Matthew 8:18-22 and I Corinthians 4:8-13
“Speak to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.” - Ephesians 5:19 NKJV
Last week, we explored the powerful song from Aretha Franklin about respect. We found that people could simply command respect by being who God created them to be. But this week, we realize that such action inevitably leads to detractors. Perhaps for no one is this more clear than Jesus himself. He went from town to town preaching and healing, doing the work that God had called him to do. But he seemed to have constant problems with those who knew him as a young child, believing him to be impudent and overstepping his place. Several times, he is quite frustrated with others’ opinions. In fact, when his family is trying to call him away from preaching, perhaps embarrassed by his actions, Jesus refuses simply to acknowledge them. He motions to the crowd, telling them, “Here are my mother and my brothers!”
In today’s text, because of his family’s embarrassment and his hometown’s judgments, he feels out of place: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” And then, a few sentences later, he utters that confusing line to the person who asked to bury his father before following Jesus: “Let the dead bury their own dead." Countless tomes have been written trying to interpret these words from a theological point of view. However, in my mind, it’s clear: Jesus is simply frustrated and taking it out on this would-be follower.
But feeling out of place did not end with Jesus. Some decades ago, Bob Dylan sang these provocative words:
How does it feel?
To be without a home,
Like a complete unknown,
Like a rolling stone.
I must be honest. For decades upon decades, I never liked Bob Dylan’s music. In fact, whenever it came on the radio, I was aghast that somebody with such a grating voice had become so popular. But recently, something changed, and I don’t know how to account for it. I’ve come to truly treasure his music and be powerfully moved by his voice and his vocal interpretation. The Times They Are a-Changin’, Tangled Up in Blue, and Hurricane are masterpieces of music with a message. But one stands above the rest for me.
In his raspy, nasally voice, when he croons out those words “How does it feel?”, it wakes you up and leads you to consider your own sense of place in this world. The lyrics are powerful and confusing at the same time, which enables us each to consider the song from our perspective. At one point, he sings about those who have fallen on hard times:
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime,
didn’t you?
…
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal.
These words force us to powerfully consider that any success that we have can very quickly turn around on us. Our sense of pride and place based on accomplishments, possessions, or others’ opinions of us is an utter house of cards.
How does it feel? First, hopefully, thinking about it makes us look differently at the person scrounging for their next meal or at the person who has suffered career or personal shame. It can be too easy to look on them with scorn and blame.
In large part, this was the hands-on ministry of Jesus. Many people he cared for were the complete unknowns, without a home, that Dylan sang about. The lepers, the lame, the religious and social outcasts—all of them were cut off from the life of the community. Dylan forces us to confront that part of ourselves that feels superior, and Jesus shows us how to treat those having to scrounge for a scrap of respect.
The song is not only about a sense of homelessness but about Dylan’s utter frustration with his sense that so many people in his world are simply fake. It is when he sings these incomprehensible lines that, at the same time, capture his anger:
You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.
Ain’t it hard when you discovered that
He really wasn’t where it’s at,
After he took from you everything he could steal.
Paul the apostle felt like everything had been stolen from him as well, and as a result, he felt he had no home in this world. Once he became a follower of Jesus, the people of Damascus sought to kill him. Determined he would not leave the town alive, they posted guards; he miraculously escaped by being let down the city wall in a basket at night. But Paul would not only have to avoid his fellow Jews. Many of the Christian converts, both Gentile and Jew, questioned his status as an apostle, and he constantly had to re-establish his authority as an emissary of God. Listen to his pain once again from our Corinthian text:
For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals. We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed and beaten and homeless, and we grow weary from the work of our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly. We have become like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things, to this very day.
Rarely have so few words captured such complete despair, despondency, and desperation. This is why he yearns to go to heaven to be with God; in fact, he begs to go to heaven, to no longer be judged and reviled by people from every facet of his life. He wants to be home—not a rolling stone.
Like Dylan, Paul, and Jesus, there is a sense within each one of us that we are not truly at home. And, surprisingly, at times, this can be precisely the right feeling. As Dylan wrote:
When you ain’t got nothing,
you got nothing to lose.
You're invisible now,
you’ve got no secrets to conceal.
It is in moments at the bottom—when you’ve lost everything, feel that no one is on your side, and believe you’ve failed at life— that finally perhaps we are open to realizing the truth. This world is not our true home. We have been made for something more sublime, more complete, more authentic, more honest, more open, and more beautiful. It is a place not found on this earth; Paul knew this. Like all of us at times, he spewed his frustration, but at other times, he voiced the truth with rapturous hope, no matter what would come. Such as when he’s able to say, “To live is Christ; to die is gain.”
Once we discover our authentic self—the person that God made us to be—that’s when we are free. Truly free from the expectations of others; truly free from our own self-doubt and self-loathing; truly free to be just who you are. And then you feel at home.
When Dylan first performed Like a Rolling Stone, according to one account, his former fans were booing and yelling, “Get rid of the electric guitar!” As one critic wrote, many folk fans saw this as a betrayal, calling him a Judas.
But for Dylan, it set him free. Dylan is not truly singing about other people. Perhaps, more than anything, the song is about himself. Biographer of Dylan, Robert Shelton, wrote: “‘Rolling Stone’ is about the loss of innocence and the harshness of experience. Myths, props, and old beliefs fall away to reveal a very taxing reality.” The phony people in his world frustrated him, but perhaps most troubling was his own feeling that he was not being his true self. This is what he said about the time of the song:
Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing. I was very drained, and the way things were going, it was a very draggy situation ... But Like a Rolling Stone changed it all. I mean, it was something that I myself could dig. It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.
Because of his popularity with acoustic music fans, Dylan had been channeled into a particular style that he didn’t feel was authentic. Combined with the phony crowd, like Jesus, he felt like a man without a home. But this song changed all that. In fact, the words didn’t begin as a song; it was just a journal of sorts that he had started. Listen to what he had to say about them:
This long piece of vomit, 20 pages long, and out of it I took Like a Rolling Stone and made it as a single. And I’d never written anything like that before, and it suddenly came to me that was what I should do...
When you realize why God has put you on this earth, you will feel a sense of place, a sense of purpose, and when the arrows of scorn fly, they cannot penetrate. There is a sense of self and confidence because you know that whatever happens on this earth and in this place, it’s not your true ultimate destiny. One day, you will feel complete, perfect, and whole.
How does it feel to be on this earth? It feels frustrating, confusing … hard, beautiful, wonderful, glorious; it feels like home.
Amen.
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