(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on August 07, 2016, Proper 14)
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Of Houses and Homes
Lion lives alone in the hills. One fall day, as he tends to his garden, he hears a noise above. A wounded bird falls from its flock. Lion takes the bird into his care, bandaging his wing and welcoming him into his home. Over the winter, as Bird heals, the two become inseparable friends. Bird often perches within the shaggy warmth of Lion’s mane. At night, when Lion climbs into bed, Bird climbs into one of Lion’s oversized slippers. On snowy days when they’re homebound, the two sit in front of the fire, and Lion reads to Bird.
Finally the winter passes. Early one spring day, Bird hears his flock overhead. It is a bittersweet parting.
Lion resumes his solitary life, but now it feels emptier than ever before. His house is no longer a home. It lacks the warmth of companionship. It lacks love.
For Lion, the summer is slow and lonesome. His thoughts are continually turned upward to the sky, wondering where Bird is. Summer slides into fall. Lion spends most of his days in the garden, passing time the best he can, until early one lonely morning when he hears a familiar tweet. There, above him, he sees a flock of birds flying south for the winter. One bird descends straight for him. It is Bird, returning for another winter together.[1]
“Home Is Where the Heart Is”
If the story of Lion and Bird were told in a school setting, you can guess what its moral might be: “Home is where the heart is.”
It’s a time-honored saying, the kind of thing you’d expect to find hand-stitched and hanging in the kitchen, or perhaps sitting quaintly on a mantelpiece. It’s a warm and cozy proverb, a feel-good sentiment that we can all appreciate, the kind of sentiment that graces Hallmark Christmas cards or Cracker Barrel merchandise.
It is not the sort of saying that you’d associate with revolutionaries enduring persecution. It is not the kind of thing you’d expect to hear among an oppressed people faced with state-sanctioned violence and theft.
But that is just what it is in today’s scripture, where the writer addresses a people who are enduring beatings and imprisonment and dispossession (cf. 10:33-34). In today’s scripture, the writer encourages this community of Christ-followers by reminding them that their faith and their hope are not in the visible world, but rather in what is “not seen,” in “things that are not visible” (11:2-3)—in a homeland that they have not yet reached. In fact, he suggests, they are “strangers and foreigners” just like Abraham and other ancient heroes of faith. Which was his way of saying: “Home is where your heart is—and your heart is somewhere better than here.”
What’s Really Real
The writer of Hebrews does what any good person of faith does in our world. He pulls back the veil from the plainly visible world and reveals an enchanted world, a world imbued with mystery, filled with the unforeseeable. He rallies his discouraged listeners against the powers of the obvious and the self-evident, against the tyranny of the seen, against the common sense of what is calculable and measurable and observable. Yes, they may be losing their possessions and their homes. Yes, all evidence points against the prospect of security and comfort in the foreseeable future. But the world, he whispers urgently, is filled with unseen possibilities. In fact, he says, it is the invisible that gives birth to the visible (cf. 11:3).
To prove his point, he points to the example of the ancestral family, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Abraham left the comfort of his home and family, he says, because of an invisible promise. He didn’t even know where he was going. For the same reason, Isaac and Jacob remained in the foreign land, living in tents as strangers and foreigners. According to our world’s way of seeing things, they were homeless. They had left home far behind. But according to their hearts, home was somewhere else—its blueprints nothing more than the misty, shifting outlines of a promise.
Which is all to prove the point of the writer of Hebrews—what is visible is not the realest thing in the world. What’s real, what’s really real, is the invisible.[2] What’s really real is the stuff of poems, prayers, and promises. Indeed, it is an invisible promise that leads Abraham and Isaac and Jacob away from the real comforts of their home to go wander in a strange land, lost and homeless. That is the fabric of faith: attending to the invisible tugs and pulls of God, heeding the holy commotion in one’s heart. These invisible movements are indeed what give birth to new life. Anyone who knows the power of love or forgiveness, the power of hope or trust, knows this to be true.
No Department of Homeland Security in the Kingdom of God
We can imagine how this message would encourage the community to which it was written. For people who were regularly on the receiving end of beatings and imprisonment and dispossession, it is good news indeed to be reminded that the visible world is not the end of the story. It is gospel to hear that within all the tangible and visible elements of persecution, there flutters an invisible, intangible promise of something much different, something much better. For a people whose homes are shattered or even taken from them, it is a holy lifeline to hear that their real home is in things unseen.
