HOMECOMING AND OUR TRUE HOME

My daughter and I both have bad colds. The day is bright and cool outside; inside it is time for homemade soup and naps. Below is the conclusion of one of my favorite sermons by Coleman Brown:

The word, "Home" may well arouse in us only nostalgia and loneliness; I understand that very well. Or "home" may lead us to cowardice, to betrayal of our responsibility to do justice, to resist injustice: I understand that, too.

But the symbol, the word "home" may also help open us to the rule of God, to the kingdom of heaven, to what Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed and called Beloved Community.

The New Testament writers beheld in the death of Jesus, God's purpose to bring us home to ourselves, to one another, and, yes, to God.

Home: our true home: yet how can we speak it?

Robert Frost helps me in the impossible task with his poem, "The Death of the Hired Man." Silas, a single man, an ordinary and not particularly outstanding man has come back ill and ready to die to a farm home where he has worked as hired help before. Warren, the decent owner of the farm, is not happy that Silas has come back; Silas has let him down in the past. He relents only so far as to admit that. "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,they have to take you in." But Mary his wife goes further, and she says of home-. "I should have called it something you somehow haven't to deserve."

Mary is right. If we have to earn our home, our true home, what chance have we?

What can we say of our true home? You must speak for yourself. There will be clues in the home you've had; but also in the home you've never had. Let me say this:

There will be privacy there as well as togetherness; and work--satisfying tasks for which we have had some chance to become competent--and there will be leisure, and we shall learn to play again. And, yes, there will be the special others--whose very names become more hallowed with the years; I cannot conceive it otherwise. But not only they are there.

For there will be other homes in our true home--homes linked to homes, and many kinds of homes, not just those created by a man and a woman and their children. And there will be gatherings, and celebrations. And we shall learn to worship.

It will be familiar, and renewing, and ever new. It is not just "gemutlichkeit," not just friendliness and warmth and welcome--because love without justice is not fully love; but justice without love is not even justice.

So there will be a welcome there without having to earn it: and forgiveness.

And so I dream of our true home, even as I remember, remember death, and what Matthew Arnold calls "the eternal note of sadness."

Some of you have worried about becoming sad during this sermon, and some of you have fought it. Indeed, there are at least two dangers in matters like these: sentimentality is one ... a little religious emotion, a little nostalgia, a little pie in the sky bye and bye, and then back to business as usual. But the second danger in the face of sadness is refusal of it with a quiet coldness-- in fact, a certain kind of nihilism, if a very conventional nihilism. We will not allow the sadness to enter because dreams of home and justice and love threaten our "management" of our lives; and so we turn cold; we stare intently as into a black hole, and seek to steel ourselves, and feel nothing except the cold, indeed to feel nothing ... except nothing.

To those of us in this second danger--and it can be any and all of us-- to you I say, for God's sake allow the sadness, even the eternal note of sadness in! It is a way back, perhaps the only way back.

So you find the notion of our true home an impossible dream, and talk of heaven impossible to follow or to feel, all right! But let the sadness which is linked in this world to our dreams and hopes for home, let that sadness be.

Homecoming is a symbol. Home is a symbol. Heaven is a symbol.
'Just symbols?" someone asks
Of course not just symbols!

Like all true symbols, homecoming and home participate in that which is too deep for words, in that "which no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived" in that which has been "revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God."

Will you hope with me that prayers, like my father's very secular, but very tender prayer--"show me the way to go home"--that my Dad who at 8 years old watched his mother die, and lost his childhood home there at the foot of her bed, that he and all like him will, verily, be shown the way to go home-- to a true and real home?

Will you hope with me--and translate hope into action, those of you who think the sermon has been escapist--will you hope and work for prisoners, some kind of prisoners, and perhaps even real criminals and would-be-criminals, that they may find, and not merely six feet under, the green, green grass of home?

Will you hope, will you work and hope, pray and work and hope that there may be a place for us, for all of us somewhere a place for us, for (dare I say it, in the face of their awful suffering?) for the starving in Africa and the countless homeless of our great cities, and the burnt out, including the burnt out right here ...? Will you take on commitment to the hope that peace and quiet and open air, wait for us, somewhere? can you let your life turn around so that your life shows your dream of that home where there begins to be time together with time to spare, time to learn, time to care? Will you dare hope together that we will find a new way of living, that we will find a way of forgiving?

There may be no way without tears; increasingly I think so, but I don't know. Save us from sentimentality, O God! But save us no less from a shallow positive thinking! And save us from the coldness which denies the symbols, the words, the dreams in which sadness and joy, sadness and hope, sadness and courage, sadness and love are inseparable! Save us from that coldness which we prefer in order that all our problems can remain "manageable"! How can we manage" heartache and death and joy, and our human longing for a real homecoming, a real home?

Well, listen to something a guy I know has written:

"The gospel shouts the good news that God is making his home with us, that we are homeless wanderers no more. We are not yet home, but we are going home. Going home to that homecoming banquet where elder brother and prodigal son, father and son, mother and daughter, exile and stranger, man and woman, white and black, East and West, Arab and Jew, poor and rich, lion and lamb will sit down together in peace. The biblical word of new creation, of resurrection, suggests that all our history--personal and communal, over all the aeons, over all the earth and throughout the entire cosmos--is not lost or forgotten. Rather, all is gathered up, restored, offered, celebrated, shared, brought into communion.

As in the...Creed, "I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." Yes, I look and keep on looking, and sometimes I think I glimpse it from afar. And if someone tells me that "eternity is in an hour" and that homeland heaven is available right now on homeland earth, I will nod and celebrate and enjoy. But I will still wonder about the mystery which is to come--the mystery in which we shall all be changed, the mystery of that communion of the saints streaming in the gates of home when no one will be on the outside, ever again."

So let's turn to our neighbors and offer them the "peace of God."
And may we hear our neighbor's greeting to us as a call to live as those who know life to be on the way home;
to live in anticipation of our great homecoming;
to live revealing the hope that one day no one will be on the outside ever again.

“The peace of God be with you.”

Coleman B. Brown