Sunday June 9, 2024
St. Andrew Church
Rev. Julianne Porras-Center
First Lesson: Genesis 3:22
Then the LORD God said, “See, the humans have become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and now they might reach out their hands and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever”— 23 therefore the LORD God sent them forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which they were taken. 24 He drove out the humans, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
Second Lesson: Rev 21:1-6
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; 4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” 5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” 6 Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.
But before we get too further into worship today, I’m wondering if you’ll do a bit of an experiment with me – yeah? A meditation – don’t worry.
I want you all to close your eyes for a moment and I want you to imagine… the last place you felt at home..
Maybe it’s the home you live in now. Maybe it’s this very church, or your study, a particular park you like to visit.
Maybe you’re right now in a place you left behind.. a childhood bedroom, a kitchen table surrounded by familiar faces..
Wherever it is, I want you to take it in. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are you smelling?
What is it that makes this home? How does it make you feel? Maybe you feel safety.. or joy… or comfort.. a level of understanding or belonging. Some kind of community… perhaps. Love.
How does it feel in your body? Are your shoulders relaxed? Your breaths are deep..
DEEP BREATH
Okay now, slowly and when you’re ready, I want you to think about a time when you didn’t feel at home.
When you felt restless. Or uncomfortable. Out of place. Like you didn’t belong, like you didn’t fit in.
What does that feel like? Are you jittery? Is there a sinking dread in your stomach? A tightening of your muscles?
What’s different than the memory of feeling at home? Is it the people? Is it the place? Is it.. nothing at all? Just some abstract feeling like something is amiss?
Is it mental, emotional, physical, — or is it almost spiritual, this feeling out of place?
Okay, now that I’ve made you uncomfortable, you can open your eyes. Take a deep breath. You’re safe here.
I want to talk to you today about that concept of not feeling at home. Because not only is it a personal preoccupation of mine, not only do I think it is theologically rich, full of good Biblical exegesis – but it also is one of the theological underpinnings of what my ministry down in Watsonville. And I’m so excited to share that with you.
But as I do so, I want you to remember what those two experiences felt like today, want you to embody what we’re talking about. And I ask you, if you will, to do this as you to join me on a fairly ambitious project today –
I’d like to talk about this feeling of home and its corresponding feeling of exile in two ways.
First, I’d like to locate this sensation in the Biblical narrative – the story of everything. For this, we’ll enlist our scriptures, from the very first and the very last books of the Bible. We’ll try to answer questions like: Why do we not feel at home? What is our Christian call in the midst of that feeling?
AND THEN, once we’ve done all that big universalizing narrative work – once we’ve told the story of everything, then I’d like to scale us down to a particular context, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about Watsonville.
That sound doable? Alright.
So first—the story of everything. Our first scripture brings us right to the beginning – but not the very beginning of everything. In the beginning, if you’ll recall, God created the heavens and the earth, humans and creatures, and called it Good. We, humans were placed in a garden – our home – a place where God and we could dwell together and everything was perfect, right?
Well, not exactly. We were humans after all, and what do we humans do – we long for things! We want, we want too much! We did the one forbidden thing.. and we were exiled from the Garden. Compelled not to live in our perfect home, but to wander East of Eden, conveniently the book I read in preparation to move to this beautiful central coast.
Miroslav Volf, a professor of mine at Yale and a writer of many good books believes as so many existential philosophers and life livers have, that this story was written to explain and give words to the feeling that we all have – a feeling of exile, of not being at home, of things just not being right.
He writes:
“No keen observation is required to see that something is amiss in the world. More than something—many things. That much is obvious. So obvious, in fact, that it’s all too easy to find oneself thinking that things are especially, uniquely awry. That they have never been worse. Narratives of crisis and decline do offer their own sickly sort of comfort, but pseudo-romantic nostalgia is a Siren’s song. Many things have always been amiss…
In an important sense, everything is awry and has been awry, the primordial and indestructible goodness of the creation notwithstanding. There is an abiding out-of-jointness to things, witnessed (but not exhausted) by the abiding disquietude of human hearts… Beneath or alongside or mingled with the disquietude, perhaps you have felt an amorphous but insistent longing… a longing for home.”
In other words.. as long as humans have been humans, they’ve felt like things are just messed up. Like they’re wandering around.. like they’re exiled.
Reading the bible, this theme of exile is everywhere. Israelites wandering far from home for 40 years like we remember during Lent. Prophets feeling far from home in their native land. People longing for a world where justice reigns because God lives in intimate relationship with humanity.
And where does this theme reach its fulcrum? As Christians, we locate it in the incarnation of Christ, where, as the Gospel of John writes, the word becomes flesh and dwells with us. Christ feels our suffering. Christ feels our exile. But Christ does not leave us in the feeling of discomfort.. he doesn’t just empathize
He brings us home. Or rather, he gives us a way to walk ourselves home.
