Sermon Archive
Homeless
Sermon preached by Richard Holloway at West End Churches Together morning service on 1 February 2004
Psalm 104.1-18; Luke 9.57-62
'Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.' Luke 9.58
One of the most creative and enjoyable aspects of speaking or writing about ancient texts, such as the Bible, is that you can use them as springboards for your imagination, since no one really knows what they mean anymore. Take, for example, the famous phrase I used in my text, 'the Son of man.' What does it mean, how are we to understand it?
Behind those words, four of them in Greek as in English, there lies an ancient theological dispute. The most obvious meaning is 'male human being,' as in the old phrase 'this man's son,' meaning me, or me here, as in the phrase from countless Western movies: 'No one's gonna drive this man's son outta town.'
If you look up the phrase 'Son of Man' in a concordance of the Bible, one of those handy volumes that tells you exactly where you can find any particular word or phrase, you will find hundreds of places in the Old Testament where it means male human being and one place where it might mean something else. In the Book of Daniel we read in chapter 7: 'And there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days, and to him was given dominion that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.' From that obscure text in a very weird book there developed an enormous theological industry designed to prove that when Jesus used the term he was claiming not to be a man, but to be the son of God, in other words, divine. Now if theologians can get away with such fancy footwork I want to try a bit of it myself this morning and offer you a way to read or understand my text, 'the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.'
I want to begin by contrasting these words of Jesus with what we heard in Psalm 104. That magnificent psalm celebrates the order of nature in which everything has its appointed place: 'The trees of the wood are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted; where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees are her house. The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and the rocks for the conies.'
In other words, nature gives its creatures a fixed and established home in the scheme of things. The birds are programmed to build their nests and the animals to seek refuge among the rocks and caves. One of the ways we try to explain the behaviour of animals and birds is by the word instinct, that mysterious internal communication system that enables a young snow goose to know how to fly thousands of miles south at the beginning of winter and take the return trip at the beginning of spring, always against extraordinary odds. Birds and animals seem to be intuitively at home in the world and to know their place in it. It's as though nature or the life force works automatically through them, much in the way that we programme machines to do our bidding.
But for human animal it is not so simple. We are not at home in the world in the automatic, instinctive way of the other animals with whom we share the planet. Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the son of man hath not where to lay his head. Something has wrenched us out of the natural order that gave us birth and has made us homeless and uncertain of our place. It is self-consciousness that has done this. We rarely act on pure instinct and when we do we soon complicate the ease of what we do by thinking about it. We have uneasy consciences, homeless consciences, neither completely instinctive nor completely rational.
One way to try to understand the effect of this is to think, by analogy, about the impact of actual homelessness on our fellow humans. The causes of the various forms of physical homelessness are well documented by agencies like Shelter and the Scottish Churches Housing Agency. Behind them there is a constellation of factors, any combination of which can serve to uproot the person from the human community and send them in free fall into a kind of social outer space: ill health, especially in its psychological forms, economic adversities, either sudden or long standing, those mysterious erosions of our inner strength that can suddenly afflict the precarious individual and plunge them into helplessness and depression. Any one or any combination of these factors can have the violent and disorienting effect of uprooting a person or a family and severing them from the safety of ordinary life. They are plunged suddenly into a sort of non life, a kind of social invisibility and powerlessness that is devastating. To have no address, no permanent abode, in our sort of connected society, is to cease to be, is to become invisible, to lose significance, to have your mooring cut and to feel yourself blown away by the winds of fortune. I have heard the experience likened to agnosia, that kind of radical memory loss which removes any sense of self from you. Remove all those connections and you remove the self.
What you might call individual or family homelessness is a common pattern in our greedy and settled society, but it takes different, more communal forms in other kinds of society. Whole communities can be rendered homeless by political and historical forces. The Second World War created millions of such people. At the time they were called 'displaced persons,' people without place in the world. And the wars of our own era continue to spawn this kind of radical homelessness, compounded by the refusal of those with a more settled place on earth to share it with those who have none.
A more subtle kind of enforced homelessness is ethical homelessness. These are alienated, outsider groups, whom certain theologians are beginning to describe as Queer people, an intentional lift from the sexual vocabulary, to describe a state of rejection based on difference: difference in colour, or sexuality, or mental health. The dominant group that creates the conventions outlaws those who do not or cannot conform, making them permanent exiles in their own communities, people who never belong, who are never one of us.
So a moment's thought reveals just how good we human animals are at rendering our own kind homeless. I think the cause or root of this kind of behaviour lies in our reflective self consciousness. Compare us with the rest of the animal kingdom and you see the contrast. Without wanting to sentimentalise non-human animals, naturalists claim that they achieve a remarkable symbiosis with each other. They prey on one another, live off one another, but in a way that achieves a kind of natural balance. They take what they need when they need it. We self-conscious animals are different. There is a tendency to gross inflation in us that means we never have enough. Let me give you two examples of how this works in practice. Take our relations with other animals, especially the ones we live off, chicken, pigs and cattle. We no longer live in a sort of tragic harmony with them; rather we have enslaved them, made them homeless, shoved them in animal concentration camps or factories and turned them from life forms with their own place and integrity into food product for us. Our excessive appetite, uncontrolled automatically by nature, has rendered a large part of the animal kingdom homeless and it is well on its way to making parts of our planet uninhabitable for animals and humans alike.
But we do it to each other as well. This is partly to do with our greed and lack of balance in the way we consume, but it also has something to do with our lack of balance in the way we think. Our ideas turn out to be even more dangerous than our appetites. Let me give you a few examples of ideas that can make people homeless.
Racism is one. Racism is an idea that can make whole communities refugees in their homeland.
Hatred of the different is another idea that can make people homeless. I know many Christian homosexuals who no longer feel at home in the Church because a virulent idea about their status has made them homeless, has cast them out.
And think of the centuries when the idea that women were inferior to men kept them outside the sanctuary and made them homeless within what Jesus called his father's house.
The root of the terrible forms of homelessness that we inflict on each other lies in our own greedy insecurity. Is there a remedy? Never a permanent one, I fear, but there are things we can do to improve the situation. In the Christian tradition one of these things would come under the heading, Confession of Sin. We could begin by honestly admitting that, inescapably, the human animal has a tendency to excess in appetite and in the production of wrong ideas, which, unless it is moderated, makes other animals and other humans homeless. Wise people know how difficult it is to eradicate a character flaw, but if we acknowledge that it exists we can develop ways of compensating for it. All of that could come under the head of leading the examined life or acknowledging your sinfulness or admitting not hiding from what you are like.
The next part of the response is active. It calls upon us to do what we can to undo the effects of humanity's greed and anxiety upon others. Don't buy factory farmed food. Don't read the kind of newspapers that demonise refugees. Don't back the kind of politicians who cater to the worst and rarely to the best in human nature. Don't support social policies that create a society like Scotland's today where one child in three lives in poverty. Don't support policies that create a society like England and Wales today where there are more children between the ages of 12 and 14 in prison than at anytime since 1908.
I am afraid that Homelessness Sunday will probably become a permanent entry in the Church's calendar, because it reflects a permanent truth about humanity. 'Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.' So work, vote and pray for a society in which, maybe one day, all can be at home.