Third Sunday after Epiphany: Homelessness Sunday
It's a funny thing about being a student: you move a lot. In the last ten years, I've lived in eight different houses in three countries. But now I've lived here in Sheffield nearly three years, I'm finally starting to feel at home. I have a house, which deserves more cleaning than it gets. I have a garden. I have neighbours whose names I know, whose children are growing up before my eyes. I even have milk delivered to my doorstep. It feels strange, but it feels good to have somewhere to call home. And I'm not the only one for whom having a home is important. Listen to Catherine's story, one of the stories we will hear at the Poverty Hearing at the Broomhall Centre this coming Saturday.
I am a Tutsi from Ruanda educated in Tanzania. I fled to Kenya in 1999 with my 5 yr old son, pregnant with my daughter. Without Kenyan ID I could not work or maintain myself. In 2002 I came to the UK, and claimed asylum. I was put in a hostel in Clapham. There was one kitchen, toilet and bathroom for 10 families. Two months later I was put in a flat in a rough neighbourhood in Middlesbrough, and then endured two years of racial problems. After writing a letter of complaint to the Home Office I was eventually relocated in Sheffield in 2004, into a single bedroom house for 3 days before being placed into a 3 bedroom house. I was moved again in 2005 (to a 2 bed house) and then twice again in 2006.
Late in 2007 I was given permission to stay, and was moved out of the asylum system into a hostel. The next month seemed like a year, living in one room with two small children, with nowhere to play, in a hostel with 20 rooms housing families, singles, people on drugs, people fleeing from domestic violence. There was one kitchen, 2 toilets and bathrooms, but no laundry facilities. 5 years of belongings had to be put into a shed.
I wrote to the council, and on 4th January 2008 was given temporary accommodation in a Housing Association property, my ninth residence in the UK. I am now bidding for a council house and hoping that this 10th place will be permanent.
Imagine it - nine different places in six years; always having to pack up and move on; always hoping that this time it will be OK. Having a home is important.
Home would be important too for Simon and Andrew, James and John, the fishermen we meet in our reading this morning. They had their homes and their families, their work and their friends. They'd likely never left Capernaum in their lives. But when Jesus asked them, they left it all behind them, moving all over Galilee with him, only sometimes touching base at Capernaum. They weren't like me, travelling to train for something that would earn their living. They weren't like Catherine, travelling because their lives were in danger and they had to get out and start again somewhere strange where nobody knew them. Andrew and Simon, John and James left their homes and everything they knew because they wanted to follow Jesus, to get to know him better, to find out what on earth he could mean by fishing to catch people.
A lot of you will have left home and country, friends and family when you came to Sheffield. Last night at the Caledonian Burns supper I was among many people fondly remembering the home and the culture they had left behind.
I wonder, how did you feel when you first left your home to come to Sheffield: how long it took before you thought of Sheffield as your home, and if indeed it is home for you now, or whether you're still hoping to go back. Another change many here will be considering, or maybe trying not to think about, is the move we will have to make at some stage from living in our own home to living where someone else can take care of us. That, too, can be a stressful decision to make, and sometimes one beyond our control.
Yet while leaving home can be hard, all of us who have done it even once know that it's not the bricks and mortar - whether it's a house or a church - that's the most important thing to hang onto. It's what home means to us that we miss, whether it's history or security or our own space or relationships we value. Jesus' friends moved away from everything they'd known in order to keep in touch with him, because that new relationship was even more important to them than the life they knew. I wonder what is most important in our lives.
‘Follow me' by the Catholic hymnodist Michael Cockett, a modern hymn paired with a tune by Sister Madeleine FCJ, explores the tension between Jesus' homelessness and his home in God.
R&S 200 looks to Christian action in the present as well as God's action in the past. The tune Paderborn is a German folk melody.
R&S 628 also explores the implications of the Gospel for life now. The tune Sancta Civitas (‘Holy City') was written by Herbert Howells.
When I was preparing this service for Homelessness Sunday, I kept asking myself the question: where was Jesus' home? As we know from our Christmas services, he started off life in Bethlehem, then moved back to Nazareth to grow up with Mary and Joseph. In our reading today we find he's left home and moved to Capernaum, by the Sea of Galilee. And here comes the first of Matthew's fulfilments of prophecy - remember I warned you about them at Christmas? He looks at Jesus' life, and he wants to tie it in with what he knows from the Hebrew Bible, and riffling through Isaiah he thinks, Aha. Here's something useful. Here's something that will show other Jewish people how important Jesus is and how he fits into our story of salvation. But as often happens with Matthew, the quotation that's intended to be helpful actually adds to our confusion. Because what is all this about ‘Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali'? Who or what are they?
