God as a Wanderer

       Rosie and I have moved twenty-seven times.  We started our marriage in a little apartment in Indiana, PA.  I was in radio at the time, working as a disc jockey at the local station.  We moved from that apartment at the beginning of a journey that took us first to Texas, in Longview and Sherman, then when I was drafted, back to Pittsburgh and then to Baltimore and back to Texas at Fort Hood.  In each of these places, we found apartments that were wonderfully adequate.  When I got out of the army, we moved again to Texas and I went back to work for the station in Sherman where I had worked before I was drafted.

I then forsook radio for television and we moved to Wichita Falls, then to Midland, where we finally bought a house, for $7500 with a down payment of $150, which I paid in three $50 monthly payments.

There were many other moves (our parents called us gypsies) and we took our kids with us and finally settled down in Johnstown, PA, where I worked in television for eleven years and we had only three houses.  We never thought that there was anything wrong with all of this, it all seemed all right to us.

The point of all of this is that not being settled was a perfectly natural thing for us.  We moved where life took us and found our community among the places where we lived.  I can remember some wonderful friends whom we met in each of these towns and the memories have lasted for us.

After I went to seminary, we came back to Pittsburgh and had two churches in my ministerial career.  The first was in Moon Township, where we stayed for six years, then to Christ Church, North Hills, where I was the rector for eighteen years.  This was the most settled that we had ever been in our lives.  Our youngest daughter, Heather was never in one school for more than one year.  She bounced around with us from place to place and finally graduated from North Hills high school.  Being gypsies was good for all of us.  We saw a lot of the countryside.

In the Old Testament lesson, David wants to build a temple for God.  He calls Nathan, the prophet and tells him See, I am living in a house of cedar, but the Ark of God stays in a tent.  Nathan tells David to go and do all that he has in mind because the Lord is with him.

But later, the Lord spoke to Nathan and essentially told him that David was not the one to build him a house, that God was a gypsy, and has lived in a tent since he had brought out the people of Israel from Egypt.  David had just brought the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem and lodged it in the Tent of Meeting, uniting the tribes of the north with the tribes of the south.  The Ark had a home in the tent.  Finally, Solomon, David’s son would build the temple, but as things worked out, the temples stayed temporary.  All that we have at the moment is the ruin of Herod’s temple, the western wall in Jerusalem, where prayers are said constantly.  There is no permanent temple for God in all of the earth.

I have loved traveling through England where the ruins of old churches seem to be the most spiritual of places, where God has never left.  The old cathedrals seem to have a fragility about them, as do all churches.  I wonder if this is a message to us from God about putting our trust in bricks and mortar.

The apostles in the early church met in homes, where thirty or forty would gather to worship.  Large churches and cathedrals came much later after Christianity had become established.  The early Christians were on the run much of the time.  Being on the run kept them limber and aware of their surroundings.  When we are gypsies, we don’t have as much time to root.  I think it is interesting that narrowness in our culture is called “parochialism”, named possibly for parishes where people huddle together in their pews against those from the outside.

When God came to this earth to become incarnate and live like the rest of us, the way that this was done was to be born of a young woman, a poor woman in Nazareth who wasn’t yet married to the carpenter, Joseph.  When Jesus was born in a crude stable in Bethlehem, there was no home for these parents.  They didn’t even have a place in the inn.  It is fascinating that there is no “home” of Mary or of Joseph for all of us to visit, no residence here on earth of Jesus to attract tourists.  There is only the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem with a silver star under an altar that is supposedly the “place” where Jesus was born.  But we don’t really know.

Even in his death, his supposed “home” is the crypt in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, where the Orthodox priests will give you a candle when you enter it.  There is even an argument over where Jesus was buried.  Is it in the crypt, or is it in the Garden (or Gordon, from the man who discovered it) tomb that looks more like a burial plot.  It is all a silly argument anyway because Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to be with God, leaving us with our memories and our arguments,

The truth of it all is that God has no earthly home, except in our hearts.  That is exactly, I think, what God has in mind.  Through all of his ministry, Jesus lived in no settled place.  He moved from town to town, blessed and healed and was known throughout the land.

So what are we to do?  If bricks and mortar isn’t the way to establish God in this world, what is the way?  I believe that it is only how our lives are lived that God is seen in our communities and in our circle of friends.  How we treat each other is the whole idea.  Our worship takes different forms and can be a wonderful means of keeping us in touch with our God, but it is in our actions that God can be seen by others.  One answer is for of us all to pay attention to Mary’s extraordinary praise in The Magnificat and work to lift up the lowly and the oppressed to continue God’s love for this world.