26-Jun-2016 Sermon
“Jesus as Homeless”
Brian Lennstrom
This is the first sermon that I’ve heard about that has rules. Not rules for you, the listener, but rules for me, the speaker. And the rules are: No shaming; no guilt; no armchair Social Work; no quotes from Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Theresa or Pope Francis; no censure and no blame. Because this is a sermon about homelessness, about poverty and about the marginalized. The excluded. And we need rules because every sermon about the poor is also a sermon about anxiety. Our anxiety.
We’re anxious when we see people on the street that we think are homeless. I know I am. We think, I wonder where he’ll sleep tonight. What she’ll eat tonight. I wonder if that person is suffering from some kind of mental illness. Maybe we wonder, could that person find a job? Find a way out? Or, more accurately, find a way in?
We might think, what would it take for that to be me?
It’s very difficult to hear from Jesus when we feel anxious, and what we need most desperately to do today, is to hear from Jesus. So because anxiety will prevent us from hearing clearly, let’s normalize it, shall we? Right here, right now--10:45 on Sunday, June 26th, 2016--we’re normalizing anxiety about poverty. We’re saying, “It’s normal to feel anxious about the poor.” Completely normal.
Okay, now that that’s taking of—now that we’ve normalized our anxiety, we’ve taken a big step toward identifying with the poor. Because guess what—they’re anxious, too! How would you like to be at the center of the problem of homelessness! How would you like to be someone that other people want to “fix.” There’s a stigma about poverty. And that comes with a whopping amount of anxiety. They’re anxious, like we’re anxious.
Jesus says, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Someone has come to Jesus and volunteered to be His disciple; someone has raised their hand and said, “Put me in, Coach Jesus! I’ll follow you anywhere.” And Jesus makes the strange reply that Foxes have holes but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. It’s strange, but it’s only strange because we’re looking at it from the perspective of the young person who volunteered, who wanted to be the disciple. We identify with him. It’s strange because we’re still looking at the words of Jesus from our perspective. We don’t yet understand that the best way to read the Bible is from the perspective of Jesus—what is He saying about Himself? Because the experience of the young man—like our experience—like the experience of Nicodemus and Mary and Peter and Paul—means practically nothing. Jesus is not our coach. He loves, but the fact that He loves doesn’t change the fact that it’s all about Him. He watches over us, but it’s still a one-person show. We are the body of Christ, but it’s the body of Christ, not the team of Christ.
Jesus says, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Our first point was that we can identify with the poor, with those having hard times, because we ourselves are anxious about poverty, just like they are anxious about poverty. Our second point is that in this passage, Jesus Himself identifies with the homeless. The Son of Man has been sent into the far country to love us and teach us and die for us, but there is no home for Him in the far country. His being among us is from first to last, an act of obedience. And it’s not always a pleasantkind of obedience. Luke has told us before that Jesus is homeless—in Bethlehem at His birth, he tells us three times that Jesus was laid in a manger—a feeding trough, for goodness sake. No place. Matthew tells us that Jesus and His parents become refugees in Egyptbecause Herod wanted to kill Him. No place. And even after Herod dies, when they return to Palestine, they don’t go to Judea, where Joseph wanted; they had to go north, to Galilee. No place. And even in Galilee, as John tells us, Jesus points out that a prophet has no honor in his own country. No honor, no room, no home. For Jesus, homelessness was an act of obedience.
Jesus identifies with the poor and the homeless, and by so doing, He changes how we look at poverty. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Mt 25:40), He said. And like the people in that story, we might ask Jesus, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you…?” We ask because we don’t know how easy it is to see Jesus among the excluded. We think of poverty only as a problem to be solved but it’s also a question for us. A friendly question, not a shameful question. Because we always think that the Bible is a book of answers, when it’s really a book of questions. The question is simple: who is the one who, unlike the fox and bird, has no place to lay His head? Who is He? Who’s sitting on the bench and smoking a cigarette? Who are you referring to, when you say to yourself, I wonder where he will sleep tonight? But he’s not the person of shame! He’s not the problem! He’s cold, and that’s a problem. He’s hungry, and hunger is the problem. He’s anxious, and anxiety is a problem. But he’s not the problem. He’s the Son of Man. Or—he’s the person that the Son of Man identifies with. Or—he’s the person that the Son of Man identifies with. And by so doing, He changes how we look at poverty.
