Coming Home
January 04, 2009
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Jeremiah 31:7-14; John 1:1-18
The holiday season is winding down…after worship today, we will “undecorate” the sanctuary. And those who have traveled for the holidays will return, if they haven’t already. People who have come home will go back, people who have left home to visit will return. And for many people, figuring out which of these groups they are is not easy.
When I was in college, I looked forward to coming home at Christmas. And my mother tells the story of my walking into the house and seeing first, the dining room table set for three (with a place setting at the head of the table and one on either side) instead of set for four (two on each side) as it always had been when I was home. Secondly I saw, upon entering the kitchen, a jar of Skippy peanut butter on the counter, although we had always been a Peter Pan peanut butter family. And Mom reports that I turned to her and said, “You’ve changed everything!”
I don’t remember that sequence – what I remember is that at that Christmas break, I was very surprised and disconcerted to find that I no longer felt “at home” in my parents’ home, and it created a fair amount of anxiety in me to realize that home was no longer home to me. It was years before I felt at home in their home again – and I now realize that what happened was simply that I finally became comfortable as a visitor in their home.
My sons will go home this afternoon – they feel more at home at college than they do with us, as I did at the same age. I understand.
It is hard when life changes, and you no longer feel at home in your life. This is part of what makes Christmas difficult for some people – many folks establish traditions around the holidays, and then if something disrupts the tradition (like a new home, or a death, or a new person in the family, or poor health), then everything feels strange and difficult. I remember getting an email once from a friend several months after her leukemia diagnosis, and she was wishing that everything would get back to normal soon. It was not going to happen – there was a new normal in her life. Nothing would ever be the same as it had been before. There are some events that happen in our lives that are watershed moments – forever afterwards, time is measured in “before” and “after” that event. Nationally, some of those events have been the Depression, the attack at Pearl Harbor, the particular war that so many refer to simply as “the War”, the assassination of Kennedy, 9/11 – after each of these our national consciousness was different in a way that changed the way we felt about ourselves, and our life together.
In our personal lives, we also have these watershed moments that change everything forever, and you’ll hear people say, “Before the accident….” “Since my diagnosis….” “After the divorce,” “Once the baby came…” and everything was different…forever.
The Bible has such moments, too – the Flood, the Exodus, the birth – or death – of Jesus…and one of these events was the Exile. It was in the sixth century BCE, when a significant portion of the population was deported to Babylon. We don’t know exactly how many were in exile – Biblical figures range from 4,600 to over 10,000 – and we don’t know how long they were in exile – most estimates range from 40-70 years. Much of the Old Testament was written in response to the Exile, including large portions describing life before the Exile. Much as the Revolutionary War and the Civil War are defining events in our national history, the Exodus and the Exile are defining events in the faith history of Jews and Christians.
The Jeremiah passage was apparently written during the exile, and it tells the promise of an anticipated homecoming – it is describing a hoped-for event. It is a joyful description of the fulfillment of the longing for Israel, the longing felt by those in exile. Most of us are familiar with that longing – we’ve felt it ourselves. And like the people of Israel, we may have mistaken it for homesickness, or missing someone. Or perhaps we’ve experienced it as restlessness instead. It’s part of being human – a sense of desire for more or for meaning; a longing for what Merton described as the “hidden wholeness”. It’s the same impulse that led Peggy Lee to ask the musical question, “Is that all there is?” It’s what Augustine was describing when he wrote “Our hearts are restless ‘til they rest in thee.” And it’s what author Leighton Ford describes as “holy longing.” He writes, in his book The Attentive Life, “It is a holy longing because the desire that fuels our restlessness is at its core a longing for the God who made us for himself.”
It is the longing that led Moses to stay to discover the meaning of the burning bush. It is the desire that led the magi to follow the star from a distant land to occupied Judea, where they would come and kneel at the manger. It is the restlessness that we often mistake for the need to stay busy, or seek amusement, when it is a restlessness that is often better fed by stillness. I don’t mean to suggest that we are all walking around always feeling empty– but most of us notice a sense of desire, or restlessness from time to time, or a crisis hits and we realize that we have only been living on the surface of our lives. Unfortunately, some of us feel this desire as a sense that we’re not doing it right, this faith thing, because we think that if we were, we’d feel peaceful or more complete or more in touch with God somehow.
It is the searching that can lead us outside of our little lives, and back to our center, for we are looking to discover (again quoting Leighton Ford): “What is deepest in me? That is the crucial question. Not what is longest – how many years I will have? But what is deepest – what am I made for? And always what is deepest…is longing: to long, for a long time, from a long way off, to belong, to come to my heart’s eternal home.”
