5 Easter 2008

Going home conjures up images for me as it must for you. In my childhood home, there were rooms we lived in and rooms guests-adults used. Our home was a modest place. My parents built it as they could afford to do so. Times were hard at the end of the great depression so they bought one acre from my grandfather, built a four room house and added on as they were able. When they were almost forty, they adopted first me and almost 3 years later my brother. I watched mom leave to go get the baby. I remember her coming home with him, thinking that is cool, you can get babies at the store too. One day when Don was two, he slipped out of the house after lunch and got up on dad’s tractor and somehow got it started. We were shocked to see him driving across the pasture. My dad was not amused and moved quickly to rescue Don and the tractor. After school, I rode my horse to the pond and fished, came home and did homework. It was peaceful and the place where I learned values. It was home.

When I was in college my parents rented out our farm house and moved to a brick rancher on a large lake. My dad bought a bass boat and fished daily. When I went “home” to this house, it was where my parents lived but not a place I ever lived. My room contained the same bedroom suit I had as a child. The pictures on the walls were from childhood dance recitals – not the pictures I would have chosen to decorate the walls. I never really felt at home in this rambling house. It was also where my adulthood ideas, values often clashed with my parents.

They were unimpressed with my decision to pursue science, become an Episcopalian. On both counts their concerns were well founded, not for the reasons they gave but because the first took me far from home and the second into the priesthood. When I mom had her first heart attack, I flew home ready to translate the medical jargon. After a piece of good advice, my mom just looked at me as if I had two heads, and my aunt smiled and said, you’ll never be more than five to her. In time we came to accept that the road I travel is not the one they envisioned. Separation of parent and child is a part of growing up and despite our differences we remained family.

After my dad died and mother became too limited physically to live alone safely, we insisted she move to assisted living. At least twice a year I visited with her in the retirement home while staying in a hotel nearby. It was years before she would agree to have me drive her past either of her homes. She finally became too compromised by congestive heart failure to remain in assisted living and we offered her two choices – to move in with me or my brother. As we packed her things, she had another heart attack and died the next morning. My mom did not want to move again unless it was home for good and that is exactly what she did.

At her service I used this text: in my father’s house are many dwelling places – I go to prepare a place for you and I will come again and take you to myself. Comforting words full of hope that our loved ones are now enjoying the pure love only God can give.

For some however home is not a safe and inviting place. Too many of our children are shaped by violence in the home. Fearful of huge adults whose tempers rain down destruction, they fail to trust anyone. They have a home in God but they are still here – our neighbors. This week over 400 children were “rescued” from abusive treatment by a religious cult. Those children didn’t want to go home like we hope our children do.

Too many of our children in this country grow up in uncertain financial environments, in homes with lead paint, toxic environments that promote cancer and shorter life spans. Too many of our children go to bed hungry. Robert Coles interviewed a man in Alabama who farmed on rented land. When the crops failed one year due to a hail storm, the children were often hungry. Robert Coles asked him what he did when he had no food and the children were crying from hunger. He told Dr. Coles, I hold them very tight, hoping the heat of my body will comfort them and I tell them I hope things will be better tomorrow.

In another series of interviews Robert Coles asked Ruby Bridges how she kept her courage as she entered the all white school with so many angry people shouting at her and throwing things at her. She said she thought about Jesus on the cross. Her grandmother told her that Jesus forgave them for hurting him. Ruby said, that meant she ought to forgive these folks too.

Our reading from John 14 is comforting in that it assures us that God is providing a better home for us in eternity. But read on my friends. Jesus also told the disciples that because he was going to the Father, he would send the Holy Spirit so that we could continue the work of the kingdom of God in our time. That second part is as important as the first. We ought to be comforted in hope of our future in God and that hope ought to give us courage to work for a better world today, so that all our children have safe happy places to grow up, enough to eat, and we can do it – we ought to.

When we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God we seek to do the things Jesus did. We include everyone in our church home. We develop expanded families in the sense that everyone matters. We reach out to others in reconciling gestures of peace and justice. We intervene when someone is suffering – we help when someone is hurt. We share what we have because ultimately we know that it is not really ours but that all things come from God.

This world is not our only home. We have a future in God and with God. We have a home far surpassing this one. We have hope because we know God through the revelation of his Son. We can be generous because we know God’s grace is really for everyone. We don’t have to worry about scarcity because God’s love is abundant and sure. We have it on good authority – the promise of Jesus the Christ. So no matter how stressed we are about so many things if we can find one person to help, one person to really love, one group to stand in solidarity with we can continue the work we are given to do.

Our church is not just this frame building. Our church is our community of faith filled disciples. We come here to renew our faith, to allow God to dwell in us and to work through us. I suspect that we become tense when we think too carefully about whether we are doing the work we are given to do. In faith we follow a risky path – one that can lead to conflict and danger. Standing up for justice and peace in our world can be a difficult task and yet deep within us we know that because we are in Christ our real and true home is eternal in God.