Sermons for the Month
The Hang-out Hall
DATE: August 15, 1999
SERVICE: Pentecost XV
TEXT: Matthew 15:21-28"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
It can never be said that Adele Gaboury's neighbors were less than responsible. According to the Boston Globe when her lawn grew hip-high, her neighbors had a local boy mow it down. When her pipes froze and burst, they had the water turned off. When the mail spilled out the front door, they called the police.
The only thing they didn't do was check to see if she was alive. She wasn't.
On Monday, police climbed her crumbling brick stoop, broke in the side door of her little blue house and found what they believe to be the 73-year-old woman's skeletal remains sunk in a five-foot-high pile of trash where they had apparently lain for as long as four years.
"It's not a very friendly neighborhood," said Eileen Dugan, 70, once a close friend of Gaboury's, whose house sits less than 20 feet from the dead woman's home. "I'm as much to blame as anyone. She was alone and needed someone to talk to, but I was working two jobs and was sick of her coming over at all hours. Eventually I stopped answering the door".
Such an exception will grow increasingly frequent as our society slides steadily away from verbal intercourse and rapidly toward isolation, predicts Harvard professor and neurolinguist John Locke in The DeVoicing of Society: Why We Don't Talk to Each Other Any More. Tracing the steady back-slidding of our society from one of community interdependence to complete independence and eventual societal disregard for reality, he concludes with the following warning:
"Increasingly we go it alone, underexercising evolved faculties for social communication. Sending few messages about ourselves, we get back few reactions from others. We thus night-sail blindly into uncharted social waters, dissociated from the usual ways of knowing where we are going and what we might be becoming. Many of us are beginning to develop the symptoms of an undiagnosed social condition, a kind of functional 'de-voicing' brought on by an insufficient diet of intimate talking" (19).
As I was doing some geneology work of my family I discovered with amusement how many of my family members a hundred or so years ago married husbands and wives from just down the road or the next farm over generation after generation. The reason was obvious. For most of their lives they had lived with and around the same 1,000 or so people. They traded, played, worshipped and then married people they knew and trusted, or perhaps knew not to trust, just a buggy ride or stone's throw distant. They only people they talked to were each other in the community until -- until Bell introduced the telephone. Now Grandpa could talk to someone in the next county. Or even in another state! He was no longer exclusively dependent upon the community for conversation, goods and services.
Then came Ford's horseless buggy.
Then Orville and Wilbur's aeroplane.
Then movies.
Then talkies. Then radio.
Then television. Then computers.
Then fax machines. Then call waiting, call forwarding, caller I.D. Then the Web. Then e-mail and voice mail. Then the death of distance -- and small talk. The Harvard Business Review recently published the review of an essay entitled "The Human Moment at Work." In the last decade or so, technological changes -- mainly voice mail and e-mail -- have made a lot of face-to-face interaction unnecessary. The human moment--face-to-face live interaction--has also fallen victim to "virtual reality."
Edward Hallowell, a noted psychiatrist warns that we are in danger of losing what he calls the "human moment": an authentic psychological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space. And, he believes, we may be about to discover the destructive power of its absence.
Think about it.
Do you need the human moment in order to shop till you drop? No. We have the home shopping network. Need the human moment to conference with colleagues? No. We have video conferencing and three way calling. Need the human moment to send documents? No. We have email and faxing. Need the human moment to chat in a "room" full of others? No. We have internet chat rooms. Need the human moment to play games? No. We have game boys and computer solitare. Need the human moment to get cash, get paid, pay bills, or make deposits? No. We have automatic transfers and ATMs. Need the human moment to become and stay emotionally and spiritually whole? You bet! God knew this when he decided to visit the planet. In the past, he spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, "but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son" (Hebrews 1:1-2). The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. He was not content to give us the raw information. His plan, through the ages, was and is to dwell with his people. And for his people to dwell richly with each other.
This is echoed in our text from Matthew. It was only in that human moment when that desperate Canaanite woman knelt before Jesus and confessed her absolute faith in the power of Jesus that her daughter was healed. It was the human touch that made the difference.