This longing is part of our humanity – shared by the Muslim who goes on the hajj, the holy pilgrimage, and by the Native American who goes on a vision quest. It is the restlessness that leads a Buddhist to meditation, and the Hindu to her home altar. Many of the Psalms are speaking out of this longing – we like to remember Psalm 23 (the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want), but there are many psalms that call out with a desire for God, a sense of reaching for God and missing, like Psalm 42: As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, "Where is your God?" These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God…. It is the desire to connect with others and with something larger than ourselves – a desire that in our culture we often try to fill with our favorite sports team, or in buying something new. And as I said last week, it is a longing that is an echo of God’s longing for us. Even our seeking God is a response to God seeking us first…as today’s Gospel reminds us: The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth… God continues to reach out to us – through nature, through other people, through the Bible, and especially through our own desire for that connection. And if you’re one of those people who feels like you’re not doing it right, like you’re someone with two left feet at the dance of faith, it may be that you are a little more in tune with that echo of God within you – not less in tune. You’re sensing that longing, that desire, the Holy Spirit within you reaching back toward God…
And in our own time, we have most often missed that connection by our trying to fill up all our empty places with activity, and amusement, and stuff, or with certainty. But in fact we often find that it is in waiting and trusting that we are filled, and in caring for others that we find our own needs met. Oddly enough, when we make our own satisfaction our goal, we are most likely to be dissatisfied – but God has made us, as a friend of mine once said, so that in feeding others we are fed. And as we trust God, it’s not that we know more, but that we grow to be OK with not-knowing.
Today we ordain and install 10 women and men to ministries of leadership and compassion in our church. These folks are not any less busy than anyone else – many of them are people whom I know to be very busy. But they are choosing to root themselves in something larger, to invest themselves in God’s ministry, and to reach beyond themselves to be their best selves. Our elders and deacons are spiritual leaders, and for most of them, that is not how they see themselves. But what it means is not that they are more spiritually certain than others, or that they’ve resolved all of their doubts, but that they are willing to open their hearts and minds and souls to God, and to each other in being a spiritual community of leadership (as elders), and a spiritual community of caring (as deacons). May they grow to be able to be at home in not-knowing instead of certainty, in seeking the way rather than having the answer, and in being loving more than being right.
We are created to be at home in God, and in communities of meaning. Being in community means that we won’t always get our own way; being in God means that we know we will not find our sufficiency in ourselves. For most of us, our earliest life experiences were families, in whom we had a sense of belonging and identity, of being at home. As we grow to adulthood, most of us find ourselves wanting that security, and longing for that sense of home. We learn that it is a combination of our individual sense of meaning and identity and the larger identities we have – in families, communities, friendships, in the earth and in God. As we root ourselves more in God, and the people of God in all faiths, we can find ourselves grounded and connected, at home in the questions and each other, so that we are at home wherever we are. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Jeremiah 31:7-14; John 1:1-18
The holiday season is winding down…after worship today, we will “undecorate” the sanctuary. And those who have traveled for the holidays will return, if they haven’t already. People who have come home will go back, people who have left home to visit will return. And for many people, figuring out which of these groups they are is not easy.
When I was in college, I looked forward to coming home at Christmas. And my mother tells the story of my walking into the house and seeing first, the dining room table set for three (with a place setting at the head of the table and one on either side) instead of set for four (two on each side) as it always had been when I was home. Secondly I saw, upon entering the kitchen, a jar of Skippy peanut butter on the counter, although we had always been a Peter Pan peanut butter family. And Mom reports that I turned to her and said, “You’ve changed everything!”
I don’t remember that sequence – what I remember is that at that Christmas break, I was very surprised and disconcerted to find that I no longer felt “at home” in my parents’ home, and it created a fair amount of anxiety in me to realize that home was no longer home to me. It was years before I felt at home in their home again – and I now realize that what happened was simply that I finally became comfortable as a visitor in their home.
My sons will go home this afternoon – they feel more at home at college than they do with us, as I did at the same age. I understand.
It is hard when life changes, and you no longer feel at home in your life. This is part of what makes Christmas difficult for some people – many folks establish traditions around the holidays, and then if something disrupts the tradition (like a new home, or a death, or a new person in the family, or poor health), then everything feels strange and difficult. I remember getting an email once from a friend several months after her leukemia diagnosis, and she was wishing that everything would get back to normal soon. It was not going to happen – there was a new normal in her life. Nothing would ever be the same as it had been before. There are some events that happen in our lives that are watershed moments – forever afterwards, time is measured in “before” and “after” that event. Nationally, some of those events have been the Depression, the attack at Pearl Harbor, the particular war that so many refer to simply as “the War”, the assassination of Kennedy, 9/11 – after each of these our national consciousness was different in a way that changed the way we felt about ourselves, and our life together.
In our personal lives, we also have these watershed moments that change everything forever, and you’ll hear people say, “Before the accident….” “Since my diagnosis….” “After the divorce,” “Once the baby came…” and everything was different…forever.
The Bible has such moments, too – the Flood, the Exodus, the birth – or death – of Jesus…and one of these events was the Exile. It was in the sixth century BCE, when a significant portion of the population was deported to Babylon. We don’t know exactly how many were in exile – Biblical figures range from 4,600 to over 10,000 – and we don’t know how long they were in exile – most estimates range from 40-70 years. Much of the Old Testament was written in response to the Exile, including large portions describing life before the Exile. Much as the Revolutionary War and the Civil War are defining events in our national history, the Exodus and the Exile are defining events in the faith history of Jews and Christians.
