Finding our Home in God

Texts: Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3.17-4.1; Luke 13.31-35

Augustine of Hippo wrote in his Confessions that ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in You’.  This suggests that there is a longing in the human heart that is forever searching and striving until it finds its home, its resting-place, in God.  Today I want to steal just a little of your time reflecting on this idea of home. Is home a building or a country, or is it a person? Is home something that can be had in this life, or must we wait for the next? Is there any Christian virtue in being home-LESS?  Can any of us really thrive without a home?

Augustine’s definition of home as a resting-place in God summarizes a great deal of biblical material.  The story of Abram as we have it in Genesis, for example, is essentially about a wandering Aramean who is uprooted from Ur (in modern-day Iraq) and promised a new home.  At the simplest level of understanding, that home is nothing other than blood and soil.  For what Abram seems to desire most is a family of his own flesh and blood who will inherit the land he is being given, gain a stable and rooted place within it, and so prosper from its cultivation.

Now this desire is surely familiar to all of us.  One may interpret the traditional Australian dream for the quarter-acre block and the four-bedroom house in precisely these terms.  For what does the possession of such a thing signify if not a home in which our family may prosper, a solid base from which prosperity may be obtained for oneself and one’s family?  And is this not why many thousands of asylum seekers risk their lives in leaky boats to come to our shores? Is it not because their homelands have become unliveable?  Is it not because they seek new homes in which they may find shelter from the storms of life, a place of stability in which their families may put down roots, work hard, and prosper?  Whether we live here already, or come to Australia from afar, this desire for a home of blood and soil seems deeply embedded in the human heart.  We will risk a great deal to obtain it, very often everything that we are and everything that we own.  In Australia we will even borrow our net worth many times over in order to obtain at least the illusion that we have a home, so basic is our hunger for such things.

Now, I am the last person in the world who is qualified to condemn such desires, such needs, for I myself am subject to them.  I believe all people are.  If we are to live in this world, then there are some basic things that make the world habitable: food and drink, stable housing, and the care and regard of family and community.  We all need them because we have, and are, bodies.  And yet . . .  obtaining of such things is clearly not enough to satiate the driving need in us.  Even the most wealthy, those who have secured a stable and prosperous home and family life - not just once, but many times over - seem restless for something more.  The magazines one reads in the doctor’s surgery seem to confirm this one truth (even if truth is the last thing on their collective agenda!)  Why is this the case? Why is it that desire continues to trouble us even when we already possess everything that we could possibly need to satisfy the needs of both body and soul?

Well.  The Psalmist is one such person, a person of great wealth, a king probably: King David of Israel, most likely.  He is someone who has obtained more by way of blood and soil than almost any of his contemporaries could have imagined.  And yet he is troubled by many fears, particularly the fear of his enemies. Here’s the rub, you see.  Human beings get greedy.  Even if we are quite comfortable and secure, we look over our neighbour’s fence and see something that we do not have or (more accurately, I suspect) imagine we do not have, and we begin to covet, to desire that which belongs to our neighbour.  And that, my friends, creates the phenomenon of the enemy.  The enemy is someone whom we believe (rightly or wrongly) wants to take away what we have obtained by our virtue and by the sweat of our brow, namely our blood and our soil.  The enemy is the one who envies us, or whom we ourselves envy. The enemy is the one who has what we covet, or else covets what we have.  And if we have enemies, we feel the need to defend what we have.  For we fear that the enemy is somehow stronger than us, and will one day steal away what we treasure most.

It is interesting to me that the Psalmist seeks refuge from his enemies in the temple, the ‘house’ or dwelling-place of the Lord.  What is it about this place that eases the Psalmist’s suffering?  Apparently it is the Lord himself, the Lord’s face.  Let me quote:

One thing I ask of the Lord, one thing I seek:
To dwell in the house of the Lord all my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the Lord.
For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling,
he will hide me in the shelter of his tabernacle
and set me high on a rock.
My heart says: ‘Seek his face!’
Your face, Lord, will I seek.

Apparently the Psalmist finds in the temple - its liturgy and music, its proportions and it architecture – the very face of God.  By worshipping there, one in a whole company of worshippers, the Psalmist apparently feels that he is being faced by God in that peculiarly biblical sense of having being caught in God’s gaze as the focus of God’s interest and attention, and so drawn into relationship with God as if by a meeting of the eyes, the first exchange of lovers.  Apparently the Psalmist finds in all the story-telling of the liturgy - the recounting of God’s relations with Israel from Abram, through the Patriarchs, the exodus, the Judges, and on into his own time – a God who provides a surer and more deeply interfused sense of home than even blood and soil can do.  For in the end, it seems – at least for the spirituality of the bible – blood and soil cannot be regarded as end in themselves.  They are most properly understood as symbols that point elsewhere: to God, and to the home that God can provide as the end of both our fear and our desiring.

For that is what is finally promised in the story of Abram, if you read the story carefully.  In amongst all of the praying and promising about land and family, there is this priceless line from the lips of the Lord:

‘Do not be afraid, Abram. For I am your refuge, your very great reward.’

