September 16, 2007

16^th after Pentecost Year C

The Homecoming

Luke 15 

   Not long ago as I was crossing the bridge I saw a sailboat being pulled by a pickup truck. Upside down on the bed of the pickup bed was a small dingy. Being a sailor without a boat of my own, I stared longingly at the craft as it sped by. But what really caught our attention were the names on the boats. The sailboat was named "Daydream Believer" and the little dinghy was called "Homecoming Queen".

   Do those names ring a bell? Need a little hint? They both come from one of the biggest musical hits of the 1960's by The Monkeys: 

Cheer up, sleepy jean. 
Oh, what can it mean. 
To a daydream believer 
And a homecoming queen. 

    This whole incident, especially the Homecoming Queen part came to mind as I have been reading and thinking about the two biblical stories we just read, one from Joshua, and one from Luke, both of which are homecoming stories. In fact, God is the ultimate Homecoming Queen. In the Bible, God is continually in the process of bringing us home and we are continually in the process of seeking and going home.

     The reading form Joshua tells us that the people of Israel are finally "at home" in the Promised Land. For the first time in over forty years, they are able to eat produce from land they can call their own. For the first time in forty years, the Israelites don't have to think about where they will be tomorrow, or next week. They no longer have to eat manna. They no longer have to wander. They are home.

    In Luke's gospel, Jesus tells us a story about a homecoming. It is a universal story of a young person's quest for freedom and the youthful need to explore. It's the story of a parent's heartache, of holding on and letting go. It is a story of sibling rivalry and jealousies. In the end, it is a story of acceptance, love, and grace in a place called home.

     Most of us don't have trouble finding our place in this story. The richness of this story is that we can find ourselves in too many places in the story. We are at once searching for freedom, needing security, squandering our inheritance, asking forgiveness, extending hospitality, harboring jealousies, insisting that life be fair, holding back joy, celebrating grace. We are the Father, the prodigal and the elder son. At some point in our lives, each of us can identify with a different piece of this story. This story resonates because it is about home. Every one of us comes from a home of some sort. We know what it is like to leave home, to have our children leave, to have them return. We know the aching loneliness of the prodigal, the longing and worry of the Father, and the resentment of the brother who never left home.

    Home is different things to different people. To some it is a place; a house, a piece of land, a city or neighborhood. Home is tangible and real. Since coming to the Island I have been amazed at how many families still have a connection to the old homestead. Charlottetown even has an Old Home Week. Even when I go back to Halifax, I often will drive by the house where I grew up. Home is place where the family gathers for special days, a familiar place, a place of celebration, a place of retreat. Home is the place where we know how the air smells, how each chair feels, which pictures are on which walls. We know each tree and shrub. We know the way sunlight falls across a room. We know how is feels wrapped in darkness. Home has a physical feel to it; it has a specific geography. Its sounds, smells, tastes and sights are indelibly etched in our senses. To some home is a place.

    To others home is a feeling, a sense of belonging. Place doesn't matter so much. Wherever we may be, if we are among others who accept us for who we, then we are home. Home is a feeling that can come when we are alone, or part of a crowd. It is sense of knowing I am supposed to be right here, right now. The contemplative monk Thomas Merton narrates the following passage from his diary Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the midst of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed  with the realization that I loved all these people, that they are mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers…” Home is a familiar smile on a stranger's face. Home is a gesture, a comment, an insight that reminds us we are not alone. Home is knowing we belong.

     Home can also be a sanctuary, a place of safety. Home is where we go in body or

mind when we have no other place to go. Home is not just a shelter from the weather or other hostile forces. It is a place, or thought, or memory which surrounds us with protective comfort. When money is gone, nerves are raw, hope is thin, and the world closes in around us we just want to be safe, protected, and secure. We want to be home.

    Whether our childhood experience of home was positive or negative, the home we seek today is based on the experience of home then. We are on a journey from home to home. As we seek to translate our childhood experiences of home into the reality of our adult lives-whether we are young adults, middle aged or seniors-we come to appreciate that home is not only the place we start from, but the place we come back to. It is the place where our dreams are sustained, where our hurts are healed, where our stories can be told. The new home we seek to create is based on our childhood experience of home. For some it must be radically different, for others, it must be like it, only better.

     Home is many things to many people. A place, a thought, a feeling, or all of these rolled up together in a mass of memory and emotion. Home is a daydream. In this larger sense, one might say that we are never really ever at home for place, belonging and sanctuary are all fleeting moments in our lives. We go back to the old homestead and it is never the same. Trees have grown or been cut down. The old stuffed couch in the kitchen, where Dad used to steal a quick nap before dinner is long gone. The house is a new colour. The fields are subdivided.

    How quickly a sense of belonging can become a feeling of alienation. The safest places of our lives can easily be the most treacherous. Family, marriage, and career all rest in delicate balance. Let's face it. Some of us don't have old homesteads to return to, or we may never have felt like we belonged to anything or anybody. Some of us can never go home again. Some of us have been fleeing our homes our whole lives. We are all homeless. We are all on a journey. We are all looking for home.

    Jesus seems to know this. He knows we are lost in a daydream, not quite sure what is

real, and what is not. He knows that we believe home is out there somewhere but we're just not quite sure where. This is why Jesus says, "Follow me." He knows the way, the way home. Home, Jesus tells us, is a place where we are loved, accepted, nurtured and protected. Home is where we eat food from land given to us. Home is where we feast on a fatted calf. Home is where we are loved even when we waste our inheritance or get lost in anger and pride. Home is in the love and grace of God.

    The Good News of the Gospel is that even though we are homeless we do not have to go searching for our home. God comes to us, giving us manna, providing crops in new fields, running down the road to meet us with open arms. "Kill the fatted calf! Bring a new robe and sandals, and a ring! My child, my son, my daughter who was lost is found!"      Robert Frost's poem, The Death of a Hired Man, tells the story of a lazy farmhand who come back home in poor health. The husband is a pragmatist and says matter of factly, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there/they have to take you in…” For him home is rights and responsibilities. But it is the wife who really understands home, when she answers her husband saying that home is “Something you somehow haven't to deserve.” She understands that home is a gift, a grace neither earned nor deserved. In the end home is both sides of coin. Home does bring responsibility, but you don't have to earn the love of a home. They'll love you no matter what, even if you don't deserve it.

     Too often because of self-sufficient pride, selfishness, anger, arrogance, or perhaps even needy embarrassment, we reject God's open arms. Theologians call that sin. However, we can simply let go of our pride and realize that we are all searching. We are all homeless. We can let go of anger and arrogance and just get over embarrassment of needing others. We can put on that robe, wear that ring, eat the feast, and rest in God's grace. My friends, that feeling of finding our home in God is what the bible means by salvation.

    I can't help but think of another song this morning. It's a an old hymn, a homecoming hymn that hasn't made it into newer hymnals but still lingers in the shadows of memory.

"Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling.

Calling for you and for me.

See on the portals he's waiting and watching.

Watching for you and for me.

Come home. Come home.

Ye who are weary come home.

Earnestly, tenderly Jesus is calling.

Calling, oh sinner come home."

     So, in a way, that pickup truck, dingy, and sailboat, that was rolling down the highway ends up kind of describing us and God: just a bunch of Daydream Believers following a Homecoming Queen.

    Brothers and sisters, how do we say, “Home?” Home is that place to which God

calls us. Home is that place to which God invites us. Home is that place where

we know we are loved. My friends, home is in the arms of God. We are all just Daydream believers going down the road of life following a Homecoming Queen. Rest in that Good News because here we are at home.