First United Methodist Church of Reno, Nevada
Rev. John Auer
"Welcome Home! God Still Dwells Within . . .
."
Our hymn ("God of the Sparrow, God of the Whale") asks how
"the creature" says such "ineffables" as, Awe, Woe,
Grace, Care, Love, Praise, Save, Thanks, Life, Peace. The it asks,
"How do your children say Joy / How do your children say
Home." It may be as if we human beings, we "children" of
God, are the only species who need help finding our "joy," who
need help finding our "home." How do we say "home?"
Do we know how to say "home" to each other?
How do we say home to the earth we have exploited freely and damaged
so deeply? How do we say home to the world so divided and so conquered?
How do we say home to all those who are fighting, all those who are
fleeing from fighting? How do we say home to the millions of refugees
who circle the earth? Many of them who have never lived outside of
"temporary" encampments?
How do we say home to hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers,
whose work we accept, whose lives we do not? How do we say home to the
homeless of our own community? An estimated 5000 a day in Reno and
Sparks? How do we say home to those who are abusive, to those who are
abused, to those who are addicted and/or imprisoned in any way? How do
we say home to each other? How do we say home to the most fragmented,
scattered, hidden, and buried parts of ourselves?
Wherever we are this morning, whatever condition we’re in, wherever
we’re "coming from," as we say, wherever we may be going, --
however far away we may feel, however hard it may be to take the first
step, -- Come on home!
This is God’s house. We are as tenants here, just taking care while
the owner’s away. Jesus alone is our host. Jesus bids everyone, every
one, welcome!
The table is set with the bread of life. We call it the body of
Christ, broken for all, including for us. And with the cup of love. We
call it the blood of Christ, poured out for all, including for us. There
always is plenty of food here, so long as we learn to distribute it
fairly. There is plenty of room for us all. If not, we’ll make more.
(We did that last night! Since the new preacher came, we are growing
exponentially in "lack of talent!") There‘s a place saved in
each of what Proverbs calls our "good names," more precious to
us than any wealth or status could be.
Come on home. Where is "home" for us? A place for us? Where
we can belong unconditionally, no questions asked? Where we can fit in
because others fit us? Where, as the poet puts it, when we go there they
have to let us come in! Where we know we can find acceptance, reception,
forgiveness, and grace. Where we find that "prodigal parent"
whose very existence we reject by asking for our inheritance early. Then
we waste it all, and wander, and wallow so far from home. Yet that one
stays "home" for us, wasting their love on us, waiting and
watching for us everyday, looking and longing for us to come home again,
to show up as mere specks in the road, that they may run down to greet,
and embrace, and kiss, and restore us to full relationship, our parts in
the body again. Truly, we who were lost have been found. We who were as
dead live anew.
Come on home. We mean to greet and embrace one another this
Homecoming Day, this Homecoming Month, this month to celebrate and
discern our everyday lives and works, our everyday gifts and callings,
and to offer them back in and through the life and the work, the gifts
and the callings of this congregation. For as our Sunday School children
like to say so loudly and proudly of us all, "God don’t make no
junk!" God don’t make no junk. We know our God loves differences.
God makes so many of them." But God cannot stand distinctions.
God is offended when we think, or act as if we think, that God’s
differences give us leave to lord ourselves over each other. As if some
people simply are made to look down on, reject, and leave out. Everyone
is welcome home.
For we are all parts of one body! Each one of us gets our true
meaning from being a part of the whole, -- from belonging to something
and someone larger and fuller than just our own part of it. We give
thanks for the diversity of so many human cultures. Yet we want an
identity of our own. We honor the complexity of so many ways to be
human. Yet we need to feel integrity, harmony, of our own being.
Diversity with identity, complexity with integrity: This is what it
means for us to grow up as a species, to become sustainable with other
human beings, with other species, and with the earth herself. And we are
needed to grow up quickly!
Each of us wants to know that our particular part, and our
participation -- the part we are, the part play, -- our gift and our
calling, our identity and our vocation, our baptism and our communion,
make a difference! We matter to someone, we count for something. Our
contribution, even if just by our very being, is acknowledged and valued
as part of the whole! When I visit with senior members who cannot get
out to worship, and talk with younger members and children who are so
vitally present among us, I learn all over again: we are born with the
need to be needed, we will die with the need to be needed. Need on! The
bread is rising. .
