“A Place of Belonging” Preached at Wollaston Congregational Church On May 7th, 2017 Scripture: John 10:1-10 Remember the blind man … the one whose sight was restored by Jesus? We heard about him just a few weeks ago. Remember how the religious leaders threw him out of the community, because he told them Jesus had restored his sight? Today’s gospel passage follows along from that story. We might imagine that the newly sighted man now has no community to belong to. While he was blind, dependent on the charity of others, at least he had a place to be. Now he is sighted, ready to fend for himself, but he has no community in which to be productive. Our passage from John’s gospel provides Jesus’ discourse on the story of the rejected sighted man. In it, Jesus tells of a community for his followers … a place of belonging. It is a place where they can feel safe to flourish and grow. Jesus speaks of a sheepfold and likens himself to the gate of the enclosure. You may remember that, as part of my seminary education, I worked as a chaplain intern with the Hebrew Seniorlife organization. The first thing I learned there, was about the use of a Spiritual Assessment Tool. This tool includes a list of 7 facets of spiritual health. Chaplains can use this this list to assess each person they care for and find out where they might need some help. The first facet the tool lists is “love and belonging.” That is to say that every person has a need to be loved and to belong. We all need to feel a connection with family, friends, community, and with God. Absence of the feeling of belonging often presents as loneliness or isolation. Hebrew Seniorlife serves as a residential home for many seniors who suffer from dementia and other health challenges. The residents’ sense of belonging is often seriously upset, when they are moved from their former homes to the center. Cognitive difficulties can make the situation worse. For someone with short-term memory loss, even relatively familiar surroundings can seem strange and disorienting. The chaplains and staff at Seniorlife work hard to restore a sense of belonging, through social activities; worship opportunities, including familiar music and songs; community concerts and discussion groups. I remember wheeling an African American woman in her 90’s through the lower level of the center one time. I had wondered if she, as a black Christian, could feel a sense of belonging in a largely white, Jewish institution. But there in the basement was a large mural of an old neighborhood in Dorchester. “I like to come down here,” she told me, “because this is a picture of my neighborhood. I grew up around many Jewish families, and so I feel at home here.” Who would not wish to be loved and to belong? And yet, we see in our culture today, people belong less and less. A few generations ago almost all people belonged to an extended family, who lived together or close by. And those families lived in tightly knit communities. Everyone knew everyone else. If you didn’t like someone or didn’t get along, you had to figure things out. Because you were in the neighborhood together for the long haul. Moving away, or drawing the shades tight closed, was not an option. In some ways my own upbringing resembled this nostalgic ideal. My family lived on the edge of the village where my mom had grown up. My grandparents lived a short walk down the road. When I attended our small chapel as a young child, it seemed that almost everyone was related to me in some way: grandparents, aunts and uncles. The other families were familiar to me too. When I walked the main street through the village, from a very early age, I was often greeted as “Margaret”, my mom’s name. I didn’t mind, because those mistakes reminded me that people knew my family and were looking out for me. I am very grateful that I had this feeling of belonging in my early childhood. But even at that time, the extended family was becoming obsolete. During 1950’s and 60’s the nuclear family became the norm, at least for the white middle and upper classes. Ambitious young adults pursued careers away from their family of origin, building their own small family units as they married and had children. These units lived alongside other family units, connecting at church and other community groups … neighborhood picnics, sports leagues, holiday parties. If you Google images of nuclear families of the 50s and 60s, and you’ll see … mom, dad, 2 or 3 children, all of the same race. The family is admiring a wonderful cake, just baked by mom. Or enjoying hotdogs, grilled by dad of course, in the sunshine, on the manicured family lawn. The nuclear family is the picture of belonging … if you belong. … if your family doesn’t experience divorce. … if there isn’t a pregnancy out of wedlock … if you don’t fall in love with someone of a different race, a different religion … or the same gender. Today, in mainline American culture, it seems that those notions of the nuclear family have been eroded. Single parent families, blended families, mixed race families, interfaith families, same-sex parent