Jesus Homelessness and Faith Hospitality

Mark 6:6-13
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark%206:6b-13&version=31

The Evangelical Seminary of Matanzas in Cuba is my alma mater, this is sixty year old foundation of the Methodists, Episcopal and Presbyterian churches in Cuba. At "SET" as we called, is where I went to do my first four years of theological education. As part of our training students were in charge of organizing the daily services at the strikingly beautiful Chapel of the Resurrection, part of the Episcopal Church contribution to the seminary in 1955.

Seminarians had liberty to experiment with services at the chapel, since we were all from different denominations, there was no official liturgy. Some of us used that liberty, quite liberally at times. One of the times when iwasas my turn to organize the service. I closed the doors of the chapel, gathered the students on the steps, it was February which meant that it was chilly, grey and windy. I forbade the use of hymnals or any other book including the bible. I crossed to pieces of fallen branches on the floor in front of us and told the students that the III World War has just ended fifty years ago and we were a very small group of Christians gathering for worship, no books survived the war and church buildings were badly damaged and the institutional church has ceased to operate.

So for worship we had only our memories to rely on, there was no pastoral leadership and therefore the service will be as we decided it to be. Someone quoted scripture and talk about it, someone ask to pray for the world and we sang a couple of stanzas of hymns that we all could remember and then we disbanded.

I asked afterwards, as it was the custom, for an evaluation of the experience. The responses were mixed as it was to be expected. Most of the people felt uncomfortable because of the weather, and somewhat depressed, nevertheless they thought that the experience was a valid one. Since Christianity should not depend on the shelter of venerable and fine buildings or the existence of an institutional cast of theologians to lead it, or any particular structure for ancient and appreciated as it may be. It was somewhat odd, because the experience took place in the bosom of a seminary that as an institution exist to educate and form institutional agents of the institutional church.

I have never forgotten the experience, and I do belong happily to a tradition -the Anglican tradition- that is full of stuff. Tunics more than one and in many colors and shapes, thuribles, incenses, bells, musicians, and fine and well sheltered buildings. People tell me all the time that they are precisely attracted to the "stuff" of the Anglican worship, performed with dignity and good taste.

However, no matter how much the "incidentals" and "trappings" of my visually obsessed mind are important to me, I got to admit that in order to be church we need just our faith. Just like in my Cuban seminary, perhaps not triumphant, nor joyous and perhaps somewhat depressed, we needed just to believe. Neither buildings, or institutions or budgets or even scripture. Just our faith. The Church in Cuba was a witness to that.

There was an important lesson in that "service", one in which we were willing to relinquish the fantasy of control and share in Jesus deep homelessness. Not only the Redeemer of the World, the son of the living God, has willingly and freely subject himself to the limitations of time, space and human evil for our love sake, but He who had created all things did not have a place where to lay his head. Jesus and those who followed him were homeless by choice.

In the passage last Sunday, we saw another dimension and perhaps a deeper sense of Jesus homelessness. The people who saw him grow from a child to a man, the people who thought that knew Jesus well, his customer base, his village friends and foes, his extended family and his own close family have just shamed him in public. They have disowned Him, have question his legitimacy, have called him back to his old "metier", the one that he was only good for. So He has not just no place to lay his head on, but his has no home, nor village, nor family and certainly no job to go back to. His homelessness has gone deeper, he is now more than ever, freely albeit painfully, in the hands of the stranger who wishes to offer him hospitality. In any way, he is also free, no affecting present and prospective customers, nor plying a prophetic trade of divination by which he could enrich family and friends, having no "customers" either by building or religious, he can say whatever He wants.

He knows that the longing for being in control has a darker and sinister side, the side of violence. The fantasy of being in control fuels every kind of pathological violence because we deep down know how vulnerable and fallible we all are, the pressure is then to keep turning up the intensity of language and extremism of action to fill the void. Said Archbishop Rowan Williams addressing just recently the Synod of the Church of England in the wake of the Bombay bombings and the first anniversary of the London Subway bombings and he continues:

Serving God by organizing slaughter and suicide and random killings in order to promote God's honor or his justice makes it a god that can not be trusted. God is too weak to look after his own honor and we are the strong ones who must step in to help him. Such is the underlying blasphemy at work. End of quote.

Only by deepening his own homelessness and encouraging his disciples to follow suit, sending them without bag, nor money, a staff and the clothes on their backs and relying absolutely on the hospitality of strangers, embracing their powerlessness is for Jesus the way, the only way, to bring honor to God and his Good News because -there is no prophet without honor except in his hometown, among his kinfolk and his family- The power to expel sinister lurking demons of falsehood and pretense is by releasing the power of the mirage over our visually controlled perceptions.

Our God indeed is a God of paradox, whose power is found in powerlessness, whose honor is promoted by our relinquishing and releasing of any and all proprietary claims to his grace and love. Whose grace abounds where the sin is greater, whose light can not be put out by the thickest darkness, who has overcome death by dying on a cross, whose arms were open up in an embrace of the whole world by having them nailed to the cross by the Roman army. Yes it is absurd, absurd by the ways of the world, but in that absurdity I do believe, and I invite you to believe as well.

I do not want to sale to you religious cocaine by telling you that everything will be alright if you join the way of the cross. I am not going to invite you to defend GodÂ’s honor because he does that by delivering himself powerless to the world. I am not even, at least not today, give you an intellectually suitable and well reasoned proposition and exposition of the Christian message. I am just going to ask you to embrace that you all along knew just too well, namely that you and I, are vulnerable and fallible and that our area of control is simply minuscule.

I am going to ask you to accompany Jesus in his homelessness, both personally and as a community of faith. And to trust that there will be always people in the world, no matter how horrible it gets (and it is not getting any prettier lately) willing to offer Jesus and his message hospitality by believing that he has honor in this his adopted family and that we need nothing but our faith to be part of that family who has been given power exorcisehigh to exorcize the demons of this world, the demons of death, fanaticism, war and greed.