Well, Zebulun and Naphtali turn out to be two of Joseph's brothers - two of the also-rans who don't get a mention in the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat script after they've been introduced in ‘Jacob and Sons'. But at the time of Jesus, no one's been thinking in terms of those tribes for years - it's like talking about Yorkshire as Ridings.
So what's so important about two long-dead tribal distinctions? Zebulun and Naphtali were the most northerly tribes in Israel. And that means those areas are a long way away from religious power and from cultural authority. Jesus must have been used to that sort of attitude from childhood - if you remember, in John's Gospel Nathaniel asks, rather sniffily, Can anything good come out of Nazareth? But when he gets the chance to leave home and start work, does he, like so many young people today, go away from the area where he was brought up to start a new life? Does he go down to Jerusalem, where God's temple is to be found? Or to Sepphoris, where the Romans have their administrative headquarters? Does he even stay put in Capernaum, getting to know people? No way.
Instead, Jesus decides to travel round Galilee, visiting people's synagogues on Saturdays and preaching in them, healing people who were ill, calling friends to join him on his travels.
So where was Jesus' home, then? Not in any important place, whether Jewish or Roman. Not in any respectable place - the whole of Galilee, the north of the country, was looked down on by good religious Jews because there were so many Gentiles around. Not even in any settled place. If we're talking literally, Jesus' home was always provisional.
So what about metaphorically? Even if he didn't live anywhere on a permanent basis, what value did Jesus take as his core meaning, the place where he was spiritually at home? Matthew tells us that. It's what Jesus began to proclaim as soon as John had baptised him: Repent - change the way you think - for the kingdom of heaven has come near. And he didn't stop at telling people about God's kingdom, but immediately started to show what it meant. Calling friends to work with him, teaching people about God, making them whole. And then moving on again, to another town.
How does Matthew describe this in his quotation from Isaiah? The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light; for those who sat in the shadow of death, light has dawned. We often hear these words before Christmas as a foreshadowing of God's promised leader, the Messiah. Well, now we see them put into practice by Jesus. This is how it is when the light is switched on and the Messiah comes: he doesn't plug into the centres of political or theological power; he doesn't establish a power base anywhere and bind the locals to his interest: instead, he drifts along the roads of Galilee - of all places - talking about God's coming kingdom with a group of fishermen - of all people. Unless you'd seen that light yourself, it'd likely look a bit unimpressive from outside. A bit like the way Paul describes Jesus' cross as 'the foolishness of God'.
And ‘unimpressive' is how people apparently described Paul, too. At this stage in his correspondence with Corinth things aren't too bad, but later in his second letter to the church there, he quotes someone from the Corinthian church saying:
‘His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible.' Well, here the Corinthians certainly have a weighty letter to deal with. Their church was evidently split up into factions: some would look to Paul himself for leadership, others to Apollos, the local man, others to Peter - remember last week, Cephas means Peter in Aramaic? Peter, who would take a stronger line on the proper ways of being Jewish and Christian. Some, of course, took the high moral ground, saying, ‘I belong to Christ' - but that wasn't helping the church either, because there's nothing so annoying as being holier than thou - just think of Holy Willie's prayer.
Yet we can't point the finger at the Corinthians, for it's an easy mistake for any church to make. Maybe we might find ourselves saying, ‘I belong to Network' or ‘I belong to the Tuesday afternoon group', ‘I belong to Buildings' or ‘I belong to Finance'. We all of us have ways of belonging within the larger church, which can be part of the good and helpful way we feel at home here in St Andrew's - but if ever our allegiance to our little group becomes so strong that we start to suspect others with different connections of wanting to do our own group down, we know we're in trouble and must think again.
Paul avoids this danger of cliquishness by keeping a loose connection with his churches - imagine forgetting who you'd baptised! - and always moving on. Like Jesus, he chose to be homeless rather than making any fixed place his home. Most of us have opted for more stability: we have at least a temporary feeling of home in Sheffield and, I hope, in St Andrew's as a church. That has a lot of advantages. We can build strong relationships with one another over the years. We can invest in bricks and mortar to make sure we have premises suitable for our work. But there are also dangers in having a permanent home. We could get so tied up in maintaining our home - in terms of people and in terms of property - that we forgot the value which should be at every church's heart: God's kingdom; and the people who should be on every church's mind: those without our own front door and, particularly but not only on this Sunday, those without a front door to call their own.