families have become prevalent. I believe that these moves toward acceptance and diversity can only be beneficial. But the sad fact is that many adults live alone, or operate alone from a small family unit. Perhaps their own family unit broke down, and now they have no one. Perhaps they wanted independence and moved away, from their roots and their connections. Or perhaps were cast out by their own families. Even today, many LGBTQ youth are expelled by their families or they run away from hostility. In fact a full 40% of homeless youth on the streets are LGBT, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. [1] Even in “in tact” families, with the demands of modern life and the desire for the fulfillment of rewarding careers, most parents work full time. Some work double shifts to make ends meet and barely have time left for sleep. The better-off are needed to drive their children to sports practices, music lessons, drama rehearsals and extra tuition, when they are done with work. For many, there is no more time for community connection and belonging. Over the past generation, participation in community groups has declined very rapidly. With this decline in connection through family and community, there has been a dramatic fall in the sense of belonging. According to the Hebrew Seniorlife assessment, that means poorer spiritual and emotional health throughout our culture. The bottom line: community is in decline, loneliness is on the rise. And this trend is leading to higher rates of divorce, addiction, depression, anxiety and suicide. In the midst of these troubling trends, we hear Jesus’ words as relayed by John, to the early followers of Jesus. So let’s unpack the metaphor of the sheepfold, with Jesus as the gate. We can imagine the sheepfold of ancient times as an enclosure made from dry stone walls. This is the place the sheep belonging to various shepherds would be kept at nighttime, in order to protect them from predators and thieves. The techniques to gate and lock the enclosure were primitive. So often a gatekeeper would lie across the entrance to the sheepfold, to protect the animals inside. When the shepherds arrived in the morning, each sheep would know their master’s voice and readily be led by him to pasture. The sheepfold is sanctuary – a safe place – for the sheep. The formerly blind man, who was thrown out of his previous community, can find welcome here. Likewise, those who feel isolated in our culture ought to find safety and welcome within our churches. The elderly, those dealing with disabilities, the poor, the disenfranchised, people who are far away or estranged from their families of origin. These are the people for whom our church may provide sanctuary. In a culture of loneliness doesn’t the sheepfold sound appealing? Wouldn’t people who are isolated from one another, and lacking a feeling of belonging, like to get inside that comforting space to be protected by the gatekeeper? Aren’t we all tired of “Bowling Alone”, left to fend for ourselves. [2] It seems not. Or at least people are not seeing church in that way. It seems that the mainline church has a PR problem. In an article I read recently, The Reverend Emily Heath talks about a discussion Heath had with younger adults in a pub setting. Members of the group “shared that when peers heard they attended church, they often reacted negatively. Their friends often assumed that Christian faith meant disregard for the rights of women and LGBT people, rejection of the idea of evolution and acceptance of biblical inerrancy.” [3] This is wrong, we know, but how do we correct these assumptions, at least about our own church? Rev. Heath explains that many people in our culture, who have turned away from church, do so because of suffering some kind of pain or rejection in their original place of worship. When I hear these kinds of stories, I feel angry. They do not conjure an image of the sheepfold with the loving gatekeeper making a place of belonging for all who need it. But Heath notes there are two problems here. The first is with the original church that hurt the person … “but the second is the fact that no other church ever came along and told them that what was done to them was not God’s will.” Here is our job: to tell people that what was done to them is wrong, that they belong in the sheepfold, lovingly guarded by a gatekeeper would protect them from any more hurt and pain. My friends, you and I … we are in the right place, we are where we belong. We are safe, because we have a sheepfold here, to which we are all belong. But we have a PR problem … how to we tell the lonely ones, the isolated ones, the rejected ones that they belong here too? Today, I leave that question with you. Amen. [1] http://nationalhomeless.org/issues/lgbt/ [2] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, (Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, New York, 2000) [3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-emily-c-heath/mainline-christianity-public-relations-problem_b_993126.html
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