The hope of Christ’s incarnation is to make this earth, imperfect as it is, a welcoming home not just for each other, but a place for God to dwell with us.
A place, where as the book of Revelation prophesies, 4 God will wipe every tear from our eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more
Because the home of God will be among us mortals.
In other words, we won’t feel so alone. We won’t feel so broken. We will feel the full presence of God among us. We will feel like we did when we closed our eyes and imagined home – only greater. In other words, according to these theologians, the goal of Christian life is not serving God so that we can go to heaven. The meaning of life is serving God so that heaven can come to us.
Here — where we are at. In the thick of all the brokenness and messiness, all the human wanting and wandering. Amidst disease and death, war and poverty, depression and darkness, amidst all the things that make us know that things are not as they should be, that make us feel like God is so far from us – Here. We are called to bring the New Jerusalem here to California.
That’s how we locate our place in the Story of Everything.
And it’s exactly that theological impulse that is behind our new ministry in Watsonville. We’ve called it Somos – which means “we are” for the idea que “Somos la iglesia. Somos el cuerpo de cristo. Somos hechos en la imagen de Dios. Somos sagrados.”
We are the church. We are the body of Christ. We are made in the image of God. We are holy. And not just on Sunday morning, and not just when we are in church, but always.
And what we’re hoping to do with this theology is answer a question I know is burning on many peoples hearts in this presbytery…
What is the future of the church? How do we… do church? In this day and age, in this economy, with people who are different than us?
You see, when I moved to Watsonville, three things became immediately clear.
One, Watsonville is a town so deeply in need of God’s love. You know this, as Watsonville’s neighbor. The poverty statistics don’t do justice to the number of people who despite working incredibly hard, just don’t have enough to eat. The low education and graduation rates don’t do justice to the lack of literacy in the community. The climate models don’t do justice to the way that climate change is affecting farmworkers such as those who lost their homes – and their American dreams – in the Pajaro floods last year.
Two, Watsonville is filled with people for whom the feeling of exile that we all feel is not abstract, but literal. Upwards of 85% of the community identifies as Latino – many are first generation immigrants, people who left behind their families, their cultures, their languages, everything they considered “home” for the hope of a better life. And many are second or third generation, people who are considered “ni de aqui ni de alla” – neither from here nor there. Young people – and there are a lot of them, with 25% of the city under the age of 18 — often live their lives translating between the homes of their parents and the home they happened to be born into. They don’t feel quite “American,” but they also don’t feel quite, say, Mexican. They aren’t always sure where they belong.
And third, if we were seeking to meet the unmet needs of this community, a traditional church model wasn’t quite going to work. There are already quite a lot of traditional churches in Watsonville – and as a result, there are already a lot of preconceived notions about what churches are – and very few of those notions tell people that they are loved and holy and sacred no matter who they are, no matter where they are from, no matter who they love, and no matter what they believe.
And so the question became not only how can we tell people these truths, but how can we show them—
And so after a lot of conversations with local nonprofits, a lot of praying, and a lot of planning by the Watsonville Administrative Commission, Somos was born: A non-profit and bilingual coffee shop and community space where young people and their families can gather, build meaningful relationships, and participate in community-led recreational and cultural events and activities, and, hopefully, study.
Located in a building right between the high school and the community college, we hope to establish a sanctuary in the city where young people feel empowered to explore and experience emotional, psychological, and spiritual wholeness. And to get them in the door, we’re offering free coffee, comfy couches, and a welcoming presence.
All of this — to make people feel at home. To help them to find their particular role in the story of everything.
We’ve been open in various forms since January and it’s been heartbreaking and inspiring to see just how much people have needed it.
I want to tell just three brief stories, introduce you to three anonymized people who have come through the doors of the chapel-turned-café, just so that you have an idea of the beautiful depth of humanity that is walking through those doors.
*Redacted for the privacy of the individuals anonymized in the sermon*
These are just a few of the people who have made a chapel a bit more into a home, not just for themselves, but for me, and ultimately for God. By gathering together, by talking about nothing and everything, we’re doing something so holy. And I know you all know that too, because it’s exactly what you do each Sunday when you gather here.
You’re taking the sting out of exiling East of Eden. You’re going to some place you might want to close your eyes and imagine, some place that feels like home. And in doing so, you are reminding yourselves and everyone around you of the inherent goodness of creation, the incredible worthiness of life.
By being together, we are doing the work of making all things new, ushering forth the day when God might come home and dwell among us, bringing to fruition the Christian hope that there will be no more tears, no more violence, no more mourning and crying and pain, perhaps not universally, but particularly. Here, where we are planted. In Watsonville, CA, through something so simple as coffee and conversation. I hope to see you there sometime.
Amen.
By: Rev. Julianne Porras-Center
