A couple weeks ago I preached on contentment. I said it was a rather slippery little devil to get a grasp of and a hold on. Well, I have another one for you… home. There is a difference between a house and a home, isn’t there? It has been almost two years now since Yvette and I moved into the manse and launched head-long into an ongoing quest to turn “your” house into “our” home. We painted the walls colors that matched our personalities. We put up our artwork and framed photos from our travels. We stuffed our decorative pillows into needle point cases that we found in the backstreet markets of Katmandu. We scoured garage sales for affordable dark wood antiques; replaced the harsh overhead lighting with the incandescent glow of every size and shape of lamp we could find; bought out Home Depot’s supply of indestructible house plants; picked up a soft chenille throw from Restoration Hardware; and put up a more contemporary ceiling fan in the den where those faux-wood styrofoam ceiling beams and the chuck wagon wheel overhead light used to be. (Tom, Tom, Tom. What were you thinking?) We may not own it, but bit by bit, your manse is taking on our personality and is feeling more and more like home.
And then, eight days ago, we did something that made this transformation go into hyper-drive. We brought home Zanzibar—a beautiful, 14 pound, ten-week old, downy soft, reddish Golden Retriever puppy with the sweetest disposition and eyes that make me melt and do all sorts of things I’m not supposed to be doing for her. I’ll tell you, by the time we took her to the vet, bought her crate, collar, leash, bowls, toys and food, she had already become an expensive habit. But, you know, nothing we have bought for the house over the last two years has done anywhere near as much to make our house feel like a home than that one gorgeous ball of love and boundless energy that keeps us up all night and reduces us to groveling around on our hands and knees on the kitchen floor saying, “Oh my witty bitty baby, do you have to go potty? We wuv you so much!” I’m telling you, we are pathetic!
These feelings that we are having bring up some very important questions. At what point does a house become a home? Or maybe, more importantly, what is home? How do you define it and where do you find it? You ask most average Americans where home is these days, and they won’t even know what to tell you. Is it the place you grew up? The place you are living now? The place you just came from? Or will it be the next place that you may already be making plans to move to? I heard one person describe home as the place you feel most comfortable. Surely, that can’t be all there is to it, can it?
When I was living in Los Angeles it seemed like everybody was from somewhere else and they all assumed that they would be leaving again before too long. The big joke was that finding a native Californian in Los Angeles was like finding the missing link in the evolutionary chain. (Sorry, Yvette!) By the time people came to L.A., they had moved so many times that they no longer had any idea where home was. They didn’t even try to pretend that L.A. could be their home. They hardly even tried to get to know their neighbors, and most people still had unpacked boxes in their garage waiting for the next move. If you asked people where their home was, they would say, “Well, I am living in Sherman Oaks but I am from Atlanta… or Oregon, or Kansas or New Jersey.” It didn’t matter if they had been in L.A. for 20 years. They always seemed to add that in—the place they had originally come from. Why did they feel like they needed to tell you that? Because they wanted you to know that they weren’t at home in L.A. It may be where they are living, but it isn’t home.
There is a lot being written by sociologists these days on the causes and effects of our transience. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 43 million Americans move in an average year. That means that 16% of our country is moving every year! And most years, it is a different 16%. That’s a lot of people packing up and moving on. The typical American is now expected to move 14 times over the course of a lifetime.
It seems to me that we are looking for something. If you ask people, most of them will tell you that they are moving for work. We are taught from an early age that the most important thing we can do with our lives is to get ahead. And so, off we go to college and then move to wherever the best job is. After a few years, we move again for a better job, and then, a better one after that. But what is it that we are really looking for?
We are looking for the one thing that we have never been able to completely find here on this earth. We are looking for home—that place where we find true unconditional love (the kind we read about in our scripture lesson this morning) and complete acceptance; a place where our souls are nurtured and our identities renewed, where our desires are molded, our destinies compelled and where we can discover who we are. The truth is that that sort of home will never be found in a better job or a bigger house. It can’t be found in the warm feelings that artwork evokes, the memories captured in photographs or even in a dog or children. Our true home cannot be found in this world. And one of the keys to our contentment comes in realizing that it was never supposed to be.
