Heading for Home

Hebrews 11: 1-3 & 8-16

Roger Lynn

October 8, 2017

(CLICK HERE for the audio for this sermon)

Home! It’s a word that evokes a powerful sense of longing. We talk about being homesick. After we’ve been away for a while we know how good it feels to be home again. When we want someone to feel comfortable and welcome we invite them to “make themselves at home.” At its heart, the idea of home has less to do with place than it does with a sense of belonging.  Home really is where the heart is.

The writer of the book of Hebrews spends a great deal of time elaborating on various Old Testament figures who are lifted up as models of faithful living. And one of the characteristics which is associated with such faithfulness has to do with “seeking a homeland” – a “better country.” Part of what it means to be faithful is to pay attention to our yearning for “home.” It is a reality we can barely even imagine most of the time – something we catch only in occasional glimpses. And yet, deep down in the core of our being, we know it is real – more real that the pale reflections we so often encounter in the course of our living. Just because it hasn’t yet been fully realized in our lives doesn’t mean we stop looking. Like Abraham, and all the other faithful characters listed in the book of Hebrews, we continue to move forward, seeking a homeland that is defined by being fully aware of the ongoing presence of God. In their song about seeking just such a home, the group “The Wailin’ Jennys” sing,

When we find what we’re looking for

We’ll drop these bags & search no more

Because it’s going to feel like heaven when we’re home.

There is a line in one of John Denver’s most famous songs that describes this faithful process. He sings about “going home to a place we’ve never been before.” Faith is the longing, the dreaming, the yearning for this existence which we know is real even though we haven’t fully experienced it – yet.

The history of this quest has taken some extremely unhelpful, and sometimes downright destructive, forms, including drug abuse, violence of all sorts, greed, fear-based protectionism, and on and on the list could go. Peel back the layers of such expressions, however, and what you find underneath is a search for home – that existential place where we are safe and cared for, a place where we belong. But so often we end up looking in all the wrong places, using all the wrong strategies. We spend our lives searching “out there” for a home, only to discover that it can’t be found “out there” until we first find it “in here.” T.S. Eliot wrote a poem which speaks to this reality.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

We will never really find home anywhere until we begin to learn the trick of being at home everywhere. This happens when we recognize that home is defined not by external circumstances but by being fully in the presence of God – and realizing that we are always in the presence of God. In the words of Catherine of Siena, “All the way to heaven is heaven.” All the way to God is God. All the way home is home. As Dorothy discovers in “The Wizard of Oz,” we’ve always had the ability to go home.

And what seems at first glance like a solitary enterprise turns out finally to be very much an exercise in community. We may not be able to find home “out there,” but even when we look “in here” we also can’t find it on our own. The writer of the book of Hebrews, after listing all the heroes and heroines of the faith, sums it all up this way – “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses...” (Hebrews 12:1) Jesus said, “‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers and sisters?’ And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers and sisters! For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’ ” (Matthew 12: 49-50) The Church has sometimes been described as the family of God. When we strive to live faithfully, seeking the home that is nothing less than the fullness of God’s presence, we do so with the support of those who share this life with us, and in so doing we also invite and encourage others to discover their “home” as well. 

To live faithfully is to always be going home to a place we’ve never been before, and yet at the same time recognizing that it is the place we’ve lived our whole lives – fully and completely in the presence of God. Let’s go home.