The Dangers of Your Home Church... And Mine

The Dangers of Your Home Church Jeremiah 7:1—7 2 Timothy 1:3—7 Mark 3:19b—30 We should all be wearing crash helmets. That’s the way Annie Dillard describes the state of every hometown church in the United States of America. She wrote these words in a book, entitled, Teaching A Stone To Talk, back in the early 1980’s. But we’re seeing today, it seems, the literal implications of what she had meant as metaphor: “The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.” And that’s essentially the lay of the land. Even as we remain isolated and under Covid-19 restrictions, there are dangers that pre-date the virus and that will probably persist even when (or if) a vaccine becomes available. In today’s reading from Mark, chapter three, Jesus goes home. After facing temptations in the wilderness, and teaching and healing in the hillbilly country of Judea—and after gathering his disciples, including Judas Iscariot, who will betray him—the very next clause in verse 19 throws him back into ‘a batch of hometown TNT.’ First up, of course, are the family members, which include siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, and maybe even Jesus’ own mother; but rather than encouraging their hometown boy, the text says they tried to ‘restrain’ him—because, they claimed, he was ‘out of his mind.’ Now, let’s pause for a moment to ponder the ironic—and the paradoxical—twist of what's going on. Jesus who is the Christ, the anointed incarnation of God, the living Son of God, the human manifestation of Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel, is here belittled and defamed, not by any random strangers, but by those who have presumably known and loved him all his life. Wow! Moreover, as the religious authorities in town, as the scribes, get wind of the criticism—they issue a press release that says, in effect, ‘Jesus is evil’, and that he performs miraculous cures on behalf of the Beelzebub. And again—Wow! We might think of one’s home as the safest place in the world. And we might think of the Sunday School teachers and the Elders and the Pastors who raised us as being the most encouraging people on earth. But for Jesus, beginning in Mark 3:19, they are the most dangerous. And the question is why? Jia Tolentino is young writer, whose family immigrated from the Philippines and eventually settled outside of Houston, Texas. And there, they joined a church community that allowed them to feel safely integrated in American society. In her book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, however, the millennial author explains how the forty-six acre campus became known as the Repentagon, and the how the hometown atmosphere affected her faith: “I started to feel twinges of guilt at the end of every church service, when the pastor would call for people to come forward and accept Jesus: what if this feeling of uncertainty meant that I needed to avow Him again and again? I didn’t want to be a bad person, and I especially didn’t want to spend eternity in hell…I started getting agoraphobic in the Worship Center on Sundays. Thinking about these intimate matters in such a crowded public place felt indecent.” And so—let’s review. Once upon a time, in Christian America, we experienced the coziness of belonging. We experienced what the Greek word in Mark 3:19 would have us understand about Jesus going home: PATRIS. As in one’s fatherland, one’s native territory, one’s blood & soil… Can anyone see the danger on the horizon? Can anyone hear it? Can anyone smell, taste and touch it? The good news in the person of Jesus Christ is not the eradication of danger. The good news is not that we’ve been separated or spared from the dangers out there in the big, bad world. The good news is not that we might dominate those we perceive to be our enemies. The good news is that we have a Savior who confronts the danger WHERE WE LIVE. Here at home. Back when I had a land-line telephone, installed in my house, I would receive calls from various telemarketers, who would begin the conversation like this: “Is this the KINDER Pyle residence?” And so—picking up on their mispronunciation of my name—but knowing that they were trying to feign intimacy by trying to say my name—I began to feel more than irritated, especially by those who called at dinner time. “Is this Scott?” “Ah, who is this please?” “Is this the KINDER Pyle residence?” Until finally, I blew up: “Actually, no! This is the MEAN-SPIRITED ANGRY Pyle residence, and I don’t want you to ever call my home again!” You see, it’s often at home, with the family crest hanging over the fireplace where we become the most vulnerable or the most susceptible. And the reason for this vulnerability or this susceptibility, I think, is that you and I do long for that place where we won’t be threatened. On