Going Home
Jeremiah 1:4-10 Luke 4:21-32
Several years ago
I was invited back to my family’s church in Northern Indiana to celebrate the Eucharist and to preach.
Not only was it a celebration for my brother David’s seventieth birthday, it was a very
special homecoming for me.
My grandfather
had served as rector of St. John of the Cross Episcopal Church in Bristol,
Indiana from 1907-1917. He died before I was born so I only knew him through
stories and a photograph that my brother David presented to me when I was
ordained. It was a great honor and an
awesome responsibility to stand where my grandfather stood; to celebrate the
Eucharist with many of the exact same words and prayers he used; to preach
where he had preached so many years before.
As my brother
Steve, who was serving as acolyte-reader, and I prepared to process, a few
late-comers straggled in. Steve and I moved to one side to let them find their
pews before we began the procession. One very elderly lady, dragging a walker
across the wooden narthex floor stopped abruptly. I barely recognized the shell of the formidable Mrs. Dalrymple—former president of ECW and Daughters of the King. She inspected me with
her piercing eyes just as she had when I was in 7th grade. I fully
expected her to say, "You’ve spilled chocolate milk on your
vestments!"
But instead, in her loud, no-nonsense voice she said, "You ARE your mother!"
Ripples of laughter spread in the near-by pews. I could especially detect the smothered laughter
of my brothers.
When Jesus
entered the synagogue in Nazareth that day, he was the hometown boy coming
home. But he wasn’t Joseph,
his father, and he wasn’t the boy
who grew up there. He returned filled
with the Spirit. He was so much more
than the sum of his past. After his time in the wilderness, he had returned to
Galilee to preach and teach in the synagogues. Universal praise about him spread
across the region even to his hometown.
So when he stood to read that day, perhaps the congregation was more
focused on him than on the words he was reading from Isaiah.
He read from the
scroll:
The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to
the poor. He has sent me to proclaim
release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the
oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
When he was
finished, he rolled up the scroll and handed it back to the attendant and sat
down. All eyes were riveted on him; you
could have heard a pin drop.
But if they
expected Jesus to say, "It’s so good to be home in this comfortable,
safe place," they were wrong.
If they expected
him to say, "Thank you for the model you provided for
me when I was a child," they
were wrong.
If they expected
him to say, "You have fulfilled Isaiah’s scripture by the way you’ve lived your lives," they were wrong.
If they expected
him to say, "I am here to do the things I did at
Capernaum," they were wrong.
Instead, he
practically blasted them out of their seats and out of their self-satisfied
complacency. Especially outrageous to
them were his observations from Jewish scripture. He told them that Elijah wasn’t sent to the thousands of poor Jewish widows but to one poor foreign
widow. Elisha didn’t cleanse a single one of the thousands of
Jewish lepers but instead only one foreign Syrian leper! He was saying that God’s redeeming love was for all people—not just the Jewish people.
Well, those observations
of his ended the warm, fuzzy homecoming just like that. In the words of the gospel, "They got up, drove him out of the town,
and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they
might hurl him off the cliff."
He may have been
the golden hometown boy but he was not a prophet accepted in his hometown.
Some months ago
the four of us who preach at St. James’ (Edie Bird, Laura Shoffner, John Burton and I), started posting our
sermons on our St. James’
website. We now have an archive of
those sermons and each one has a title.
It is my practice as I prepare a sermon to choose a "working title." I try to use that title as a focus so I
won’t stray too much from the point I am
trying to make.
Sometimes that
title is the final title. At other
times the sermon takes on a life of its own and I must go back and change the
title to reflect that.
The working title
of this sermon was "Coming
Home."
It is also the final title.
When I went to
our website to read Laura’s
wonderful sermon which she presented last week, I was especially struck by her
title, "Leaving the Village." If you haven’t read this sermon, you’ve missed a great one. It is on the website or if you don’t have internet access, any one of us on
the preaching team will be glad to print out a copy for you.
In a nutshell
Laura talked about the village as the church and society many of us grew up
in. That church no longer exits as it
did then. The world is a very different place. So, we need to leave that
village in the sense that we need to expand our boundaries as we search for new
ways to be church that will speak to and touch the hearts of the young and the
unchurched and not just to those of us who grew up in the village.
It seems to me
that "leaving the village" and "coming home" are two
parts of one whole. Leaving the village
is only truly possible when we come home to the truth in our hearts about what
is really important. That is not to say
that we need to throw out everything we cherish from our past. That is not to say we need to embrace every
nuance of pop culture that comes along. We need to measure both our heritage
and our present and our future with discerning hearts.
When I came home
to my childhood church, I was not my mother—although I know I looked a lot like her. But I was also not the child I had been fifty years before. And
the church I returned to was not the church, the village, I had left
behind. Some of the remnants of that
girl and that church were good and durable.
Others weren’t.
How glad I am
that I am no longer in the seventh grade! And how glad I am that my mother
passed on to me not just her genes but her faith and her joy in living.
How glad I am
that some of the same beautiful liturgy and music still inform our worship
today.
How glad I am
that I could stand in that church fifty years later as a priest where I wasn’t allowed to be an acolyte when I was a
young girl.
And how very glad
I am that there were people, some very courageous men and women, who came home
to their hearts and were willing to take the great risk of leaving the village—to be church and to allow church in whole
new ways, including the ordination of women.
It is much more
comfortable to do what we have always done, in the ways we’ve always done things. It is risky to stick our necks out to try
something new that may or may not work.
It is risky to think in new ways. It is unnerving for you in the pews
but it is also often just as unnerving for those of us up here! From whence does our help come?
The lesson from
Jeremiah that we heard this morning is one of my favorites. It is often read at ordinations to the
deaconate. It was read at mine.
Here’s the part that really speaks to me:
"Now
the word of the Lord came to me saying, "Before
I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated
you; I appointed you a prophet to the
nations." Then I said, "Ah,
Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a child."
But the Lord said to me, "Do
not say, 'I
am only a child'; for you shall go to all whom I send you, and you shall speak
whatever I command you. Do not be
afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord."
We are not our
parents; we are not the children we were, even though those influences are
still part of us. God consecrated us,
each one of us; God appointed us, each one of us to be more than we can ever be
on our own. No matter that we once spilled chocolate milk on our dresses and on
Mrs. Dalrymple—No matter
that we might still spill iced tea all over us and those around us.
With his
deliverance, we are able to leave the village; we are truly able to come home. Honoring our past, while embracing those
words from the Prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah in the context of our world, we can
leave the old village as we form a new one that welcomes everyone—as we come home to the truth in our hearts.
Amen
The Rev. Betsy Porter
January 28, 2007