But where is the gospel in this for a people like us, a people who know nothing of the oppression and hardship of that early Christ-following community?
There are, of course, some Christians who do claim persecution in this nation, who do claim that the Christian religion is under attack. To these claims, I would humbly suggest that the removal of Christian mottos from national objects or the absence of Christian prayer from public events is not persecution. It is a loss of power and privilege—two things that Christ shunned all his life. If anything, the recent cultural and political developments lead us back to a more authentic expression of our faith, one where we truly are “strangers and foreigners.”
In the Greek, the word for stranger is xenos. This word echoes suggestively in our word xenophobia, implying that our faith makes us very different from the present world, that it puts us on the margins of this world. Perhaps that is the message of the letter to us today. As followers of Christ, we are strangers to a world that is interested in securing what is visible, in protecting what it possesses. But in the kingdom of God, there is no department of homeland security. In the kingdom of God, the homeland is never something we secure; it is something that we seek (cf. 11:14).
Seeking a Homeland
I am reminded here of the story of Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan. He and eight other Catholic activists poured napalm on a pile of draft files and burned them in Catonsville, Maryland, in a “creative protest” against the obligation of war.[3] Berrigan was arrested and imprisoned for three years. It was a controversial event. I’m not here to deliver a verdict one way or the other. I think Berrigan was right, and I think the United States government was right—each according to their respective standards. In the kingdom of God, where the enemy is loved, the persecutor is prayed for, and the other cheek is turned, it made much more sense to burn paper than to burn the lives of others. Berrigan was right. In a kingdom of this world—whether it’s the United States or any other country, really—the force of law and order rules the day. The United States government was right.
It is an illumining contrast in perspectives. The United States acted out of self-interest to secure its homeland against the spread of what it saw as a dangerous influence. From such a perspective, it was justified. And from such a perspective, Daniel Berrigan was a stranger and a foreigner—just like the heroes of faith extolled in today’s scripture. He acted out of alien interests to seek a homeland that did not yet exist, a homeland “whose architect and builder” was God—a homeland that could never be secured by sword and spear, but could only be sought by way of invisible things, like love and forgiveness, hope and vulnerability.
“There Is Another World, but It Is within This One”
For many centuries, much of the church has interpreted the promise of a better homeland simply as a reference to heaven, ignoring the fact that Jesus prayed for God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven,” overlooking the great vision of Revelation that one day heaven will finally come to earth, to the very ground we walk.
William Butler Yeats is attributed with having written: “There is another world, but it is within this one.” I can hardly think of a better paraphrase of the gospel in today’s scripture. We are “strangers and foreigners,” yes, but neither are we travelers simply making an earthly pit stop, nor are we immigrants seeking naturalization into the present order. No, we are “strangers and foreigners” whose hearts are firmly planted in this world—or rather, within this world, within the invisible promise of a better world.
We are like Lion. We have lived here all our lives. But one day Bird flew in—which is to say, Love flew in—and ever since then, we have realized just how empty this “home” can be. Our hearts are yearning for a better home. Not a homeland to be secured against the unknown, but a homeland to be sought in the unknown—a gospel homeland where the stranger is welcomed and the enemy is loved, where the unruly rule of love “lift[s] up the lowliest instead of [waiting for] relief [to] trickle down from the top,” where the least and the littlest “enjoy pride of place and a special privilege.”[4] A homeland whose architect and builder is the God who is Love.
Prayer
Hope of the homeless,
God of the stranger and the foreigner—
Attune our souls
To the shifting outlines of your Kingdom;
Draw our hearts away
From what is visible and known,
From the lesser homeland we would secure,
And pull us through the unseen powers of love
Toward the homeland You are building.
Amen.
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[1] This tale is a paraphrase of children’s picture book The Lion and the Bird. Marianne Dubuc, The Lion and the Bird (trans. Claudia Zoe Bedrick; New York: Enchanted Lion, 2014).
[2] Cf. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 183: “Indeed, we are more realist than the realists, never satisfied with what is merely real, hyper-realists in love with the real, by which we mean the ‘promise of the world,’ the events harbored in the bowels of the real.”
[3] David Dark, The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 148.
[4] John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), ebook loc. 1387-1390.
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