Reign of Christ Sunday
November 24, 2024

The Welcome Mat

Joseph L. Morrow
Associate Pastor

Psalm 132:1–9
2 Samuel 7:1–11, 16

---

A Tussle in the Garden Patch

I know it doesn’t sound all that pastoral, but I have to start out by telling you I’ve been in a feud with one of my neighbors. Pastors have a reputation for being affable people, but we’re just like everyone else. We can get peeved and upset too. Here’s the issue. For about three years now, I have been gardening vegetables in my backyard, and I love planting loads of garlic. Now if that makes a few of you avoid me at Coffee Hour I won’t take it personally. But in a household where we feast on Korean, American, Indian, Italian, and French cuisine, garlic is the base of our cooking.

The first year I planted twenty-five cloves in fall, and in spring twenty-five shoots peaked up over the mounds of snow and leaves. That summer I harvested twenty-five beautiful bulbs. The next year with great anticipation I planted another twenty-five cloves, but this time there were only two shoots. I chalked it up to some oversight on my part, maybe insufficient mulch or I buried them too deep in the ground to catch the sunlight. So this fall, I scaled back a bit and planted only eighteen cloves. I carefully dug holes, but not too deep. I put in a lot of mulch this time, with giant piles of leaves taken from raked piles in other people’s front yards. They must have thought I was a bit strange.

Weeks went by and my curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to peek under the mulch and see if the garlic started to sprout as it usually does, before going dormant for the winter. Well, as I dug a little in the soil, I discovered that someone or something had been digging around there too. In fact, I uncovered a series of tunnels in a zig zag as if some creature had gotten lost and was frantically trying to burrow its way out of my garden patch. And the garlic, my precious garlic, was scattered all out of place. Some of it was missing altogether. Turns out I had a little neighbor. Who also liked garlic. And didn’t ask to borrow it.

And so the feud began. I refused to have two straight years of garden failure. So I put a giant iron shovel over the garden bed. In retrospect I’m not sure what that did, but it was my warning message to stay away. Days later I saw overturned leaves and more tunnels. Then I put up metal grates I had hanging around in the shed. But my little neighbors must have just moved in and out of those metal squares, because days later I saw more tunnels. So I went to Home Depot, bought chicken wire, nailed it to the wood edges of the planter box, and then wrapped it all around the box so tightly I don’t even know how I’m going to get to the garlic once it comes up.

After all this I was catching my breath on a bag of topsoil, stewing in my anger, muttering under my breath “this is my place, my home,” when the Spirit — doing what it often does — tapped me on the shoulder, and I said to myself, “Wait a sec. Isn’t this my four-legged neighbor’s home too?”

Wendell Berry, our country’s poet laureate of agriculture, once said that “we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone.”

My house is not just my home. It is also a home for all that surrounds me, my family, our dog, three trees, and even the unknown critters digging up my garlic patch. Property lines mean very little to plants whose roots spread beneath sidewalks and to many-legged creatures who come and go as they please.

Home Is Where the Power Is

No matter the size or nature of the creature, home is more than simply a space. It is a state of being comfortable and secure, at rest from an anxiety-ridden world. Mostly because home is where you have a larger say in making the rules.

When as a child I would protest about the overbearing or outdated preferences of my mother or grandmother, they usually responded with the same refrain: “Baby, I pay the cost to be the boss. I put a roof over your head. I put clothes on your back. I get the veto.”

It’s no surprise then that King David, beleaguered by military campaigns, is so fixated on the idea of home. David says a lot in both Psalm 132 and 2 Samuel about his house built of cedar, the luxurious building material of his day. David is no mere homeowner. Scholar Carol Meyer reminds us that, as king, he becomes a symbol, whose “personal and political successes and failures are intimately and inextricably linked to the fortunes of the kingdom” (Carol Meyers, “Kinship and Kingship,” Oxford History of the Biblical World, p. 168). The status, wealth, and security of David’s home reflect the same for the people. And that extends to the temple, the home, David wanted to build for God. Meyer tells us again, “The temple was the primary visual representation of the divine election and sanction of the king who built it and of his dynastic successors (Meyers, Oxford History of the Biblical World, p. 198). David’s not doing God a kind favor; he’s shoring up his own power.

Uprooted and Estranged

If a house brings power and stability, the opposite is terrifying. Just ask the 18,886 individuals who according to the 2024 Point in Time Survey are unhoused in Chicago at any given time this year. To be without a house is to become vulnerable, risking the health of the body and the integrity of relationships. But it’s not just a matter of shelter. How many of you have ever had that feeling of being estranged from the place you thought you belonged? Perhaps you have felt it around the Thanksgiving table. Or experienced it about a community or country you have loved. Or maybe you have felt that alienation from your own body, unable to do what you once enjoyed.