the contrary, we seem hardwired for love and for radical acceptance. In fact, unless we’ve been hardened by the mob, unless we’ve been deceived by someone we’ve trusted, what’s most human about us is our eagerness to believe in the other person’s good intentions. In other words, unlike what the scribes presume as the motivations of Jesus—to cast out demons by the source of all demons—I would suggest that, left to our own devices, every person whose been made in the image of God, would longs to honor that image in all persons. Even if that person has been accused of a crime. Even if that person is named George Floyd. And even if that person seems like a threat to my comfort and my security and my patriotic way of life. The image of God in the other trumps everything and everyone. And so—it’s dangerous and it’s a danger when that image is obscured, when that image is caricatured, when that image is stereotyped and pigeonholed—by someone from the home church, who says “I know you. You are the person I know. You are nothing more than the person I know.” In Walker Percy’s novel, The Second Coming, a young woman, named Allison, has escaped from a mental hospital by hiding in a laundry truck. The truck takes her as far as the central park, and she figures that she’ll get out and sit on a bench in the park, while trying to regain her bearings. Amid the pedestrian-traffic, there’s a woman, giving away religious pamphlets and most people are taking them to be nice, but not really trying to listen or read. Allison, however, is handed the brochure and begins to read. “Why don’t you come to a little get-together we’re having tonight?” said the woman with a beaming smile, “a person like yourself might get a lot out of it.” Allison considered the question… “I’m not sure what you mean by the expression ‘a person like yourself.’ Does that mean you know what I am like?” You see, although we’re talking about a fictional character here, just think about all the real-life people we’ve written off as some ‘mental case,’ or some ‘black guy,’ or some ‘homeless drug addict.’ And just think about how sometimes the people from the ol’ neighborhood keep us stuck in that neighborhood with all its injustices and all its petty fears. Jesus lived and died so that those dangers can be met and overcome. And God raised Jesus from the tomb so that what we often consider to be over and done is never quite finished. So that, even as we return home, we’re still not home. So that, even as we get back to worshipping face-to-face in the old familiar facility, we’re still on a journey. And it’s a journey that exceeds the boundaries of home. And it’s a journey that rattles the fences we construct and the walls we build. And why? Well, according to Jesus, because “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Alice Walker wrote an especially poignant short story for today’s world. Entitled ‘The Welcome Table’ it portrays a black woman who walks through the open doors of a church in the rural south of the United States; and as she sits there in the pew, a group of deacons and chatty women from the congregation try to explain to her how this place of worship was not her home, how she belonged across the tracks at the African American congregation. Then, four large white ushers take a break from ushering their like-minded, white friends to their seats, and they shove their hands beneath the black woman’s armpits and pick her up. With as much decorum as they can muster—which isn’t much—they then throw the unwelcome misfit to the concrete steps outside. At this point, of course, there’s not much she can do, but sit there. And yet, while waiting for some kind of sign, Alice Walker describes an extraordinary sight. It’s Jesus, not going into the church, like so many others, but striding beyond it. The black woman then rises to her feet, and Walker writes, "she did not know where they were going; someplace wonderful; she suspected. The ground was like clouds under their feet, and she felt she could walk forever without becoming the least bit tired.” Now I don’t know about you, but I am tired. I’m tired of the pandemic. I’m tired of the police brutality I see on television. I’m tired of the looters and the anarchists who destroy property and engage in all kinds of violence. And to my mind, it’s dangerous out there. Danger! Danger! Danger! And yet, perhaps those more obvious dangers have their roots where we’ve felt the safest—at home and among the members of our own home church. I’m not saying it’s wrong to commit to a specific community of people and to love God together with all that we’ve got. But, it’s when Jesus comes home that he’s most in danger of being domesticated. And the real Jesus of Mark 3:19 won’t be tamed. He’s wild and he’s on the road. He’s going home—as are we— but we’re not there yet. Amen.