When we go for our table conversation together following worship, we
will hear 1 Corinthians 12: God’s own creative, wise, and mysterious
Spirit is always and everywhere alive, and well, and at work in us all.
For each of us to be a part of the whole, to be participant in the life
and for the good of the body, is precisely what God wants and God means
for us all. We are all in this together! Communion is, literally, just a
foretaste, a heads-up and a get-with-it, for what Dr. King calls the
Beloved Community God is bringing to "on earth as it is in
heaven."
Dr. King also speaks of the "world house" that is
"home" to us all: "Some years ago a famous novelist
died," writes Dr. King. "Among his papers was found a list of
suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored
being this one: ‘A widely separated family inherits a house in which
they have to live together.’" Imagine the story lines flowing
from that beginning! "This is the great new problem of
humankind," Dr. King continues. "We have inherited a large
house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together –
black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and
Protestant, Moslem and Hindu – a family unduly separated in ideas,
culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must
learn somehow to live with each other in peace." We who can never
again live apart. . . . How do we say home again?
As our own body is a sign of the body of the congregation, so the
body of our congregation is a sign of the body of the larger church and
community. Those bodies, in turn, are signs of the nation, and of the
world body of the United Nations, and, at last, signs of the whole body
Earth! This fragile and lovely blue ball of a planet suspended so gently
in space, truly a global village oblivious to every border. What is our
growing awareness of environment and of ecology trying to tell us, if
not that every species, every resource, every element of the earth, of
creation, is connected to every other?
We can only be healthy, our children, our grandchildren, can only be
healthy, in any small part of creation, by concerning ourselves and by
caring for the good of the whole creation! When our young people and
children ask, why Sunday School? Why Church? I say, because the whole
world, the whole earth, are waiting, are watching for us to come
"home" as a species. We who know Jesus ought know something
about that. Something about being children of God.
Paul seems to be saying to the Corinthians, it might help us remember
the wholeness of who we are if, when we greet one another, we would not
only shake hands but shake feet once in a while! Thank God for such
lovers of feet as Jesus and great podiatrists like Kitty Glantz! When
our feet hurt, we hurt all over. Or, Paul might add, when we fall in
love, it might be good for us once in a while not only to look into one
another’s eyes, but also to gaze deeply, fondly, passionately into one
another’s ears! Imagine! Don’t blame me, that’s Paul’s idea:
"If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could
it smell?"
We get the point. We believe, we really believe, God has put, and
still is putting, this body together, part by part! This body we humbly
refer to as Reno’s First United Methodist Church. For us to "come
home" this morning is for us to be filled, as only "home"
can fill us, both with a memory and with a hope! Again, that is what our
communion is, both a memory of Jesus’ engaging and suffering the
powers of death, for us and for the whole world, and a hope of Jesus’
enduring and subverting the powers of death, in us and in the whole
world.
As we say "Thanks" to all those who have gone before us in
the life and the work of this body the congregation, so we say
"Yes," "Welcome" to all those who come now and who
will come to be this body as we seek to grow, in ministry and in
mission, in faith and in works, in baptism and communion, in life and in
love, in justice and in joy. Welcome home! We believe there is place for
everyone here! No matter how we are dressed, James would add, no matter
how wealthy we seem, no matter what gifts or what talents we bring,
there is a place for us here!
And especially if we are poor, and especially if we are messed-up,
and especially if we are wondering what, if anything, we ever will have
to give, there is a place for us here. And even, perhaps the hardest of
all, even if we are rich, and even if we have not ever noticed the poor,
except to oppress and exploit them, and even if it takes such a miracle
to save us as Jesus says a camel might be to slip through the eye of a
needle, still there is a place for us here. For we are all in this
together. We are all parts of the whole. Welcome home.
This week we face 9/11 again. As the poet foresees in our Words for Meditation, retribution only
compounds the sorrow. Returning evil for evil may give the illusion of
"homeland security." But in the end evil just feeds on itself.
If we would come home to our place in the world, we must go far beyond
dim assault upon each other’s symbols and beg for light in a time of
new life.
We have never really lived in this world before. We come home to it
again, as if for the very first time. We move, invites the poet, through
September to the Octobers and the Novembers of our lives and our life
together. "Only altars can bear the ache and longing." We of
"every tongue and race" have so much to let go of, so much to
leave on the altars of this "world house." That we might hear
and see again, in "ancient songs and common symbols shared,"
"God still dwells within our damaged human circle / And love is
still stronger than death." Love is still stronger than death.
Amen.
