Taken by Dorothy Benz
homeward bound
Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost ● September 29, 2024
Dorothy Benz, Guest Preacher © 2024
You can view the full worship video recording at:
Scripture Readings:
Acts 4:32-35 (Inclusive Bible)
The texts of the readings are in the worship bulletin linked here.
I want to share some thoughts this morning about home – What is home, where is home, what makes home valuable and precious to us? And how does church embody those values? How does church need to change to embody them? Home can be a place, but we all know that sometimes the place we call home doesn’t provide the comfort or safety we need in home. So it’s not really the place that makes it home.
I want to share a little about my journeys by way of exploring these questions.
I was born in Mannheim, Germany, to devout Lutheran parents, and we immigrated to the United States in 1968. As they settled into a new country, my parents went about trying to find a church. They headed first to the local Lutheran church, but they didn’t like the pastor. When their insurance agent asked them if they had found a church yet and they said no, he invited them to First United Methodist Church of Montclair. There, they were warmly received and paid a visit by the minister in the following week. And so they stayed.
I think of myself as an accidental Methodist in light of this happenstance route by which my family became active members in our local UMC. But accident or not, FUMC was my church home. It’s where we played hide and seek in “the catacombs” (unfinished church basement) during the potlucks and lock-ins I loved. It’s where I was confirmed. It’s where I played an angel in the Christmas pageant every single year, never getting the lead roles of Mary or Gabriel despite being the only kid in the youth group who actually believed in God. And in high school, it’s where I discerned a call to ministry.
I left for college with the intention of going to seminary after graduating. But in the spring of my freshman year, I came out as a lesbian at pretty much the exact same moment that the UMC General Conference voted to ban gays and lesbians from ministry.
And suddenly, this church that had nurtured me and nurtured my faith, was no longer safe, no longer welcoming. It was no longer home.
I thought of that experience again as I was reading today’s scripture, which paints a radically different picture of the church than the one I experienced in this homophobic rejection. It made me think again about what we cherish and value in home.
The writer of Acts tells us that the whole group of believers, the whole church, was “of one heart and soul.” They don’t say exactly what that means, but I think about the ordinary people from all walks of life who were part of that very early church and how they came together despite their different backgrounds and different experiences. Earlier in Acts we are told not just that they shared possessions but that they also broke bread together, an intimate gathering where all are equal. To this day, breaking bread together, eating together, is one of the things we most cherish about the places and people we call home.
They were “of one heart and one soul.” This makes me think, too, of the bold claim that Paul makes in his letter to the Galatian church: “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” It’s impossible to overstate how radical this statement was in the social and political context in which Paul wrote it. This was an era of social hierarchy and stratification, and Paul’s image here is mind-blowingly disruptive of the status quo. I have often thought how much less radical it is for the church in our own time to say “there is no longer gay or straight, there is no longer trans or cis” – and yet for half a century it said the opposite.
Home is the place where we are accepted as we are, unconditionally; where we are welcome without regard for our position or status in society. For the early believers, church was that home.
Those first believers went further, though, the writer of Acts tells us. “Everything they owned was held in common,” they tell us. Those in the community who had land or houses sold them and the proceeds went to take care of the entire community. “They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.” As a result, the scripture tells us, “there was not a needy person among them.” To me, this is one of the most beautiful testimonies in all of scripture. That the church came together, shared resources, provided for everyone, and no one was left behind.
Can you imagine? There was not a needy person among them. What church today can say that?
This early body of believers was doing a radical thing – they were rejecting wealth and material possessions as the measure of value and instead making the wellbeing of the community – the entire community – the measure of value. When I think of home, I see these values, too. Home is not a place where I pay rent, where I might be evicted. It is not a place where some community members have loads of things and money and others do not have enough. No, it is a place where community and meeting everyone’s needs replace market value and commodification.
These values of the early church that are reflected in today’s scripture – acceptance and welcome where everyone is of one heart and soul; rejection of wealth and possessions as a measure of value; embrace of the wellbeing of the whole community as what matters – these values were, and are, profoundly countercultural.
In the chapters leading up to the text we read today, the book of Acts describes an early community of believers that are preaching this radical gospel, and getting arrested and thrown in jail for it. The church in these pages is a community challenging the values of the society around it and modeling a different possibility.
Oh how I long for the church today to be like this!
But sadly, my experience, particularly my experience of the institutional church, has been the opposite. In the years in which I was active in the struggle to end the UMC’s discrimination, the church I saw was not the church of Acts. Far from being of one heart and soul, church leaders divided the church by declaring some of us as "incompatible with Christian teaching.” Far from valuing community over material wealth, the church consistently chose institutional self-preservation over the needs of the entire community.
Far from being any kind of home, the UMC for me embodied all the values of the society around it that the early church so bravely stood up to.
And so, after many years of fighting, I left the UMC in 2019. My journey to find church that embodies home continues, and my journey to be the church that embodies home continues, too.
One place that journey has taken me is to the U.S.-Mexico border, where I have done humanitarian aid work with the group No More Deaths. And there, in the harsh desert borderlands, I have witnessed people creating home in the most unexpected of places and the most amazing of ways.
Along the border wall in Arizona, in the region where I was working in January, there were people crossing through gaps in the wall, looking to get to the nearest Border Patrol station to initiate an asylum claim. But the nearest station is 17 miles away, with no shelter, no water, no food along the way and many of the people were ill or injured, some were old, and there were infants and small children, too. So we set up some tents and brought some supplies out to the wall to create a very makeshift camp. Our first aid people treated sprains and cuts. Other volunteers cooked hundreds of packets of ramen on two old Coleman stove burners. We handed out granola bars, blankets, bottles of water, diapers, jackets, whatever we could scrounge together. A few volunteers went off with one of the trucks to find and chop firewood.
One night, after a particularly long and busy day, we were ready to head back to Tucson after all the injuries were treated and everyone had been fed. We went through the camp letting people know we were leaving. As I was walking to the truck, I saw dozens of fires, each with a tight circle of people huddled in blankets around it. There was conversation around each circle, and even laughter. I remember thinking how amazingly resilient people can be and how powerful community is.
What I saw there was a piece of home – as much as we could, distributing “to each as any had need” food, water, blankets, firewood; people together of one heart and one soul; taking care of the entire community. Even in that scarcity, even in that transient place, there was home.
And there was church, too.
The values that were embodied in that camp were the values of Acts 4. Commodity value meant nothing in that space, and community meant everything. It was as counter-cultural as those first believers.
If you look at the cover of today’s bulletin, you will see a picture of a shrine. That shrine is part of No More Deaths’ main humanitarian aid camp. Unlike the makeshift camp, this camp is permanent and well established. People crossing in the wilderness can rest there, get medical care, and fresh food, too. There are solar panels that power a fridge – a real oasis in the desert.
And in between the kitchen, the barrels of water, the composting toilets, and the dish-washing station is this shrine. A symbol of the faith that people carry with them on the journey. A place to pray and give thanks and remember that God journeys with us.
In the end, home isn’t so much a place as it is this journey, where we together try to create spaces where all are accepted and welcome, where wealth and material possessions are not what matter and community and everyone’s needs being met are what does.
So in this church home here at Church of the Village, your church home and one of many I’ve been privileged to share in, I leave you with the joyful task of ever further embracing the values of those first believers, living profoundly counter-culturally to nurture this community and everyone in it.
Amen.