Tabernacles outside St. Paul’s Seattle, December 2022.
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Lately we at St. Paul’s have tried to stop calling our unhoused neighbors “the homeless.” We have our reasons for this. First, they are whole human beings who should not be defined by their lack of a mailing address. Calling them “the homeless” pejoratively labels them: the label refers to something missing in their life, something abnormal, something bad or wrong.
A second reason to say no to the term “the homeless” is that our neighbors are no less our neighbors for lacking a house, and to call them “homeless” might imply otherwise: it might suggest that they are not – that they technically, literally cannot – be our neighbors. And finally, perhaps it’s just problematic in its essence, this term, “the homeless.” It diminishes our human neighbors into objects, into things, and into loathsome things at that. It’s small. It’s mean.
Some of our other neighbors – who, like most of us here at church this Christmas morning, have house numbers on homes they rent or own – unapologetically dislike our unhoused neighbors, and simply want them to go away. They view them as loathsome. But before we judge them too harshly, we should confess that that same impulse can stir our own hearts, too, when someone vandalizes the labyrinth, or sets the outdoor lavatories on fire. If we do feel this way about our neighbors, it is understandable – I can and do empathize – but we should work on that. We really should. Human misbehavior is something every single person does, including those of us with impressive addresses on streets like Pennsylvania Avenue, or Downing Street. So we should just confess the sin and fix it whenever we are unkind to our neighbors.
But I have an idea that neither term – neither “unhoused neighbors” or “the homeless” – really works to refer to our friends who can’t easily receive mail. I think both terms fail to adequately describe our neighbors because these folks are not, in an important way, unhoused or homeless. They have houses, and they have a home. Their houses are tents; and their home is St. Paul’s.
First, their houses: these neighbors of ours often live in tents. (Sometimes they live in tiny houses.) And it happens that one of the reasons we respond to our neighbors with compassion and friendship is that our faith tradition is dotted with tents, all down the ages. We even have a snazzy word for these mobile houses: we call them tabernacles. We carry deep in our faith memory the experience of the ancient Israelites who constructed a tabernacle that served as their house of worship in the wilderness. The tabernacle was seen as the dwelling place of God: every time the nomads plunked down for a while in one place, they would set up the tabernacle, and they would say their prayers, and then they would perceive that God’s very presence had drawn close to them. God was there. In the tabernacle. In the tent.
Ages later, we construct permanent buildings with the markings of impermanence. When the church I last served as a priest – Grace Episcopal Church on Bainbridge Island – built their new building in 2003, they asked the architect to “build us a tent in the meadow.” If you go there, you see wood and glass soaring above you and you get a sense that you’re in a kind of tent. You are in a tabernacle. But St. Paul’s also has a tabernacle in the design of this 1962 building: we call it a nave, related to the words naval and navy – our building looks like an upside-down ship, like Noah’s ark. This is good for our spiritual life: even in our permanent building, we remember that we are on the move. Even in a grand structure of concrete slabs and soaring beams, we recall that God appears in tents to people on the move, people on the run, people who lack a permanent address.
And as mortal creatures, we know in our bones that we all lack a permanent address.
And so we find on Christmas morning that John, the fourth evangelist, the person and the community that give us today’s Good News – John knew what they were doing, knew what they were saying, when they wrote that “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” The deeper meaning can be lost in translation, so let’s recover it: one translation by Eugene Peterson says it this way: “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” That’s good; that’s getting closer to what John means. But others have said it this way: “The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.” This gets us even closer. If Jesus Christ is the Word of God, if Jesus Christ is God, then Jesus Christ will likely appear in a tabernacle, in a tent.
The Greek word John uses is ἐσκήνωσεν [es-KAY-no-sen], and yes, it means tabernacle, or tent. God appears in a tent. This does not mean that our friends just outside are God. No, that’s a silly – and blasphemous! – step too far. But it does mean something startling: it means that if God appears among us, here to answer our cries, here to be known, to heal us, to strengthen us, to save us, then God will most likely appear in a tent. That is to say, God appears in our lives where we feel most transitory, most unsettled, most frantic. And God inspires our ministry just there. God sends us there into the work of our faith, together.
And so our friends in the literal tents outside: they may enjoy God’s awesome presence and power more intimately, more viscerally, than those among us whose needs are reliably met. I am one of those among us: I have a warm home and I sleep under a heavy blanket; I enjoy robust physical health and was raised with reasonably secure emotional attachment to my parents; I have been educated and have never, ever worried where or whether my next meal will be. Now, God loves me, even in all this lavish privilege, but God appeared to me most powerfully in the tabernacles of my life. One of them was a jail cell I occupied for an hour or so one night, for cause. I belonged in that cell. I was released and sent home, but not before I sensed in the depths of my frantic spirit God’s searing presence. I had done something I should not have done, and God was there, merciful but bracing, loving but also harrowing.
And so it goes. God appears in tabernacles, in tents, in the transitory places of our lives, in the critical moments of loss and change, in the dreadful – even shattering – moments of crisis, in the excruciating conflicts and sometimes tragic upheavals that leave us confused, frantic, even sometimes terrified. That is where God most powerfully appears.
And this is why, again, our so-called “unhoused neighbors” are top of mind on this Christmas morning. We proclaim that the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us, which means our neighbors are intimate companions of the Holy One, the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. In Jesus the Incarnate One, God Almighty lays down humbly in a tent at the edge of our property, here along First Avenue North, and breaks bread with our neighbor, sharing from the open snack pack we gave him along with hand-warmers and gloves and stocking cap and underwear.
That same Word pitches his tent in our anxious hearts as we wrestle with all the challenges of the Seattle housing crisis, and what it all means for this community of faith. Times are tough right now, right around here, on this block, and it is definitely a wilderness place for us in many ways. And so, yet again, God appears: in the wilderness, among people in transition, among people on the run, appearing in a tabernacle, in a tent, this time the tent of our hearts. What will we do for our friends in tents? God knows. And God is here. We will find that we know what to do.
And we will never give up on all this, because as I said above, our neighbors not only have houses – their houses are tents, the dwelling places God loves most – but they have a home, too. Their home is St. Paul’s. They are members of St. Paul’s, as surely as all of us who pledge our dollars and come inside this nave, this upside-down boat, to say our prayers.
“How many members would you say we have?” I asked Barbara our treasurer a few days ago. I asked her this because people often ask me this question in my early weeks here. “I’d say about a hundred pledging members and two hundred active members,” Barbara said. That sounds about right. But that term ‘active member’ is more inclusive than we may imagine. On this Christmas morning, we hear the Good News that among our active members are the neighbors nearby who have so much to teach us about human endurance in the wilderness.
This morning, they are breaking bread with the Word made flesh who has appeared in their tabernacles. They are beholding his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
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Preached on Christmas Day, December 25, 2022, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 52:7-10
Psalm 98
Hebrews 1:1-12
John 1:1-14