“The
Purple Bubblegum House
John
2:13-22
Allen
Huff
Jonesborough
Presbyterian Church
5/14/17
With your indulgence, I’d like to take you on a trip to LA
this morning. And by LA I mean Lower Alabama, which is, for better and worse, everything
Los Angeles is not.
Every
three years, since the late 1940’s, on the weekend nearest July 4th,
the Salter/Lawson clan has held a reunion. My mother’s mother was a Salter, and
this is her extended family – so extended, in fact, that like Jeff Foxworthy’s
old redneck joke, it would actually be a fine place to look for a date.
The reunion takes place in a community called Josie, Alabama.
If you need help placing it, Josie is on US Highway 29 just south of Perote, not
far from Blues Old Stand and Smut Eye. There’s a crossroads at Josie. Well, crossroads is a little generous, but a
county road does turn east off the highway right there.
Josie
got its name from my great-grandmother, Josie Lawson. Back in the early 1880’s,
folks in that community decided to give their little corner of the world a
name. They took suggestions and put them in a hat. Josie had just been born, so her parents threw
in their new daughter’s name. And by the luck of the draw, literally, the
people named their community Josie.
About
a tenth of a mile north of the crossroads, on the east side of the highway, and
maybe 20 feet off the blacktop, stands the now-uninhabitable shell of the old
Salter house. During reunions, the Salter clan used to gather in that house.
Now we just gather around it in the shade of the oak trees, while the Lawsons
gather across the road under a tall pole barn where everyone comes together to
eat.
My
grandmother, one of twelve children, was born in the Salter house 115 years
ago. Beneath the ugly, scalloped siding lies the original heart-pine clapboard,
but no one under 80 has ever seen it.
When built, the house had three large bedrooms coming off of
the wide hallway down the middle. During the reunion, sacred artifacts were
brought out and laid with care on the beds. They included clothing and jewelry
worn by the Salters. There were yellowed letters and faded pictures. There was
even a gnarled, wooden cane which, family legend holds, was used by a
great-great-grandfather when he walked back to Pike County, AL after being
wounded in the Battle of Atlanta.
Just off the left side of the front porch, next to the door was
an addition. Built around 1910, it was, and is, still called the “new room.” Three
or four reunions ago, Marianne and I stayed in the new room, and I almost fell
through a rotting floorboard and into the heaven-knows-what of a crawl space below.
On
the back of the house was the spacious kitchen. Being places of gathering and
nurturing, kitchens used to share holy-of-holies
status with the front porch. During reunions, the kitchen and the front porch were
still the most-used areas of the house.
If you took the path down the hill behind the house, and
followed the rich aroma of moisture and earthy rot, in about 50 yards you’d
find the natural spring from which the Salter’s drew their drinking, cooking,
and bathing water before deep wells and plumbing came along. The last time I
was there, the spring was still running.
At one reunion back in the late 1960’s, my sister, Laura,
and I found a glass jar on a kitchen counter. In the jar were little purple balls
of bubblegum, individually wrapped in crinkly cellophane. For some reason,
happening upon that purple bubblegum became a defining event.
That house has stood in that place for over 100 years.
Ernest Salter, my great-grandfather, was a country doctor. He lived in and
worked out of that house, caring for people in the surrounding counties. Not
long after the birth of Edwin, child #12, Josie died of cancer in that house. On
numerous occasions after Ernest’s death, members of the family stayed there
while in some sort of transition, especially after World War II. The Salter house
has been a home, a way station, a refuge, and a place to gather and remember. But
time has a way of creating distance, even if you’re not all that far away.
When
my mother was a child in Montgomery, about an hour up the road, her mother called
every trip to Josie “going down home.” Descendants who had moved to southwest
Georgia called it the “Alabama Home.” Illinois and Michigan relatives called it
the “Josie Home.” When I was young, a trip to Josie was called “going to the
country.” Since the discovery my sister and I made nearly 50 years ago, our
family has called it “The Purple Bubblegum House.” Do you feel the progression
of distance?
While
I always loved going to the Salter house, and in spite of having deep and
identifying roots there, it was never my home. When I arrived, I expected
someone to have gotten it ready. When I left, I straightened up anything I put
out of place, but I left the real cleanup and maintenance to others. During reunions,
I sat in the shade of oak trees and nostalgia, but not in the light of immediate
belonging to and personal responsibility for that place.
The temple is Israel’s old home place. Through the temple, Yahweh
lived with the people and the people lived with Yahweh. By Jesus’ day, distance
has taken a toll. And while it wasn’t any one person’s fault, that which had
been built as a place for worship has
become an object of worship. Its rich,
spiritual traditions have dimmed into mere religion. Israel’s old home place is
disappearing beneath the kudzu of self-serving piety. Its priests and prophets
and have become administrators of a large, wealthy, and powerful business. Like the Purple Bubblegum House, it’s a well-visited, but rather
un-lived-in relic.
When Jesus enters the temple, the Jews are preparing for a
reunion of sorts. They’re preparing for Passover, the ritualized remembrance of
the formative experience of Exodus. And Jesus doesn’t just enter the temple; he makes an
entrance. Grabbing a handful of ropes and slinging them around like a whip,
he drives moneychangers and livestock salesmen out of the temple the way he
drives demons out of people.
Over the centuries, the intensity of Jesus’ reaction has
caused lots of embarrassment and equivocation. It’s also been used to justify
all manner of un-Christlike violence.
Well,
I started wondering: Could Jesus’ disruptive zeal be an intentional reenactment
of Passover? Could he be re-membering more than just the preparations to leave
Egypt? Could he be trying to remind the Jewish people that just as they fled
the enslaving whip of Pharaoh, now they must flee the enslaving whip of a
religion that has become an institution that exists for its own sake? Is this
the beginning of a new Passover and a new Exodus? A new journey of discovery
with Jesus, the new Moses, saying, Let my
people go! Let this deathliness die and new life arise!
Facing changes and challenges of our own, we can understand
why the temple leaders opposed Jesus with such panicked fury. He is threatening
everything that has become sacred, dependable, and comfortable to them. So,
said Fred Craddock, “in the throes of death, and in a move toward self-preservation,
the temple keepers…destroy the One in whom God and humankind meet.”1
For eons, human beings have been manipulating, intimidating,
and even killing in order to control and maintain beloved institutions. The
Church participates in that carnage, and sometimes, that so discourages me that
I want to hang this robe on a hook and walk away for good.
But
where would I go? Josie, Alabama? I don’t live there. I don’t live in Shelby,
or Mebane, or Statesboro, or Augusta, either. For now, I live in Jonesborough –
with you.
As the Church and a church, we are Christ’s body, a place
of transforming worship, fellowship, and witness. When we forget that, we live
as an aging and irrelevant institution in love with itself rather than with
God. But when we clear this place of its forgetfulness, of its rigor mortis,
when we really come alive here
through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, this is a well-lived-in house – a
mansion with many rooms, and porches, and shade trees, and well-springs, and
memories, and a big kitchen where we all eat together.
Every Sunday can be a family reunion, and the more new and
unfamiliar faces there are, the more like God’s family we look.
Whether
you have come here all your life, or whether you are here for the first time
today, Welcome Home!
1Fred B. Craddock, Preaching Through the Christian
Year, Craddock, et al. 1993, Trinity Press International. Pg. 155.
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