"Right Where You Belong" - Sermon from Nov. 4, 2012
By Rev. Amelia Fulbright
This passage from the first chapter of Ruth has been following me around for the last 9 years. It is the text I was assigned to preach in my first preaching class in seminary. Then, 3 years later, it was the text I was assigned to preach for my senior sermon at Austin Presbyterian Seminary. And here we are, 6 years after that senior sermon, and this passage has surfaced again in the lectionary.
Maybe you are familiar with it, too, or at least with Ruth’s famous words to Naomi, “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die---there will I be buried.”
These words are often quoted at weddings as a model for the kind of commitment the marrying couple is pledging to one another. The 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians, sometimes called “the love chapter,” is often used in a similar fashion. You know, “Love is patient, love is kind, love does not bear false witness...” But neither one of these passages is really about marriage; in Corinthians Paul is giving instructions to the fractured church community at Corinth, and in Ruth, the commitment is between a woman and her mother-in-law, both grieving the loss of their husbands in a culture where being wed was necessary for a woman’s survival.
“Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” These words are spoken into the darkness and disorientation of grief, where Ruth must struggle to redefine who she is and where she belongs. Ruth’s sister-in-law, Orpah, in the midst of her own grief and disorientation, makes a very different decision; she chooses to remain in her homeland, with her people, her culture, her gods. The Bible does not condemn her for it, and who can blame her for clinging to what she has always known? It is even more remarkable, then, in the light of Orpah’s choice, that Ruth clings to her mother-in-law and literally stakes her identity and her life on a commitment to Naomi’s people, Naomi’s country and Naomi’s God.
You might say that as a country and a culture, we are in the midst of the disorientation of grief. Diana Butler Bass makes this very point in her book, Christianity After Religion (which the college students and I are reading together this semester). Bass paints a clear picture of how traditional Protestant, Jewish and Roman Catholic identities are in decline in this country. As of 2010, somewhere from 16-20% of Americans identified as “none” or “unaffiliated” in a survey of religious affiliation. This number has increased dramatically since 1972, when the “nones” amounted to about 5% of the population. To give you an idea of how the “nones” compare to other groups, in that same survey, ~16-18% identified as Protestant, 23% as Catholic and 26% as evangelicals.
According to Bass, we are a culture grieving the loss of institutions that we looked to, at one time, for stability, safety and yes, identity. Even those who have chosen to be unaffiliated or to affiliate with new kinds of communities, says Bass, still feel a sense of being “ungrounded” and “unmoored,” trying to rediscover where they can and do belong.
It’s no secret that people are hungry for connection in our culture, the most wired-in culture of all time, and perhaps more disconnected than ever before. Religious communities, churches, are, at least ostensibly, available to help people connect with other people and with something larger than themselves. But the church is a product of culture, too, and we have not always lived up to our ideals. In Christianity After Religion, Bass tells a story that illustrates this problem:
Excerpt from Christianity After Religion by Diana Butler Bass (pp. 193-194):
“When I think of spirituality, I think of individualism,” stated a Lutheran pastor. “Spirituality is all about ‘me,’ but religion is communal. It is about ‘us.’”
I stopped for a moment...”I’m not sure about that,” I replied. “How many times have you been at a church board meeting where someone comes in angry and threatens, ‘If you don’t do it my way, I’ll take my pledge and leave the church.’”
People laughed uncomfortably, heads nodding.
“That’s about as individualistic as you can get,” I insisted. “Just putting a bunch of people together in a church building doesn’t make them a community. Community is about relationships and making connections. That’s spiritual work. And it may or may not happen in a church.”
The sad fact is that many churches are not very good at being communities. They answer the where question by saying, “At First and Main.” They answer the who question by putting up a sign that reads, “St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.” Some churches think this is an adequate explanation of identity, when millions report that they are searching for vibrant spiritual community. Almost three quarters of young adult church members report that they long for community, while half of young adults outside of religious denominations say that they long for community. Indeed, Google “longing for community,” and you will get more than 10 million hits.
Just like the rest of American culture, with it’s preference for rugged individualism and self-sufficiency, American Christianity has a history of being especially focused on the individual. This is particularly true of 20th century evangelical Christianity and it’s focus on personal salvation. But you don’t need to read Walt Whitman’s poetry or Deepak Chopra to understand that, at its core, the Way of Jesus is deeply communal.
Remember Jesus’ words to his disciples in John’s Gospel? “I am the vine; you are the branches.” This is a picture of Christian community as an organic integrated whole. There are separate branches, sure, but we are born of the same vine, and our growth and health is tied together.
Consider the Apostle Paul’s central image of the Church as the BODY of Christ. Again, the image is that of an organic, integrated whole, where every person is a part, and every part has a function that is indispensable to the viability of the body as a whole.
And don’t forget the healing story from Mark’s 2nd chapter, where Jesus says that the faith of a paralyzed man’s four friends, not his own, is what made him whole.
One of the beautiful things about All Saints is that it reminds us that we are connected, even when we do not feel it. And not only connected to each other in this place, but to other people and creatures across time and space.
