Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
All Saints Day
November 5, 2006
W. Gregory Pope
HOME
Acts 17:16-34
Isaiah 25:6-9
When a loved one dies, we sometimes speak of their having “gone home.” What do we mean by that?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the meaning of “home.”
As most of you know, my family and I have just moved into a house here in Crescent Hill. There are several lessons I have learned in the process.
One, I’m not going to move again for a long, long time. It’s way too stressful. It has almost been our undoing. Just so you know, when you fire me I’m not moving!
A second lesson I have learned is that in a well-read home library John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progess sits right next to Jimmy Buffett’s A Salty Piece of Land. I don’t have enough money to read Warren Buffett, so Jimmy and John spend their days and nights side by side. In fact, I think if Pilgrim had spent more time relaxing on a salty piece of land, he would have progressed toward home more quickly.
A third lesson I have learned is not to walk down hardwood steps in socks. You may very well receive bodily markings as reminders of your foolishness.
I have also learned that our family is much more materialistic than I would have thought. Many of the same boxes that were loaded into the basement of our new house have been unopened for years. Several very kind people from this congregation moved boxes and boxes of our stuff from one basement into a moving van and into another basement. They know how materialistic we are. This past Lent I preached a sermon on simplicity. I’m glad sermonic memory is short. Because no one threw it back in my face. But you could have. The amount of stuff we have is ridiculous.
Another more important lesson I’ve been learning is the meaning of home.
I spent the first eighteen years of my life calling one house my home. My parents still live in that house in Douglasville, Georgia. And I’m glad. Every time I go back to that house I can relive my childhood, looking across the street into the neighbor’s yard that was once our football field and baseball park.
Since graduating high school I have lived in seven dorm rooms, three rental houses, one parsonage, and I have just purchased my fifth house. In many ways I feel like a nomad.
We do live in a mobile society. Very few people live in the same place their whole lives. According to the latest US Census Bureau about 43 million Americans move in an average year. That’s 16 percent of the population. The typical American is now expected to move 14 times over the course of his or her life. (Craig Barnes, Searching For Home, Brazos Press, 2003, 15)
My own mobility has caused me to think a great deal about the meaning of home. And I don’t necessarily mean my childhood home, or about staying in one place for a long period of time. I’m thinking about being at home within myself and the role people, places, and God play in the longing for home deep within us all.
In the opening lines of the movie Patch Adams the narrator says, “All the restless hearts of the world are trying to find their way home.”
What is the home we are trying to find?
In his book, Searching For Home, Craig Barnes says, “The real home for which we yearn isn’t the place where we grew up or the new place we’re hoping to find, but the place we were created to live.” (Barnes, 13)
Home, he says, isn’t so much a geographical place as it is a place in the heart of God where we were created to dwell. And when you find that home, all the other places of life start to make sense. (Barnes, 23)
When Paul was in Athens, our text for today tells us, he discovered a city full of idols. Our world is full of idols. In our recent move, we unloaded boxes and boxes of idols. I wonder if the idols in our lives and in our world and in our congregations are so prevalent because we have forgotten what those in Athens were learning. Could it be that we are wandering, looking for the next new thing - the next job, the next relationship, the next church, the next computer, the next blackberry, the next vacation, the next house - could it be that we are wandering and searching because we have forgotten that it is in God we live and move and have our being?
Have we forgotten that God is our home? The various cities and places where we live or have lived, those places are not our true home. God is our true home. God is the One in whom we live and breathe and have our being. God is the One to whom we belong. The One who alone calls us by name. God is our home.
No other relationship, no other place, nothing, can be your true home like the heart of God from which you came and where you were created to dwell. And Jesus is the way home.
It is right to use the language of “going home” when a loved one dies.
One of the last things Jesus said to his disciples had to do with the home he was going to prepare for them in heaven. They didn’t think they knew the way. But Jesus told them that they did. That he was the way home.
Sometimes we dismiss heaven as an escapist view of reality. And there are those who use it as such. But, as Craig Barnes reminds us, the Bible doesn’t talk about heaven for the purpose of escaping this earth and our responsibilities within it. Rather, everything the Bible says about the next life is for the purpose of inspiring us to live out of an eternal vision for the life that we have today (Barnes, 56).
The reality of heaven, the place of God’s unhindered presence, is crucial to those of us who are lost and weary, wandering like nomads.
Before heaven is a place, it is first of all a relationship with God, the God in whom we live and move and have our being. And that relationship informs and gives shape to the living of our lives.
As Jesus lived in this world, he maintained communion with God. He knew that he lived and moved and had his being in God, and so was never lost. He sent the Holy Spirit, who through baptism adopts us into the same communion he shared with God. And in that Family of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we are transformed from wandering nomads into hopeful pilgrims who know the home for which we yearn. It is where we belong, and we will never be content with any place other than that communion. (Barnes, 52-53)
We sometimes speak of church as home. But church at its best can only be a taste of home. The church’s task is lead the world into communion with God and serve as the closest earthly approximation we can have to our home with God. If we expect the church to be home we may set ourselves up for disappointment.
Because church families are in many ways like other families. There are those who you would just as soon not have in either family, but you’re stuck with them, and you have to learn to love them. We are bound to each other in the covenant of Christ’s grace embodied as we gather around this table.
The community of faith we are called to enjoy is more than a collection of cherished relationships. It is a community rooted in communion with God, centered in the worship of God.
Sacred spaces and experiences of worship can nourish our longing for home, for communion with God. In fact, worship is the time we clarify exactly what home it is we are yearning to find. In worship we confess how much we long for home and how lost we have become in our search for it. (Barnes, 27)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer affirms the gift of the Christian family of faith when he writes, “It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brothers and sisters.”
The church is a gift to us. A very human and flawed gift, but a gift that has been known to save our lives. The faithful church, where love is the foundation of all relationships, nurtures us in the saving way of Jesus Christ. It directs us toward our true home.
Anne Lamott is a writer who lives in California. Her pastor, Veronica, told a story about a friend of hers who got lost one day when she was seven years old. Her little friend ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She became very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they drove around until, to her great relief, she saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and when arriving in front of it, she said, “You can let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.”
And that is why, says Lamott, I have stayed so close to my church - because no matter how bad I’m feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened I am, when I see the faces of the people at my church, and hear their voices, I can always find my way home. (Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, Pantheon, 1999, 55)
Look around you. See your brothers and sisters. Your mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. Did you hear those names called earlier, those brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, who have made the final journey home? In the mystery of resurrection and in the mystery of what we call “the communion of saints,” they are still among us, cheering us on as we lead others toward their home in God, and seek to find home ourselves. And they’ll be waiting for us when we arrive home.
This is a place where you can be at home, and from here find home.
And in this place, point others toward home.
Because “all the restless hearts of the world are trying to find their way home.” And, adds Augustine, we will not rest until we rest in God.
Let us pray. God, we hear you calling us toward home. It is easy to get lost in this world. Guide us as we journey. And “plunge us on with hope and courage ‘til Thy harbor is our home.” Amen.
This table is God’s family kitchen. All are invited to eat in God’s house. If you take the bread and cup, I think you’ll find it tastes like home. The table is set. The bread of life. The cup of salvation. Come and dine. And as you do, remember our brother Jesus who is the way home.
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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
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