The Home We Are Promised

"...."And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there ye may be also."

Homecoming Sunday presumes that you and I have been someplace other than "home" in the months just passed. That may or may not be true for any one of us literally. Yet biblically and theologically, our distance from home is a presumption underlining every day of our human existence. Though we may not, by outward appearance, appear to be thus, we are homeless. In fact, our human spirits have strangely been marked--not by chance but by design--with a restlessness which will not be satisfied. Home promised, but home not given. So George Herbert describes how, when God first made human life, God poured out all the blessings there were: strength, beauty, wisdom, honour, pleasure. But then God made a stay and withheld one last blessing--the blessing of rest...of a home: For if I should (said He)

Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of Me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature,
So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, then weariness
May toss him to my breast.

Strangers and exiles, the author of the Book of Hebrews calls us, pilgrims, says King James, seeking a homeland. Hearts restless until they rest in thee, prayed Augustine. That is our human existence given us in light of the promise of a home...the promise of eternal life. "A black man at my church," writes Anne Lamott, "who is nearing one hundred thundered last Sunday, 'God is your home,' and I pass this on mostly," she says, "because all of the interesting characters I've ever worked with--including myself--have had at their center a feeling of otherness, of homesickness."

Which is to say that the promise of eternal life--of life with God and God as home--has a way of raising up interesting characters between birth and death: characters who are never quite satisfied, surely never settled, always on the look-out for the hidden treasure, the greater challenge, the better country, the true purpose. The world teaches us to regard such characters with pity: Will they never be content, we wonder?

But the Bible is our earnest that God responds otherwise. For God mostly has to do with the folks ever ready to pick up and follow--even if it is just down the street, or the folks willing to quit their tents for the wilderness, or the ones who may not change their address or their job description, but are forever open to changing their direction. And always God has to do with the black men who, at one hundred years of age, know they have yet to arrive.

We long, of course, to live otherwise. We spend our lives feathering our nests, propping up our pillows just right, like dogs circling and circling and circling and circling until finding just the right angle of repose before the fire, we look for a perfect and permanent place to rest. Why? In part, it is an "enormous temptation," as Annie Dillard has put it before in this pulpit, "to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end...so self-conscious, so apparently moral....I won't have it," she cries. The Lord God, in fact, will not stand for it. That is why, not only are God's creatures given to a homesickness but, in the second place, creation itself is obviously not quite finished, when seen in the light of the promise of a home...of eternal life.

Eternal life--if it is not made into some upper-middle class ethereal existence by self-satisfied Christians wanting their privilege theologically assured forever--eternal life, if taken for the wild promise that it is, becomes rather a burr in our communal saddle, a prod at our back, a thorn in our side, causing us to conclude there is something never quite right about this picture! In fact, we who have been promised a city where death is no more, neither mourning nor crying nor any more pain, surely are given to know better! Thus we must protest the headlines, petition the powers that be, struggle with the school board, rage at the diagnosis. We do so because we have heard the better news of a city whose builder and founder is God.

So not only are we as selves incomplete, but this good gift of life collectively, with all its wonder and mystery, its friendships and deep loves, is--by design--incomplete...that is to say, it cannot offer, it is made incapable of giving us the rest for which we were made. It is not home because--no matter what any current guru would have you believe--it is not God. And all of our efforts to make it be otherwise, to adore the gift instead of the giver, make us weary and empty and restless. It is as though the very imperfection, the incongruities, the incomprehensibility, the injustices of human existence are given a greater purpose by the God who is shaping us, moment by moment, in this life, for the life to come. So had the last moment come for Mr. Valient-for-Truth in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress such that he was summoned home,
...and [he] had this for a token that the summons was true,
"That his pitcher was broken at the fountain."
When he understood it, he called for his friends and
told them of it. Then he said, I am going to my
Father's; and though with great difficulty I have got
hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I
have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to
him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my
courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and
scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I
have fought His battles who will now be my rewarder.
When the day that he must go hence was come, many
accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he
went, he said, "Death, where is thy sting?" And as he
went down deeper, he said, "Grave, where is thy
victory?" So he passed over, and all the trumpets
sounded for him on the other side.

With great difficulty we have got hither...our marks and scars we carry with us in this life...our sword we give to them that shall succeed us in our pilgrimage. Not by our goodness, says Herbert, but by our weariness in well-doing are we turned toward home...not by life fulfilled but by hope's disappointments are we destined for eternal life...interesting characters in a land not our own, until we come unto thine everlasting Kingdom...pilgrims quitting our tents in the wilderness and high-tailing it toward the place we have been promised.