“The Dancing Saints icon is a monumental, surprising and powerful statement of faith for the ages, created by iconographer Mark Dukes with the people of Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. Twelve years in the making, it is a 3,000 square foot icon wrapping around the entire church rotunda, showing ninety larger-than life saints; four animals; stars, moons, suns and a twelve-foot dancing Christ.
The saints—ranging from traditional figures like King David, Teresa of Avila and Francis of Assisi to unorthodox and non-Christian people like Malcolm X, Anne Frank, and Rumi—represent musicians, artists, mathematicians, martyrs, scholars, mystics, lovers, prophets and sinners from all times, from many faiths and backgrounds.
As the congregation dances around the altar, the saints dance above, proclaiming a sweeping, universal vision of God shining through human life.
"For an icon portraying St. Gregory’s vision, the dancers must be diverse, and exemplify traits that Gregory’s teaching emphasizes and our congregation’s life upholds. Our members’ meeting identified the qualities we were looking for; then a committee of six members and clergy gathered 350 nominations and researched biographies, sifting, combining, stirring and reducing these to seventy-four. Nearly every church member will find a name they offered here. Nearly every life will find an exemplar."” (cited from www.allsaintscompany.org)
I am in awe of this mural, not only because of its beauty but because of the communal process that went into creating it. It is a unified, tangible expression of the vibrant community that commissioned it. And it makes me wonder, “What kind of tangible expression of this community might we care to commission?”
Whatever we decide to accomplish together, I am convicted that we must be able to prioritize the “building of community” as the primary purpose of the Church in this time and place. Not the dissemination of right doctrine or the repetition of rituals, but the nurturing of authentic personal and communal relationships. People in this time and place need salvation not so much from the fires of eternity but from the hell of isolation and hyper-individualism here and now.
This is why gatherings outside of Sunday worship are so essential to the health of our congregation. The Open Table and our Cathedral Concerts may not seem to have any overt spiritual purpose, but they are directly geared at building relationships through regular fun and fellowship, with each other and with guests from our city. Our retreats help members to strengthen the bonds of friendship, so that we can truly be a community, not just a functioning church. God’s Family Dinner and the new Drop-In Center are not only about providing for basic physical needs; these ministries help us to develop authentic relationships with our neighbors. It is an unavoidable truth that we cannot be the kind of vibrant community for which people long unless we dedicate ourselves to being together more regularly than one hour a week on Sunday morning. Indeed, we often see more college students at our Tuesday night gatherings than we do on Sunday, I think in part because the emphasis of Tuesday nights is so much about connecting with each other, whatever we are studying.
We must also be open to embracing new forms of community. A few months back, some of us in this room gathered to dream about the possibility of transforming our chapel into a fully-functioning coffee house. In many ways, I think cafes are the new cathedrals. They are hubs of information and activity, and they are open to the public most of the time. People gather there for all kinds of reasons---sustenance, fellowship, entertainment, study, educational events and for a sense of place and belonging. They create space for both extroverted and introverted forms of connection; you can sit in a corner with your nose in a book and still feel connected to the people seated nearby OR you can gather with a bunch of friends for drinks and conversation. Like churches, people usually have their favorite coffee shops, where they keep going back to because the baristas know their names and they feel like they belong. Imagine the people who might choose our UBC cafe as their home. Maybe we could even call it “The Community.” Imagine the types of events we could host there---live music and art shows, documentaries and book studies. Imagine the hospitality we could offer to people who are suspicious of the Church and would otherwise not darken our doors. This is my vision of the kind of community we might create at UBC, and I feel passionate about it.
But however we as a church decide to reach out to the world around us, if we want others to join us on our journey of faith, we must be willing to commit to each other first, making the hard but necessary choice to give our time, energy and resources to this community, even if/when that may mean missing out on other communities.
In our world today, we are confronted with so many good choices and places to find community-- family, friends, social action groups, political parties, teams and bands and clubs, etc., etc., etc. But as one of my New Testament professors taught us in seminary: “You can’t love everybody.” This is not what you’d expect a seminary professor to say. Aren’t Christians supposed to love everybody? “No,” he would answer. You can be kind to everybody. You can work for a world where everyone is treated justly. But love---that requires patience, forgiveness and lots and lots of time. For many of us, the choice to affiliate with too many communities is often the choice to avoid really committing to anyone. It allows us to feel superficially connected, without getting us into the dirty work of addressing conflict or making hard decisions or taking risks together. But this inability to commit also disconnects us from the joys of intimacy and healing that come from living and working closely together over time.
A student recently commented to me that “church is the only place where I can flake out and not get in trouble.” It didn’t used to be so. At one time a preacher could use shame and guilt to get people to church. Threaten your eternal soul, or at least your standing in the congregation. Well, not anymore. You all are too smart and too stubborn for that. And that is a good thing!
But, perhaps paradoxically, isn’t that what makes this the kind of church, this kind of faith, this kind of God worth the commitment? The kind of place where you can give of yourself freely, not out of compulsion or fear, but out of a sense of love and overflowing gratitude.
AMEN.