Home is a powerful metaphor. We chase after it our whole lives. Since the Garden all of humanity has been living out our lives as wanderers in this world. That is the entire story of the Bible in a nutshell. Each of us is born with a restless wandering spirit that was never intended to be fully satisfied until we find the real home for which our souls are aching in communion with God. When Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden, the Bible says that God placed an angel at the eastern gate of the Garden with a sword of fire so that the two could never go back again. Have you ever tried to go back home again, go back to the place where you grew up? If you’ve tried it, you’ve probably discovered that it is no longer home. “Going home” is a powerful image that John Steinbeck identified and made famous. We can’t go back again. All the rest of life is spent searching and restless, somewhere “East of Eden.”
It is not that we have been abandoned in this world, just that we were never meant to become completely content in it. We are given glimpses along the way of what our real home will be like. This is one of the most powerful aspects to perhaps the most powerful and dearly loved chapters of scripture in the entire Bible. After describing what true, perfect love really looks like, Paul realizes how frustrating it is going to be for us when we compare this kind of love to what we have experienced here on earth and come to the realization that we have never fully given or received this kind of love here. And so, in the most lyrical way, Paul turns our attention, once again, as he does throughout the New Testament, toward the imperfect, restless or transient nature of life in this world—the “Not Yet” of the Christian Gospel.
At best, the homes that we set up here, the houses that we furnish, the lives we create, and the families that we build and love so dearly can only be a glimpse, a poor reflection of what we are truly longing; which is why we tend to get so frustrated with our own families when they don’t live up to the longing, the yearning, and the ache that God has placed in each one of our hearts to guide us home.
This Thursday, we will be celebrating one of our nation’s favorite holidays. Families will be traveling over road and through sky to be together. Bread will be broken, traditions reenacted, bonds re-kindled and our best attempt at love shown. But I feel like I need to caution you not to expect too much from this Thanksgiving; or at least, not to expect something that can never be fully found here on earth. When we become tempted to take the focus off of giving thanks and to put it, instead, on creating that one day of the year when our houses become the perfect home that we are longing for, we are doomed to frustration, hurt and disillusionment. Listen to how Craig Barnes puts it in his book on this subject, “Searching for Home.”
He says that if we want an image for Thanksgiving, a more helpful portrait of the true family table would be Leonardo DaVinci’s, “Last Supper.” There, we see the images of grief, confusion, disillusionment, pending separation and betrayal that are a part of most family tables. But we also see a savior in the middle of it all who bears our burdens, brings redemption and helps us to catch a glimpse of what is to come even in the midst of the pain.
The longing itself is a good thing… as long as we don’t get confused as to where we are supposed to find its fulfillment. Yvette and I were watching the Alaska IMAX at home on DVD the other night, and there was an entire segment on this spectacular, unbelievable migration that millions upon millions of salmon make every year just to get back to the little streams and tributaries from which they were spawned. It’s not like they remember where they were born, at least not consciously; but somewhere deep inside, they do. There is a powerful force placed in the fiber of their being—one that we cannot even begin to explain—that draws them home. We were amazed just watching the things that these fish are capable of doing in their single minded determination to get back to a home that they can only know through the longing in their hearts. It is almost comical. They literally jump up waterfalls, swim against roaring rivers, jump through the jaws of waiting Grizzlies and flop their bodies across dry patches of rock. At times they get confused as to where their real home is. Many of them take a wrong turn somewhere, follow the wrong stream and end up dying in the shallow water. But for those that make it back home, it is the fulfillment of their destiny—the culmination of what they were created to be. Somewhere deep inside of each one, the creator has placed an instinctual urge that sends them out, draws them through life, and then, leads them back home again.
What I want to ask you this morning is, “If that sort of longing for home can live inside of a stupid fish, do you honestly believe that it isn’t lurking deep inside of you?” This is not our home. It was never intended to be. We said it yesterday at Bill’s funeral and last Wednesday at Eleanor Peter’s. It is the reason that John 14 is almost sacramental at all the funerals we perform. You were made with this longing for a reason—so that you will be drawn back to the place where you were created. Don’t follow the wrong streams in search of it. Don’t allow the glimpses that you see here on earth to trick you into thinking that anything you have created here is the fulfillment of it. Accept your role as a wanderer in this world; rejoice in the reflections however dimly they may be, that you discover along the way; and allow this sacred urge, allow this God-given yearning, allow this divinely inspired ache to lead you into the arms of the only one who can ever show you your true home. And you will have the best Thanksgiving ever.
AMEN
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