Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · June 27, 2010
Litany of Praise
From Psalm 77
We cry to God in the day of our trouble.
We commune with our hearts and search out the Spirit.
We call to mind the deeds of the Lord, the wonders of old.
Your way was through the mighty waters, yet your footprints were unseen!
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
World without end. Amen. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of morning and God of evening, God of sunshine and God of rain, you possess all of the rhythms of our lives. In the evening, you are the cradle of the world. In the morning, you are our comforter. You are here when we go away. You are waiting when we return. You are the source of our life. You provide us with laughter and love. You comfort us when tears run down our cheeks.
This morning, God, we pray that you will guide our eyes to the holy moments that we might otherwise miss. Surprise us with your presence. Push us into places that we may have no intention of going to on our own. Help us be part of your relentless work in this world. Remind us, as a community of faith, we gather together, and we do not move through life alone. Even when our days our fragile, when we don’t always know the answers, we know that you are our refuge and strength. You gather us together as one.
So, here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom, the power, and glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 9:57-62
As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Message
Foxes Have Holes
Tim Carson
Have you ever felt like you just don’t belong? You don’t fit in?
My grandmother lived to be nearly 100, and put quite simply, she outlived all her contemporaries. She outlived her classmates and friends. She outlived two spouses. She outlived one of her children. She outlived her Sunday school class at church. And I remember her telling me, “Tim, I don’t really know why I’m left around here. But God must have a purpose for it, so I will be grateful. I just don’t know what that purpose is.”
As a strong person of faith, she trusted God, but in the end, she felt that she lacked a place in this world, when she had one before. She felt like she didn’t fit anymore. Have you ever felt that way?
Have you ever been newly single, either through death or divorce, and suddenly found yourself going solo in a couples’ world? It’s strange being the 3rd, the 5th, the 7th wheel. Isn’t it? You find ways to make it work, of course, but things have changed, and you’re not sure how you fit.
When students come home from a semester abroad, or the Peace Corps volunteer finishes their service in a third-world country, or missionaries return from years of service, or service men or service women after a deployment, they all enter another world. It is this world that has become strange in their absence, strange by comparison with the rest of the world, strange according to all the experiences they’ve had that most people are interested in for about 60 seconds. Then the issue becomes, “What movie would you like to see,” or “Do you want to go to Taco Bell or Burger King?”
And they wonder, “What world do I belong to? This world or that world? Or both? Or neither? Where am I, who am I?”
Have you ever had that sinking feeling that you didn’t fit at your new school, or your new college campus, or that you feel isolated at your new job? You’re glad you have that new job. You are glad you are there, but they have their own internal culture thing going on. They all know what it is, but you don’t. Do you fit inside that or not? Did someone just forget to give me the rulebook?
How about living in a new community? You have moved to a new town or city. You used to know how to drive to the Wal-Mart. Now, you have to MapQuest it. You used to go by instinct. You knew how to drive to wherever you wanted to go. Now, where am I? Where do I belong?
How about in a new church? You are happy with your new church, but do I feel like it is family yet? Am I connected? Are there people I could say, “Let’s go out and get a bite to eat.” Or, “I need to talk.” Or did you once have a church that felt like my family, but over the course of the years, so many people have died and so much has changed that it doesn’t feel that way any longer. With all our past coordinates absent, we don’t know where we fit, where we belong, how we can feel at home. Have you ever felt that way, like you don’t belong?
Does it surprise you to hear that Jesus lived his whole life this way? As the text says, the foxes and birds, all the animals of creation have a place, but the Son of Man does not. He doesn’t have a place of rest in this world, because he carries more than the world can house. The One who proclaims the empire of God knows deep down that he does not belong to the empires of this world. He comes to the world because God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that all should have life. But those to whom he went rejected him, and he became homeless in the world, a wanderer, a permanent itinerant.
Christians are also in-between people – we do and we don’t belong. And it’s not only because of the very human things we share with other, this experience of social dislocation and alienation. It is not only that.
In Christian existence, we do belong and want to. We’re not Gnostics, after all – we believe this is God’s good world and we are a part of it. We want to be meaningfully connected, to the earth, with family and friends, national community, and a world community.
But on the other hand, like the Son of Man, we know that we are never fully at home, because this reality is always passing, because the world we have created falls short of God’s desire for it. “Foxes have holes and birds have their nests,” but every home we might seek is a temporary one, a lacking one, and we know it.
Besides, we don’t want merely to practice a cultural Christianity. Cultural Christianity is a form of the faith that simply accommodates to, reflects all the cultural and social norms around it. But that is not enough. It is not enough to be an echo for those norms, because so many do not reflect the way of the One who had no place to lay his head.
In the 4th century, when Christianity became the religion of the realm under Constantine, the Church grew enormously, became the powerhouse, but these changes and developments were not all for the good or for the right reasons. Many people affiliated with Christianity simply because it was the social thing to do and gave them greater personal or business status, connections and opportunity. Sound familiar?
And as the established religion of the realm became more popular and legitimized by the empire, it became easier to become a part of it. Gone were the days when one might have to sacrifice for confessing Christ as Lord. Now, to the contrary, belonging rewarded you. There was a reward in this world for being a Christian, at least by name.