But there is, of course, more to eternal life than the restlessness of our character, and the incompleteness of creation, goading us on until we lie to die...and that more is a place prepared for those we have loved and lost. You and I live with a profound awareness that our grasp on things visible is fleeting, at best...that the longer we live, the more our homesickness takes on a focus and a face: it is the face of all we have loved and from whom we have been separated. This Homecoming Sunday brings to mind the names of those who were beside us in the pew only a year ago, and are no more to be touched and held. The promise of eternal life gives to us the sure and certain hope which alone has the power to uphold us amidst all of life's separations and endings and deaths. "It is not really the shortness of life that saddens and offends us," wrote John Baillie, "it is its temporality--not that it ends so soon, but that it ends at all; and still more deeply the fact that, even while it lasts, it is made up of nothing but endings, of meetings and partings, of memories and longings...."

The only way I know how to stand at the edge of an open grave and commit those who are dear to us to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, lo these many years ahead, God willing...is the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ. Note, it is not the resurrection of the good...not the resurrection of the born-again...not the resurrection of the politically correct or the doctrinally pure...not the resurrection of the morally upright. The wages of sin is death, wrote the Apostle Paul. "We who must die," said Auden, "demand a miracle." I think that includes us all! And before the demand is out of our mouths, the promise has been vouch-safed to us in Jesus Christ. To wit, we are all headed home...and, no matter what, I do believe with all that is in me, we are headed home together!

At the heart of the Christian faith is the proclamation that every last child born on this earth was made to live and die in relation to God. By sheer implication, it means we are also destined to be clumped together with each other, whether we like it or not, eternally! That is not to say we don't miss the point along the way, and do so, often, in God's name. But in the end, I am more sure than anything else I know, when we see Him face to face, such love divine all loves excelling will be irresistible, and we will find ourselves--inspite of our selves and because of Him--together again...surprised, no doubt, at the ones who end up forever by our side!:

For an hour it was deadly dull and I was fidgety.
Miss Watson would say, 'Don't put your feet up there,
Huckleberry;' and 'don't scrunch up like that,
Huckleberry--set up straight;' and pretty soon she
would say, 'Don't gap and stretch like that,
Huckleberry--why don't you try to behave?' Then she
told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I
was there....She said it was wicked to say what I said;
said she wouldn't say it for the whole world; she was
going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I
couldn't see no advantage in going where she was going,
so I made up my mind I wouldn't even try for it....she
had got a start, and she went on and told me all about
the good place. She said all a body would have to do
there was to go around all day long with a harp and
sing, forever and ever. So I didn't think much of it.
But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom
Sawyer would go there, and, she said, not by a
considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I
wanted him and me to be
together."

The promise of eternal life is the proclamation that God wants us to be not separated on moral grounds but together standing on the only ground there is: the ground of God's mercy and grace. Therefore, Christ has prepared a place for us...all of us.

Though there is one last thing to say. For even as, in this life, we take our leave from one another, by death most wholly, by estrangement most painfully, by disease most inextricably, by destiny most nobly, there is intended a tender mercy in the midst of our human existence, which is but a foretaste of eternal life. We know it by inkling, by intimation, by a glimmer and a gossamer thread, by the Him who has gone before us and promised to prepare a place. That same one left us a place and a people provisionally to call home. Theologically we speak of it as one of the means of God's grace and, tangibly, we call it Christ's church.

This is as close to home as you and I will get, until Christ's cross is placed before our closing eyes. To be sure, the institution has a way of downright goading our restlessness: the petty fights, the crabby pew-sitters, the endless bureaucracy, the obscure preachers, the small-spirited meanness, the attention to minutia by which her common life is marked, has always tempted people to quit this tent in favor of the wilderness.

But you see, even this provisional home, given us by Christ on earth, was meant to be a pilgrim church...a community on the way...a gathering of strangers and sojourners seeking a better home. In fact, one of the marks that The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill is Christ's church, and not merely a human institution held in human hands, is precisely her refusal to stand still. This is, I know, quite the opposite of what we would like the church to be. Rather we would like her to be the one place we can count on to sing the hymns we already know, meet on the night we've always met upon, organize the bazaar exactly as it has been organized since the beginning, celebrate the Lord's Supper the way we used to. But for some cock-eyed reason, God has sent me to you and you are restless in a way you were not before. And God has given you to me and I am struggling in a way I never have before. And such is as God intends it on this Sunday of our Homecoming. Christ teaches us, wrote Calvin of the church, "to travel as pilgrims in this world that our celestial heritage may not perish nor pass away": "There's no Discouragement/ Shall make him once Relent/His first avowed Intent/ To be a Pilgrim." Welcome home? Welcome to this pilgrimage.

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