Certainly the church is uniquely capable of true human community. But how often do we, united in the potential for this blessing, ever realize it? Are we not, like the culture at large, content with mere association when we should be taking the time to talk? Do we cross in the parking lot each Sunday with a quick nod and obligatory salute when we could be really listening -- even dwelling -- together in unity with our brothers and sisters next door?
Social gathering places should be put on the endangered species list. We all know that civic participation is down on all fronts. Grange halls are gone. Kiwanis and Lions and Rotary clubs struggle to exist. We're losing the reason and places to gather. One reason we host the various AA groups that meet here is there are almost no other places in our area for them to meet. Perhaps the church can still be a place for a culture adrift from community. Today those who visit us in search of community expect more from a church than even the best of sermons. They looking for places to connect with others.
They need a place to "hang out."
"To 'hang out' is a special thing. There is no specific way to define the experience, but everyone who has ever done it knows what it is all about. It means, first, that you have friends .... But aside from friends, there must also be a Place ... the Great, Good Place that every man carries in his heart, the place of safety, the place where the harshness of the real world is fended off" (Pete Hamill, A Hangout is a Place, 134).
Yet even this realization presents a unique challenge for churches. Because along with our innate craving for a place to "hang out" is our fear of not being accepted by other "hangers." We're naturally afraid to be a "hangee" so we shy away from the very places that can make us whole human beings.
What's the best way to initiate healthy hanging relationships?
Small talk in small groups.
As you know, small talk in small groups needs no specific topic. It exists not for the sake of saying something particular but for sharing ourselves with others. In that sense, it may be small, but it is not trivial. In fact, it is vitally important, not because of what it says, but because of what it does. It's part of the cement that bonds people to each other.
Small talk in small groups is the kind of thing that is often shuned by those seeking to get down to business. I think one of the biggest differences between a committee and a LIFE group is the focus. A committee is task-focused and so often dispenses with small talk, sharing talk, in order to get the job--whatever it is--done. LIFE groups on the other hand focus on building Christ-centered relationships. Casual and polite banter about weather, sports, family, current events and the Holy Spirit is often seen as a shallow obstacle to committee work. Many in and out of the church seem to advocate a kind of "get down to business" transparency that pooh-poohs the social mores of chatting. The faster, it is thought, that we dispense with formalities, even prayer, the faster true business can begin and get done.
But ironically, just the opposite seems to be true. We need small talk. Truly deep relationships need the kind of fertilization that time and small talk provide. It's through the daily convergence of lives that small morsels of trust are passed. Tony Hillerman is an anthropologist who's written dozens of best-selling mystery novels based on the intricacies of Navajo culture. One passage describes an interview of a wise Navajo elder about his knowledge of a certain crime. The Anglo policeman, ignorant of the unspoken Navajo conversational posturing, jumps right in with a stream of questions to the old man. The response is icy and uncooperative, and the officer leaves in frustration.
Later, a Navajo policeman visits for the same purpose. He says nothing about the crime, but sits silently in the presence of his elder. For two hours, the old man banters about the Navajo nation and their families, and his fear for the younger generation, about the spirit. And then there is a pause. The old man sits down. And the policeman says he needs to ask a few questions about a certain event. And the old man tells him everything he knows. Why?
There is a certain delicate elegance to the Navajo ways. When the visitor has shown proper respect ... when he has listened well and hard ... when the host then pauses ... a silent permission is then granted. You have respected me. Now I will respect you.
The Navajos are on to something. Small talk is a form of respect and a deposit of trust. Deep relationships cannot be rushed, but surface unexpectedly, the result of thousands of small trust deposits. Intimacy cannot be forced by ill-timed episodes of traumatic self-disclosure.
Only time and trust will build the kind of church people who can "hang out." Let's set aside some time and space for this.
We used to call them committees. Now we know they're really LIFE groups.
We used to call them "Fellowship Halls." Now we know they're really "Hang-Out Halls!"
AMEN