Dr. John Low, of the Pokagon Potawatomi tribe, spoke to the Fourth Church community in October about the history of the tribe, which once inhabited Chicago, being estranged from their home. In his talk he recounted the treaties, such as the Chicago Treaty of 1833 that overturned the Potawatomi connection to these Lake Michigan shores and permanently disrupted their culture of living off the land.

The repercussions of losing home are adverse and often irreversible. That begs the question: why would the God of scripture invite such an outcome by refusing David’s request to build a divine house?

Well, when we take the broader view of scripture we get clues. The psalm read this morning says “let us worship at God’s footstool.” The prophet Isaiah, who comes along after David’s psalms, tells us God says, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me?” (Isaiah 66:1). So God’s perspective seems to be thus: this house you build for yourself is actually in the middle of my house. My house is the whole of creation. In other words, God will not be confined to a temple, built according to David’s rules and offering divine sanction for his every action. David may think he owns a house and even a kingdom, but under God’s authority nothing is really his own.

And that’s just good Presbyterian theology. Nothing is really ever our own.

Not our house.

Our neighborhood.

Our church.

Our nation.

Our network, our business, or all the thousand realms of human productivity.

They are all in service to God and God’s reign or nothing at all. I know that’s hard for us to absorb. We’ve got receipts after all for what we have bought and purchased. But the truth of scripture is that we take up residence in God’s house in the same way the critters take over the garlic patch, even to the annoyance of the homeowner.

But that doesn’t mean God doesn’t love or want to be with us. Second Samuel is quick to tell us that the tent of which God traveled in from the days of the Exodus until David was always residing with the people. With is the operative word. God desires to be available wherever God’s people call home, in the best and worst of times, whether we feel comfortable or estranged. God wants to be near us.

Now a spoiler alert: a temple will eventually be built by David’s son Solomon. But it functions less like the exclusive home of God than the welcome mat where we dust off our weary feet and are treated to the hospitality of God’s presence. Case in point: eventually as the Babylonians invade and the temple is destroyed, the book of Ezekiel gives us an evocative image of a wheeled chariot leaving the temple and carrying God’s Spirit into exile with the people. The welcome mat is taken up and settled down in Babylon, where a grieving people will nevertheless find a home with God.

Many centuries later, Jesus, the Son of Man who has nowhere to lay his head, will remind us that God’s reign is not in a house of cedar but like a mustard seed that will grow wild and free, until it becomes big enough for the wild birds to come and build nests in its branches. That’s quite a big welcome mat for a God whose footstool is the earth and whose crown is heaven.

Home Is Where We Relinquish Power

If God’s home transcends human borders, it means as God’s people we must resist narrowing God’s goodness to any one sanctuary, place, people, or cause, especially when it primarily serves the comfort, security, and power of a few rather than the needs of all. Which brings us back to David.

By title and power David has a house of cedar and the wherewithal to build a house for God. But by covenant God says, “Your descendants are the house. They are the welcome mat by which others will know God’s love and justice is near.” As Christians we believe that line of descent extends to Jesus. And Jesus, seeks to make the house one where neither moth mor rust destroy. But to do so he must refuse title and power. It’s not easy for us mortals to emulate that. But there are ways we can try.

This week the church universal lost Tony Campolo, a much-beloved follower of Jesus as well as dynamic teacher and theologian of the American church. He died at the age of eighty-nine after having built bridges of understanding across evangelical and mainline church, Black and majority white churches, progressives and conservatives.

One of the stories he was fond of telling was about his participation in the life of a Black congregation. One day students were coming forward during worship to be prayed over in a baccalaureate Sunday just as we do here each year. Each came forth sharing their college plans and majors to much applause and amens, especially from the elders who had accompanied their educational journey. But then the pastor’s laudatory tone dramatically shifted. He looked those young people in the eye and said, “I know you’re full of vigor today, but one day you’re gonna die. Yes, and when you do they’ll pray over you in worship, put you in the ground, and then come back to the church and eat potato salad. [Well, maybe casserole.]” “Now listen,” the pastor continued, “the day you were born, you were the only one crying and everyone else was joyful, but on that last day, when they lay you in your grave, do you want a tombstone with all your titles (think bachelors, masters, VP, president, ED, captain, coach), or do you want people standing with tears in their eyes giving testimonies about how you loved them, how you cared for them in the name of Jesus Christ, and how you made a difference in their lives?”

Titles or Testimonies? Which do we want?

The power and title that comes from being master or head of the house?

Or the testimonies that come with laying down the welcome mat for the benefit of others?

The choice was before David.

The choice was before Jesus

The choice is before us.

---

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church