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Foundry United Rev. |
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“When You Can’t Go
Home” Sunday, July 22, 2007 |
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John 1: 10-14
Rev. |
Where
is your home? What do you think of as home? Is it
the house you grew up in? Forty-five years after I moved from there at 15, I
still have dreams that take place in the big old farmhouse I grew up in. In
one sense it will always feel like home, I suspect. Is home
the house or apartment you live in now? Or a house or apartment you once
lived in? Does everywhere you have lived feel like home? Or is
home for you the part of the country or world you are from? Sometimes people
refer to their native land or the town they grew up in as their home. Sometimes
home is a dream. Biblically, ultimately, heaven is home, and home, I suspect,
– wherever it is – is something of heaven. Fred Buechner
says that home is “a place where you feel you belong and which in some sense
belongs to you, a place where you feel that all is somehow ultimately well
even if things aren’t going all that well at any given moment.”[i] Where
is your home? We are
looking at scriptures about home this summer. One reason for this is that the
Washington Interfaith Network – WIN – of which we are a member congregation, is
working with Mayor Fenty to create 14,000 affordable housing units in Where
is your home? Fred Buechner says there are two kinds of homeless people – the
people living on our sidewalks and in our emergency shelters and then “people
like you and me who are apt to have homes all over the place but not to be
really at home in any of them.”[ii] Sometimes
we are homeless in the sense that we can’t really be at home in the place we
think ought to be our home. The
Gospel of John says this was true about Jesus. John 1: 11 says, in the New
Revised Standard Version, “He came to what was his own, and his own people
did not accept him.” But, in
the New Revised Standard Version, this verse is footnoted, and when you read
the footnote, it is an alternate translation that says, “He came to his own
home, and his own people did not accept him.” The
expression “come to your own” in Greek is a common idiom for coming to your
home. Jesus came to what should have been his home, the place where he
belonged, and his own people would not receive him. Rudolph
Bultmann thought John was referring to humanity in general. Jesus came to
earth, the home of humanity, and humanity would not receive him. But
most biblical scholars agree that John is referring to I think
John is trying to speak a comforting pastoral word to a generation of early
Christians, many of whom lost their families and sense of home because of
their decision to become Christians. It was commonplace in the early days of
Christianity for new Christians to be shunned and outcast by their families
and by their communities. I think John is helping these early Christians who
have lost their sense of family and home to see that it was the same way for
Jesus. He was helping them find comfort in knowing that they were sharing in
the estrangement that Jesus experienced. It
still happens, you know. I’ve spoken to Christians from around the world who
became outcast in their homes, and families, and towns when they became
Christians. Something, however, drew them to Christ in spite of what felt
like losing their home. Of
course, it is also true that I have known people here in the U.S. who have
become Buddhists or Hindus, and it has resulted in them not being really
accepted by their families here, not being able to feel anymore that they can
be at home where they think they ought to belong. It
happens sometimes – too often – to gay and lesbian people who come out. It
happens even more tragically to lesbian women and gay men who feel that they
can’t come out at home, and who lose a sense of being able to belong there. They
can’t be themselves at home. People tell me that at the Gay Pride Parade no
one gets louder cheers than PFLAG – Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians
and Gays – because all too many gay and lesbian folk know the pain of having
to choose between self-affirmation and losing their home. And
there are other reasons we can lose a sense of home. Perhaps the homes we came
from were racist or sexist or violent or unloving or insane. And we know how
Jesus must have felt when, as John says, “he came to his own home and his own
people did not accept him.” So John
is being pastoral in sharing with those Christians who have paid the price of
losing their homes by becoming Christians, and he is doing more. He goes on
in the next verses to suggest that Jesus’ losing his home, his rejection by
his people, was actually salvific. It became a part of salvation history. It
was redemptive for humanity. The
next verses, John 1: 12 and 13, say: “But to all who received him, who
believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born
not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”
(Matthew 1: 12-3) Not
being accepted at home opened the doors to all humanity to become a part of
the family of God – not by birth or by blood – but by the accepting love of
God. I think
one of the basic themes of Scripture is that God takes human acts of
resistance or even evil and uses them for the sake of a larger purpose. You
remember, in the book of Genesis, when Joseph’s older brothers sold him into
slavery because they were jealous of him. Joseph becomes the king’s right
hand man in They
are ashamed and afraid. But Joseph says to them: “Even though you intended to
do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous
people, as he is doing today.” (Genesis
50:20) In another translation, he says to them: “Even
though you meant it for evil, God intended it for good.” One of the themes of Scripture is that when we experience
rejection or harm or evil, we ought to look for the good that God intends to
do through it. But there
is also something else here, I think. We all want to belong. We all want to
have a home. We all want a sense of a place where we belong and that in some way
belongs to us. But
homes can also swallow us. They can suffocate us. They can infantilize us. Sometimes
it is salvific, saving, for us to be thrust out of our homes. It is
not good, I suspect, when life is too comfortable, too secure, too easy. In a
couple of weeks Jane and I are going to It
reminded me of my friend who used to be a pastor on the Eastern Shore of
Maryland. He told me the story of one day when he was sort of frustrated and
fed up, and he told his wife he was going fishing the next morning. He left
early in the morning and drove for an hour. When he stopped for a cup of
coffee, he happened to run into a friend and he ended up spending the entire
morning talking instead of fishing. On the
way home, he decided he should stop and get some fish for dinner, so he stopped
at a fish store that happened to have a soft shell crab tank in the store. He says
he stood there watching the crabs while he waited for his fish to be cleaned,
and as he watched them he heard a voice inside himself saying, “You’ve got to
shed your shell or you will die.” We all
want a place where we feel at home, but home can be a shell. This may be why
we can never really feel totally at home in this world. Anytime we feel at
home it is a hint of heaven, but this world is not finally, fully our home
because we are always meant to feel enough discomfort so that we will
continue to grow…so that we will continue to work for change. We are
not meant to be too much at home. No one can be really at home until everyone
can have a home. No one can be fully at peace until we all have peace. No one
can really fully belong until we all can belong. Jesus “came
to his own home and his own people did not accept him, but to all who
received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of
God, who were born not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of
man, but of God.” Our
true home is in the home of Jesus where everyone is welcome to be at home. May
we be a bit uncomfortable until we are at home with him. www.foundryumc.org |
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