And our third point is that the Son of Man is the one who liberates us from slavery to our anxiety, from our exclusion, and from our homelessness. Whatever else we can say about Palestine in the first century, it was a place of oppression, of high taxation and of poor people. As John Crossan says, “[Jesus] is watched by the cold, hard eyes of peasants living long enough at subsistence level to know exactly where the line is drawn between poverty and destitution.”
So, Liberation Theology. Liberation Theology is an interpretation of Christian faith out of the experience of the poor...an attempt to read the Bible and key Christian doctrines with the eyes of the poor. The principal innovation is seeing theology from the perspective of the poor and the oppressed. For example,Jon Sobrino, a liberation theologian, argues that the poor are a privileged channel ofGod's grace. God, he argues, is revealed as having a preference for those people who are insignificant, marginalized, unimportant, needy, despised, and defenseless. Which, when you think about it, is all of us.
And here we have to walk the very narrow path that Jesus is asking us to walk. Throughout this homily I’ve been using words such as the Poor, the Marginalized, the Needy, the Homeless. And I think we use those words in part not only to describe something but also to deal with our own anxiety about people less well off than we are. We use language to differentiate ourselves in the social system; it’s that separation that helps maintain stability in the social system and it’s that stability that helps reduce our anxiety. We are the problem solvers and they are the people of the problem. The phrase “the poor” helps to reinforce that. We know our place, and we know their place. And the different places—that’s what gives stability, and reduces our anxiety. And it probably reduces their anxiety, too. It’s like the centurion who told Jesus, “I do not deserve to have you come under my roof.” As a Gentile, he knows his place. And the Jews know his place. And the Jews are watching. And it makes the centurion anxious to think that Jesus would disrupt the social order and violate the Jewish code and enter the house of a Gentile. It was not allowed.
But disruption is exactly what Jesus does in this passage, and in Luke generally. He disrupts the social order and He makes people anxious. And the reason is to show people that He can. That the social order serves Him, not the other way round.
We see that in three verses in today’s Gospel reading alone. A young man asks Jesus if he can become His disciple; he says he will follow Him anywhere. Jesus replies by saying there is nowhere to follow Him to—He has no place to lay His head. Another man wants to bury his father before following Jesus—people have been burying the dead for 100,000 years! It’s is the most ancient and the most universal custom on earth. And Jesus disrupts the social order by telling him not to bother. Another person wants to say goodbye to his family—the family—the core unit of the social order. It will just take a few minutes! Jesus says no.
Jesus disrupts the social order because Hecan and to demonstrate that His mission is one of health, not of stability. His mission—as the Liberation Theologians remind us—is to proclaim good news to the poor and freedom for the prisoners and to set the oppressed free” (Lk 3:18). And so it was. And is. But His mission is primarilyabout Him, not us, who are needy, and not the poor, who are more needy. Listen again when He reads from Isaiah in Luke, chapter 3: “The Spirit of the Lord is on ME, because he has anointed ME to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent ME to proclaim freedom for the prisoners….”
Social systems seek stability, but Jesus seeks health for His people—even at the expense of stability. And the health of His people comes only as we center on Him and feed on Him.
So the narrow path that Jesus asks us to walk, with regards to phrases like “the poor,” “the marginalized,” and “the homeless” is, on one hand, to be wise enough and bold enough and observant enough to differentiate ourselves. Many people will be hungry tonight. Some will be cold. Many have lived long enough at subsistence level to know exactly where the line is drawn between poverty and destitution. And we can help. They are poor and we are not. When we help the least of God’s children, we serve Christ the King.
But on the other hand, let’s not differentiate so much that we end just creating stability out of our language, stability that Jesus might disrupt. It’sthe stability we probably created simply to deal with our anxiety. But we have already normalized our anxiety. We said it’s normal for us to feel anxiety around the homeless. We don’t have to do the work of anxiety anymore, so let’s do the work ofidentifying with them. They are poor and we are poor. We need them. As St. John Chrysostom says, “No surgeon, extending his hand and applying his knife, removes the festering parts of the wounds as well as a poor man who, by extending his right hand and receiving alms, relieves you of the scars left by your wounds."
So the narrow path is, on one hand, to remember that they may be hungry and cold tonight, and we will likely not be. We can help them. And on the other hand, that we can identify with them as Jesus identifies with them, and not let anxiety rule us, for we have only one ruler.
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