The Jeremiah passage was apparently written during the exile, and it tells the promise of an anticipated homecoming – it is describing a hoped-for event. It is a joyful description of the fulfillment of the longing for Israel, the longing felt by those in exile. Most of us are familiar with that longing – we’ve felt it ourselves. And like the people of Israel, we may have mistaken it for homesickness, or missing someone. Or perhaps we’ve experienced it as restlessness instead. It’s part of being human – a sense of desire for more or for meaning; a longing for what Merton described as the “hidden wholeness”. It’s the same impulse that led Peggy Lee to ask the musical question, “Is that all there is?” It’s what Augustine was describing when he wrote “Our hearts are restless ‘til they rest in thee.” And it’s what author Leighton Ford describes as “holy longing.” He writes, in his book The Attentive Life, “It is a holy longing because the desire that fuels our restlessness is at its core a longing for the God who made us for himself.”
It is the longing that led Moses to stay to discover the meaning of the burning bush. It is the desire that led the magi to follow the star from a distant land to occupied Judea, where they would come and kneel at the manger. It is the restlessness that we often mistake for the need to stay busy, or seek amusement, when it is a restlessness that is often better fed by stillness. I don’t mean to suggest that we are all walking around always feeling empty– but most of us notice a sense of desire, or restlessness from time to time, or a crisis hits and we realize that we have only been living on the surface of our lives. Unfortunately, some of us feel this desire as a sense that we’re not doing it right, this faith thing, because we think that if we were, we’d feel peaceful or more complete or more in touch with God somehow.
It is the searching that can lead us outside of our little lives, and back to our center, for we are looking to discover (again quoting Leighton Ford): “What is deepest in me? That is the crucial question. Not what is longest – how many years I will have? But what is deepest – what am I made for? And always what is deepest…is longing: to long, for a long time, from a long way off, to belong, to come to my heart’s eternal home.”
This longing is part of our humanity – shared by the Muslim who goes on the hajj, the holy pilgrimage, and by the Native American who goes on a vision quest. It is the restlessness that leads a Buddhist to meditation, and the Hindu to her home altar. Many of the Psalms are speaking out of this longing – we like to remember Psalm 23 (the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want), but there are many psalms that call out with a desire for God, a sense of reaching for God and missing, like Psalm 42: As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, "Where is your God?" These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God…. It is the desire to connect with others and with something larger than ourselves – a desire that in our culture we often try to fill with our favorite sports team, or in buying something new. And as I said last week, it is a longing that is an echo of God’s longing for us. Even our seeking God is a response to God seeking us first…as today’s Gospel reminds us: The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth… God continues to reach out to us – through nature, through other people, through the Bible, and especially through our own desire for that connection. And if you’re one of those people who feels like you’re not doing it right, like you’re someone with two left feet at the dance of faith, it may be that you are a little more in tune with that echo of God within you – not less in tune. You’re sensing that longing, that desire, the Holy Spirit within you reaching back toward God…
And in our own time, we have most often missed that connection by our trying to fill up all our empty places with activity, and amusement, and stuff, or with certainty. But in fact we often find that it is in waiting and trusting that we are filled, and in caring for others that we find our own needs met. Oddly enough, when we make our own satisfaction our goal, we are most likely to be dissatisfied – but God has made us, as a friend of mine once said, so that in feeding others we are fed. And as we trust God, it’s not that we know more, but that we grow to be OK with not-knowing.
Today we ordain and install 10 women and men to ministries of leadership and compassion in our church. These folks are not any less busy than anyone else – many of them are people whom I know to be very busy. But they are choosing to root themselves in something larger, to invest themselves in God’s ministry, and to reach beyond themselves to be their best selves. Our elders and deacons are spiritual leaders, and for most of them, that is not how they see themselves. But what it means is not that they are more spiritually certain than others, or that they’ve resolved all of their doubts, but that they are willing to open their hearts and minds and souls to God, and to each other in being a spiritual community of leadership (as elders), and a spiritual community of caring (as deacons). May they grow to be able to be at home in not-knowing instead of certainty, in seeking the way rather than having the answer, and in being loving more than being right.
We are created to be at home in God, and in communities of meaning. Being in community means that we won’t always get our own way; being in God means that we know we will not find our sufficiency in ourselves. For most of us, our earliest life experiences were families, in whom we had a sense of belonging and identity, of being at home. As we grow to adulthood, most of us find ourselves wanting that security, and longing for that sense of home. We learn that it is a combination of our individual sense of meaning and identity and the larger identities we have – in families, communities, friendships, in the earth and in God. As we root ourselves more in God, and the people of God in all faiths, we can find ourselves grounded and connected, at home in the questions and each other, so that we are at home wherever we are. Amen.