Here we discover that it is God himself who promises to be Abram’s blood and soil, his land and his family.  God himself is promising to be Abram’s home.  The land of Canaan and the family from Abram’s loins give body to this promise, to be sure.  They give the promise a legitimate place to dwell in the world.  Yet they should never be mistaken for the fullness of God himself, any more than an icon or image of God should be mistaken for the divine.

There is a sense, therefore, in which the people of God will always be homeless.  Yes, in God’s grace, we may well be given homes and families. But these should never be mistaken for the home and family which God himself is for us.  For there is a city yet to come, whose architect and builder is God, and until we look for our citizenship in that ‘heavenly’ city, our hearts will continue to experience the restlessness of which Augustine speaks.  In the story of Abram that we read from Genesis, this ‘gap’ between the home we have and the home we long for is told in that strange ritual where a heifer, a ram and a lamb are cut in half and laid opposite each other, while a burning torch passes between them.  The ‘gap’ which separates the halves of the bodies signifies the gap between the promise and the fulfilment -  the covenant made before the enslavement of Israel in Egypt and its fulfilment when the people have crossed the River Jordan to take up possession of the land.  The burning torch, and the birds that are not so dismembered, are a sign that the gap will eventually be removed, that a final reconciliation will take place between the promise and its fulfilment.  In the meantime, Abram and his descendants can expect to be somewhat homeless, living here and living there, but never really belonging.

That ritual is repeated, in a way, when Jesus comes to the city of God on earth, the city of Jerusalem, and is utterly rejected in his own home.  He comes as the one who, like the God of the Psalms, longs to gather his scattered and homeless people into the shelter of his love, as a hen gathers her chicks beneath her wings.  He comes, in other words, to provide a home for God’s people in fulfilment of the promise to Abram.  But he is rejected and spurned and killed, as all prophets are.  God would provide a home for us, but we are inclined to cast God out from the homes we design for ourselves.  Sadly, this very often means that we are left with a feeling of desolation as we sit in our own homes and amidst our own families, the self-produced experience of a gap or rupture between the promise of home and its fulfilment.  For blood and soil on their own, apart from the home-making presence of God, are indeed desolate.  That is the tragic emptiness at the heart of the Nazi motto from the 1930s and 40s: ‘Blood and Soil!’!

So, there remains for the people of God a promise of home, and of Sabbath rest in God, a rest that was recently represented (albeit imperfectly) by Leonard Cohen like this:

Going home without my sorrow
Going home sometime tomorrow
Going home to where it’s better than before
Going home without my burden
Going home behind the curtain
Going home without this costume that I wore.

As we continue into the Lenten pilgrimage, this is the lesson God would have a learn: that it is only by a deliberate forgetting that we have homes and families that we shall find them more truly – not as the result of our labour and hard work – but as the gift and promise of a true home with God.  Let us never mistake the former for the latter, but let us give thanks that God is kind and let us wait for the arrival of God’s promise with joy and with praise. And let us find compassion in our hearts for all who are as homeless as we.

The Path of Prophets

Jeremiah 1.4-10; Psalm 71.1-6; 1 Corinthians 13; Luke 4.21-30

The path of the prophet of Yahweh is a difficult one.  Called by God in an irresistible fashion, the prophet is usually snatched away from what might be called a steady, secure job, and sent off to get him or herself into trouble with whatever religious and/or political authorities are in power at the time.  Take Jeremiah as an example.  According to the account in the book that bears his name, Jeremiah was little more than a boy when he was called, having just finished his apprenticeship to become a priest at the shrine in Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin.  In those days, being a priest was about as steady a job as one could get.  It was like being a public servant today.  For priests provided not only what our own government would call strictly ‘religious’ services – daily and weekly rituals, funerals, weddings and the like.  They also provided the literary, mathematical and administrative skills that kept the public sector going.  They represented the repository of the nation’s history and the main intellectual pool from which advisors to government on all kinds of issues of policy were drawn.  There was no safer job in the country, therefore, than that of a priest.

In this context it is understandable, is it not, that Jeremiah is fairly unhappy about being called to be a prophet?  ‘Ah, sovereign Lord’ he says to God, ‘I am only a child; I don’t know how to preach’.   Priests, of course, were rarely preachers.  They were administrators and liturgists, primarily.  Prophets, on the other hand, were preachers through and through.  So Jeremiah was probably right, technically, to mention these things.  Yet I doubt very much if Jeremiah’s youthful lack of experience with preaching were at the heart of his wariness.  For when the Lord replies to his excuses, he does so with these words:  ‘You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command.  Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you’.  So here is the more substantial source of Jeremiah’s concerns: prophets get into trouble.  Prophets are seized by the word of the Lord that is able – now as much as then – to uncover the secret motivations of the hearer’s hearts.  Jeremiah knew very well that preaching like this tended to be very unpopular with the people in charge.  He knew that the path of the prophet was therefore a lonely one, a dangerous one, and very often a hungry one.  For who would pay a prophet to tell them the truth?