At that time, in the 4th century when Christianity became the religion of the empire, certain Christians knew this spelled a disaster for the Church. It was growing for the wrong reasons and was becoming interlaced with the power of empire, a part of empire, fully acculturated. They were practicing culture Christianity. And so there were deep Christians who started fleeing the empire church, and they went to live harder, more solitary lives in isolated areas. Some fled to the Sinai desert, and we call them the Desert Fathers and Mothers. In Jesus’ tongue of Aramaic, the “Abbas and Ammas.” (The Papas and the Mamas.) They were, in a very real sense, the spiritual remnant of the Church, preserving some of the true faith, saving it from a faith that was being compromised by being a part of empire. Some said of the desert fathers and mothers that they fled this cultural Christianity like rats swimming away from a sinking ship.
One of those desert fathers, Abba Anthony, said, “The time is coming when people will be insane, and when they see someone who is not insane, they will attack that person saying, ‘You are insane because you are not like us.’”
They knew that the Church, by being established by the state became beholden to it, too close to culture, and so lost its ability to draw distinctions, to know the difference between the Christian faith and prevailing social values and opinion. There was not enough distance for spiritual integrity. They couldn’t even begin to speak prophetically to empire.
If you ever want a reason to keep a holy distance between church and state, this is it, and it comes from the early Christian centuries. And then there was the strong desire of the founders of our country to never again lapse into the errors of European Christianity; to have state churches, churches endorsed or established by government, the government using the church to enforce uniformity and the dominant church using the government to repress and persecute other religious minorities. In this unholy coalition, the church is inevitably corrupted. Christian faith is weakened, and the mission of the Church confused with the social policy of the day.
But it’s more subtle than that. And you and I both know it. It’s not just the case of church and state and their relationship. It’s a matter of the way we are sucked into the value system of the culture around us, often unknowingly. No distinction is drawn between the universal Christian faith and a kind of nationalism that co-opts religion to support its own aims. In this view, foxes have holes, birds have their nests, but the Son of Man beds down wherever he is most useful to us.
And so Christians must knowingly live as a part of the good creation, live within a society, offer good to a society, without being owned by it. As Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon have put it, we are “resident aliens – those who look at culture and being a Christian and know there is a difference” (Resident Aliens (Abingdon Press, 1989).
I remember one time when I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I was a resident alien, that foxes have holes and birds have their nests, but those who love Jesus have nowhere to lay their heads. I was listening to the radio, there was a talk show, and they ran a contest. The disc jockeys invited their listeners to tune in their clock radios. “Just for fun,” they said, “when you wake up to the sound of FM106, call and tell us the first words you spoke when you rolled out of bed. If you’re the third caller, you’ll win $106 from FM106.”
It didn’t take long for the contest to grow in enthusiasm. The first morning, a buoyant disc jockey said, “Caller number three, what did you say when you rolled out of bed this morning?” A groggy voice said, “Do I smell coffee burning?” Another day, a sleepy clerical worker said, “Oh no, I’m late for work.” Somebody else said her first words were, “Honey, did I put out the dog last night?” A muffled curse was bleeped out in the background. It was a funny contest and drew a considerable audience.
One morning however, the third caller said something unusual. The station phone rang. “Good morning, this is FM106. You’re on the air. What did you say when you rolled out of bed this morning?”
The voice responded, “Shema, Israel … Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.”
There was a moment of embarrassed silence. Then the radio announcer said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and cut to a commercial.
You see, apart from the situational disconnects we have in life, the in-betweenness of our living, if you are a practicing Christian, a practicing person of faith in this culture, you will inevitably feel like there is nowhere to lay your head, that you are a resident alien. And you know what? We should feel that way. If we feel too “at home” with much of what surrounds us, the disc jockey’s dismissal of faith as being so important that it would be the first thing someone might think or pray or do that day, then something is wrong with our faith. If that’s the case, if we feel too at home with that, maybe it is time to flee to the desert.
There is a razors edge distinction between being engaged with culture, but not owned by it. It’s a spiritual practice and frame of mind. And sometimes it’s harder, and sometimes it’s easier. The more that society pushes religion to the edges of relevance the easier it is for us to understand our true nature and mission in the world, to know with crystal clarity that the mission of the church is not to prop up society, to become its lackey, but rather to be an agent of transformation. And as a great paradox, the Church is able to do this best, most effectively, when its holy detachment gives its greatest freedom to speak the truth in love.
Once upon a time, in a place that is everywhere, there was a prophet that went down into the city, stood on the street corner, and day by day spoke against the injustices of the city. Day by day, he proclaimed God’s word of truth, the gift of grace, and the way to new life. And day-by-day people ignored him, and regarded him as an unwelcome stranger in their city. Months passed. Years passed. And still the prophet came.
One day, a young boy came up to the prophet and said, “Why do you do it? Why do you keep coming? No one listens. No one changes. Why do you do it?”
And the prophet said, “I used to speak in order that the city might change. Now I speak so that the city will not change me.”
“Foxes have holes, and birds have their nests. But the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
Benediction
Now, may the grace of God that always speaks to us, the love of God that enfolds us, and the Spirit that propels us forward keep you and guide you now and forever. Amen.
