Pasadena
Presbyterian Church "The Longing for Home" Scripture readings: How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts! 2 My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God. 3 Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O LORD of hosts, my King and my God. 4 Happy are those who live in your house, ever singing your praise. - Psalm 84:1-4 Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God's sight, and 5 like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For it stands in scripture: "See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame." 7 To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner," 8 and "A stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall." They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. 9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. -
I
Peter 2:4-10 Welcome home to PPC.
When I think of homecoming and home, I immediately imagine the home I
grew up in and the longing I often have to return to that place of my
childhood with its particular geography and people. Home was good. I
had two parents, two brothers, dogs and cats, and a horse. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either.
We ate every meal together. We
worked hard and played hard. Sure
we had our problems but I nearly always felt safe and loved. On top of that,
my maternal grandmother lived only a mile and a half away and her home was a
second home to me. It was a short bicycle ride to her house where I would watch
cartoons, eat homemade berry pie, and beg Grandma Stafford to tell a story
about pioneer days, like when she spent her honeymoon above a saloon to the
horror of her Victorian mother. Home was family.
We belonged together. We
spoke the same language and shared common values: the importance of hard
work, compassion for the unfortunate, and love for the inquiring mind,
especially with regard to faith and politics.
During the holidays, my family, my uncles and aunts and their
children got together at Grandma’s house for big feasts, football on T.V.,
and yard games with my cousins like bottle cap baseball and hide and go
seek. I knew where home was.
Home was among my particular people, in a particular geography, at a
particular address. Home was that place where I belonged and I wanted to be. Since becoming an adult, I
have lived in many different places among many different peoples and
geographies. I’ve lived in many different houses and called many of them
home: Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oxford, England; Dayton, Ohio; Troy, New
York; Pasadena, California, to name some of them.
If home is that place where one belongs, where one’s heart is and
where one wants to be, then I have been fortunate to find a home in many
places and amid many different peoples.
Home for me is now wherever Barbara and I are, but it’s more than
that. One of the advantages of being a pastor is that one spends nearly
every waking hour in the community of faith, the church, dedicated to
creating an alternative home of love and acceptance, where no one is a
stranger, where all are brothers and sisters, where each discovers belonging
and a sense that this is precisely where we want to be.
Of course, we do that imperfectly; the church is human, but we always
aspire to creating such a home. Nevertheless,
I sometimes feel an awkward combination of nostalgia and loneliness that
people who are without a home feel: people who are strangers, aliens,
foreigners, the homeless and immigrants.
This feeling of never quite being at home is universal for anyone who
ever has taken up the search for a spiritual pathway.
The spiritual quest is a journey, a journey of the soul, that begins
with a sense of dissatisfaction with the way things are, a sense of going
out, of leaving behind, a sense that the home of one’s dreams is not in
the past, but lies ahead. If
home is that place where one fully belongs and is fully loved, then I think
all of us in some way are never fully at home until we rest, in the fullness
of time, in the nearer presence of God. This sense of
homesickness, of disjunction between what one longs for and what is, is what
the biblical writers called “exile.”
“Exile” refers first and foremost in the biblical record as the
experience of the nation of Israel being conquered and deported to Babylon
in the Sixth Century before Christ, where the Hebrews were geographically
displaced, where they lost their home. But exile also refers to the experience of the heart.
Exile also means the loss of a structured, reliable world that gives
meaning and coherence, where the most treasured and sacred symbols and
beliefs of our faith are marginalized or trivialized.
The experience of exile is that place of disconnect between one’s
deepest values and the reality of daily life. The
ancient concept of exile seems to apply to our context today because if you
are a seriously reflective Christian who tries to follow Jesus and his
teachings, then more often than not you find yourself at odds with much of
the dominant values of our world: a rampant consumer capitalism that
pretends happiness can be bought, a militant patriotism that demands group
think, and a Christianity that has been watered down to “Jesus and me,
Jesus and me, Jesus will fix everything for me,” which sounds more like
narcissism than the faith that demands sacrifice, “my life, my soul, my
all.” A couple
of weeks ago I was at LAX waiting to pick up our son Ken who has spent a
good portion of the summer in Boston. His
flight was significantly delayed so I had the opportunity to watch a lot of
people going through all the security precautions of our post 9/11 world. Since I
hadn’t brought along a book, in my imagination I pictured Jesus trying to
make it through airport security. Imagine,
the stranger ahead of you has olive to brown-toned skin, a scruffy beard,
thick black hair, a prominent nose, an obviously suspect immigrant from the
Middle East that most of us would hope the screeners would detain.
He spouts radical ideas, blasts our culture, politics and our
religious practices. He’s not
a citizen of this country or any country but is constantly trying to recruit
people to become citizens of his so-called kingdom. His work ethic is
questionable. His loyalties are
to no nation, people or clan, but says our love must be as expansive as
God’s, which is for everyone. He’s
a monarchist vowing loyalty to only one all-powerful ruler, making his
appreciation of democracy somewhat suspect.
He tried to vandalize the market in the central business district.
He was sentenced to death for threatening the balance of power and
the peace of the people. He
wants to redistribute wealth and have us mingle with street people.
He doesn’t own property but shows up at fancy cocktail parties
un-invited and then invites in all the riffraff he’s collected, the lost,
the lonely, the despised and he calls them blessed. He wouldn’t make it through security, but would be arrested
on the spot. Yet
drawn to him we are. If we are
going to try to follow this guy, we’re going feel exiled, hardly at home
in the world as it is presently constructed.
We’re going to feel like we live here, but we don’t entirely
belong. If home is where our
heart is and if our heart is with him, then we’re going to be what Stanley
Hauerwas and William Willimon call “resident aliens,” engaged in this
world, but not of it. We’ll
be homesick, longing for a better place where you turn the other cheek
instead of preparing for war, a better place where you pray for your
enemies, forgive seventy times seven, give to unworthy beggars, and give all
away and follow him. And
follow him we do, because somehow deep in that place inside where there is a
holy longing for home, home in God, we know that his way is the only way
that really makes any difference. We welcome him into our lives and yes, we
discover the gentle Jesus who carries lambs and children and us in his arms.
He speaks comfort to the downtrodden, soothes the suffering,
heals the injured, and wipes away all our tears.
He’s also a holy terror who calls self-righteous believers broods
of snakes. He turns the tables
in our own temples and wounds our conscience until we get it right.
He tells us to put no mind to food and clothing and shelter that
we’ll need for tomorrow, but to trust him, that he will supply all our
need. I think
homecoming for us in the church is finding our home in him, in the strange
and radical Jesus of the Gospels, and in finding others along the way who
are also searching for something better, and in our shared company of the
vulnerable, the fallible, the loving, we discover that place of ultimate
belonging and love and yet dissatisfaction with the present arrangements. Welcome back to PPC. It’s good to be back home and still to long for that home of God’s making. In the meantime, we have a party to go to. Welcome home. Amen. (c)
Copyright 2007 by Mark Smutny. All
rights reserved. Permission
granted for non-profit use with attribution. |