Now, it is well-recognised in the Jewish and Christian traditions that prophets perform a very important role.  Their task, as the text from Jeremiah succinctly puts it, is to ‘uproot and to tear down’ corrupted governments and religious institutions so that more just and godly forms of human society can be built or planted in their place.   The prophet reminds those who run both nations and churches that they are straying from the blueprint for truth and goodness that is the word of Yahweh.  The prophet deconstructs the propaganda of corruption and injustice, if you like, in order to reconstruct the good, the noble and the true in the image of the word of God, which the prophet never ceases to embody both in word and in deed.  Of course, in order to fulfil this vocation, the prophet must place his or herself in a place of risk.  Prophets must tell the truth, a truth given them by God, even when it marginalises them from the ‘main game’, the ‘business as usual’ of churches, governments, or communities.  Prophets are never welcome, therefore, in their ‘home town’, as the text from Luke points out.  For the prophet knows the sins and weaknesses of his or her home town very well.  It is likely that the prophet has even participated in those sins.  It would be difficult not to, for sin is systemic and communal before it is individual and voluntary.  But the prophet is pulled away from the fabric of a sinful community by the word of God, which seizes him or her from the outside and grants him or her such a radiant vision of what the community could be in God, that its current form will no longer satisfy.  The prophet is pulled away from the community, in other words, in order to see it more clearly – pulled away in order to speak as from another place, the place of God.  That is how the priest, Jeremiah, ended up preaching against the very system that had nurtured him, the system of the temple and its priestly administrators.  

This is how it was for Jesus as well.  In order to speak the very words of God to his Jewish brothers and sisters, God had to pull him away from the finely textured fabric of what he, along with his community, had always believed.  That is how Luke would have it, anyway.  Having always believed that the people of God were the Jews, that God had no interest in anyone else, Jesus was seized by the Spirit of God at baptism.  Driven into the wilderness, he was shown that God’s love was far more universal than tribal Israel would allow.  By reflecting upon the preaching of the prophets of days gone by, it occurred to Jesus that God had very often, in Israel’s history, chosen to heal and honour people who were not members of the covenant God has made with Israel.  By this, Jesus became convinced that ‘Israel’ could no longer be thought about in biological or even geo-political terms.  For the Jesus of Luke’s gospel, ‘Israel’ was no longer a nation-state or a biological tribe.  Israel was the company of those who were grasped by God’s love, whatever their country or ethnicity, so that their lives were covenanted to God through their obedience to the call of love.  Of course, when Jesus returned from the desert to share what he had learned, when he stood among his own people to speak the new word he had received from God, they were not particularly impressed.  Indeed, as Luke tells it, they became so angry that they drove him to the brow of the hill overlooking the town, and threatened to throw him over.  Jesus was able to walk away, on this occasion, but we know that he eventually died for his cause.  Not in vain, of course.  But the cost of reform was his very life.

This prophetic pattern of being torn away from the community in order to reform the community in the image of its maker is repeated over and over again in the history of the church.  It begins with Jesus and his followers, but continues in the desert fathers of the Constininian era, who left the increasingly wealthy and powerful church of the Roman Empire in order to protest its forgetting of simplicity, poverty and compassion.  It continued in the founding of monastic communities by Pachomius and Benedict.  It continued in the resistance of the Celtic churches to Roman authority and the Franciscan reforms of the 13th century.  It continued in the protestant reformers, and in Wesley’s re-introduction of primitive Christian evangelism and discipleship into the Anglican Church.  It continued in the liberation movements within South-American Catholicism, in Vatican 2, in Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement, and even in the formation of the Uniting Church.

But where is the openness to prophecy in the church today?  We allow our prophets to critique government and the social organisation of the wider community (sometimes).  We allow them to be scathing about all that is going wrong in that sphere.  But what do we do when our prophets call the church to reform, to abandon (for example) its increasing comfort with the ideologies of secularism and consumerism and turn, again, to the covenant with a God of universal love?  Or how do we respond when the prophets call the church to abandon its oh-so-rational neo-liberalism and turn, again, to the wild and generous word of the gospel?  And which way do we look when the prophets call us to put way our many celebrity cults, with their Amway-like gathering around gurus and material success and turn, instead, to the simple poverty of the Christ who said that true life only came to those who were willing to let such things go?  I put it to you that the voices of the prophets are seldom heard or taken seriously where the most important decisions are being made.  At worst, they are branded heretics.  At best they are simply ignored, just as governments now ignore street protestors.   Sometimes the prophets are simply done away with, banished with guns or with bureaucratic machines, as in the Philippines at present.  Again, it seems, even in a church which formally honours the prophets, we are loath to hear what the prophets are trying to telling us right now.

I pray, with the Australian poet, James MacAuley, that God would raise up contemplatives and prophets to remind us of the pearl of great price that is the love of God, are pearl we are constantly in danger of putting aside.  Listen to MacAuley’s prayer:

Incarnate Word,in whom all nature lives,Cast flame upon the earth:raise up contemplativesAmong us, men whowalk within the fireof ceaseless prayerimpetuous desire.Set pools of silenceIn this thirsty land.

God grant that it may be so.