Going Home and Being Called

[Our lessons are Acts 7:55-60, 1 Peter 2:2-10 and John 14:1-14.]

Our Gospel and Epistle readings today evoke strong feelings of home and calling.

Home is an important place for us. It can be a building, large or small, fancy or poor, new or old. It can be a shelter from the storm, a refuge.

It’s more than a building. We say that home is where the heart is or it’s where we hang our hats. Robert Frost wrote, “Home is the place, where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

It is human nature to want a home. In fact, studies on children raised in institutions have shown that, in the absence of a home, children grow up psychologically damaged. We all want to go home.

St. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” How true that is! We are always looking for somewhere else than where we are.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks directly to this longing: “I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may also be.” Our true home is God.

How wonderful this sounded to the persecuted Christians at the end of the First Century! How wonderful it sounded to the Disciples when Jesus told them this as he prepared them for his death.

Even though we won’t see this in its fullest form in this life, we can know now this relationship. We can experience now a preview of our eternal home. When we do the things that Christ commands us, when we love one another as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, then God’s love dwells in us and makes a home in us. When we comfort the broken hearted, God makes a home with us. When we lay down our lives for one another, God makes a home with us. When we invite all of God’s children to God’s table to share in his body and blood, then God makes a home with us.

Sarah Dylan Breuer, a preacher and student I often read, writes,

What would happen if we really took to heart Jesus’ words, “believe in God”—the God Jesus proclaimed—and “believe also in me”? What would happen if we believed Jesus’ message that the time of fulfilment for scriptures proclaiming good news to the poor, release to prisoners, sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the year of jubilee has come? What would happen if we believed that Jesus sent to come upon us the same Spirit which empowered him to feed the hungry, heal the sick, prophesy to the powerful, and proclaim God's kingdom? What if our lives proclaimed a God who is at work in the world as Jesus’ followers saw him at work among them?

For starters, our age of anxiety might finally be able to take in Jesus’ exhortation, “do not let your hearts be troubled.” When everybody wins, the rats can stop racing. There’s no sense in suing for property or privilege when the year of jubilee is at hand. The God who created the universe is at work in Christ, the Christ in whom we abide. God’s kingdom, God’s dream, is no fantasy; it’s the most fundamental of realities.

Never forget that the Kingdom of God is not supposed to be “Pie in the sky when we die”; it is meant to be here and now and we are called to do all we can to bring it into being.

In the words of a song that came to my mind when preparing this

All God’s children get weary when they roam,
Don’t it make you want to go home?

In the first letter of Peter, part of which we read today, we are reminded that there is something special about us. We are a “chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.” How wonderful that is! We are part of something so wonderful, that it gives us a sense of being called.

And we are called to be a church together. We can not truly be the Body of Christ as individuals. I once heard an English priest talk about a sign he saw in front of a church: “You don’t have to go to church to be a Christian!” He thought this was a stupid way to get people to come inside, but more importantly, it is wrong.

You can’t truly be a Christian—a member of the Body of Christ—as an isolated human being unconnected with anyone else. We do this instead as a member of a community in faith—in our case, here at St. Christopher’s and in our Diocese and in our national Episcopal Church and, hopefully, in a continuing Communion of national churches. Together, we are baptized into the Church, nourished by the weekly Eucharist, we come together to rejoice at weddings and we come together to grieve, support and rejoice at funerals. All these things we do together.

Some appropriate words were spoken by Pope Benedict to the American bishops in Washington this week:

In a society which values personal freedom and autonomy, it is easy to lose sight of our dependence on others as well as the responsibilities that we bear towards them. This emphasis on individualism has even affected the Church, giving rise to a form of piety which sometimes emphasizes our private relationship with God at the expense of our calling to be members of a redeemed community. Yet from the beginning, God saw that “it is not good for man to be alone”. We were created as social beings who find fulfillment only in love–for God and for our neighbor. If we are truly to gaze upon him who is the source of our joy, we need to do so as members of the people of God. If this seems counter-cultural, that is simply further evidence of the urgent need for a renewed evangelization of culture.

In our country, we often emphasize the individual. The heroes of our culture have often been rugged individualists who rely on no one but themselves, as in the Western movies. While there is critical importance in the rights of individual men and women, when we overemphasize them, we lose sight of our need to be part of a community. For example, we may say that we shouldn’t have to pay school taxes, because we have no children in schools. We overlook the role that we have as members of a community to support an institution that benefits the community.

As members of a community of faith, we have a duty—we are called—to support that community. Now when we hear that, we often think of pledge cards. They are important, of course, but the financial resources we provide must always be insufficient on their own. We all have our own differing spiritual gifts and we are called upon to use those spiritual gifts to build up the Church. And if we don’t use them to build up or strengthen the Church, the gifts aren’t much use to us or the Church.

There is so much we are doing here and there is so much more we can do here as a community of faith—as that chosen race, that royal priesthood, as God’s own people.