MUMC Sermon-08/27/06

27 August 2006

The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost

"Home From Vacation"

1 Kings 8 (1, 6, 9-13, 22-30, 41-43); John 6:56-69

The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.

“Did you have a good vacation?” I’ve heard that question a few times recently, from people who seem genuinely interested. I note that there is bit of curiosity to it, too. In translation, “Did you have a good vacation,” also means, “What did you do?”

So, I’ll tell you. It was a good vacation, but it wasn’t that relaxing. First, we drove to Boston on Sunday, three weeks ago now, where we stopped to see Lynne’s 87-year-old father. The next day, we drove to Maine, to share a few days with Lynne’s sister and her family, who, incidentally, we hope will be visiting with us next week. We stayed in a cabin near Acadia Park, where we read, bicycled, soaked up a bit of sun and a lot of rugged scenery, rented a boat for a day cruise around the harbor, and ate fish and lobster.

Then, on Saturday, we drove a bit south, though still in Maine, and attended the wedding of a young director from Portland, whose family Lynne came to know when she served as the nanny for him and his sisters one summer some time ago. Then we drove even further South, down the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Parkway and finally into South Carolina, for a brief visit with friends before renting a truck, packing it with the last of my old sermons, theology books, and assorted belongings, and drove back here. We arrived back home in Mamaroneck last Saturday, unloaded the truck, took it to White Plains to turn it in, and went to a party to help a friend celebrate his 50^th birthday.

Yes, it was a good vacation. It was also busy. And it was tiring. At the end, I found that I was exhausted not merely from driving over 3,000 miles, but from the weariness of having been in several kinds of “home.” First, there was the sense of being with Lynne’s family, now very much my family, too. Being with her father, though he no longer lives in the house that Lynne called “home,” is very much a reminder of home. Being with Lynne’s sister, Lee, and her husband, Steve, and their daughter, Lizzie, felt like a kind of homecoming, too. With them, I read a preacher’s memoir of his first years in ministry, taking me to that emotional “home” of my own first years as a pastor in rural South Carolina.

Driving back through Virginia, I found the long-forgotten grave of my great-grandmother’s brother. I’ve been digging through my ancestral roots for some time, which, I suppose, is a kind of long journey home for me. For some reason, no one in my circle ever spoke much at all about the history of this branch of our family tree. So there was something of homecoming to drive into the cemetery in Charles Town, West Virginia, park the car, and step out to find a familiar name on the stone at my feet.

Then, seeing my mother and my sister brought family memories back in a flood. And packing bits and pieces I’d left behind when I moved to New York City in 2000, I found that each box carried not just things from my past, but the memories each thing represents.

Finally, moving books and sermons and pictures into the parsonage next door has made it, for me, truly my home. I had not expected, though perhaps I should have, that doing just this last bit of moving in has made me feel so much more “at home.” I feel very much as if I have finally “arrived.”

The experience of my vacation, touching as it did these various aspects of “home,” brought me to thinking about home itself. What is ‘home”? Is it where our things are? Some what. Although as we recall the events on the Gulf Coast a year ago, as Katrina wiped away forever the things of so many lives, we know that there is “home” even after the loss of such items. Or is “home” where our families live? Yes, but we move away from those we love, and still have “home.” Home is where our hearts are, where our partner is. Yes. But maybe home goes even deeper.

It was through the lens of that experience of moving in, of coming home, if you will, that I read the lesson from 1 Kings for this morning. Perhaps you won’t find it surprising that I see that story as a kind of homecoming, as well. It is a homecoming for Solomon the king, and, a homecoming for God.

In fact, it would be most accurate to say that the celebration at the temple marks the enthronement of both Solomon AND God: It is God’s homecoming, as the ark of the covenant comes into the temple; but it is Solomon’s day, too. Notice that the king, as kings tend to do, takes all the credit for the community’s labor: “I have built you an exalted house,” says Solomon to God, ‘”a place for you to dwell in forever.” From now on, God and Solomon, and the people of the nation as well, have a home. They are settled. Because as God arrived home, in Jerusalem, in the temple, accompanied with musical celebration, dance, and all the trappings fit for a God or a king, both Solomon and the nation have arrived as well.

To put it another way, no one of us is ever fully at home until God is with us there as well.

It’s a simple thought, isn’t it? And yet, in its simplicity, this notion is easily overlooked. We are never at home, unless and until God dwells with us. We are at home only in God’s presence. Even as I have been comforted by having my own books, my own tools, my own pictures and trinkets from my past, I’ve realized that one dimension of today’s lesson is to teach that “home” is, finally, where God is.

Even such an affirmation is tricky, though. For it is not the place, really, that becomes the home of God. Yes, there remains to this day, a holy mystery about Jerusalem for people of faith. It does so for us, for the Jews. It is home for us. It is home for the people of Islam as well. It is an eternal city, a holy city, drawing, even as Solomon suggests, “all the peoples of the earth.”

The temptation is to think that God lives in Jerusalem because the city is holy. But turn that thought around: Jerusalem is holy because God lives there. You see, it is the God who is at home in our own hearts that gives us a sense of mystery. It is not the place that is holy, in itself. It is, rather, that holiness of God enthroned now in our own lives that inclines us toward the sacred places of our history. Home, finally, is where God is. And where is that? With us, whenever we invite God to dwell among and within us.

Or, to use the metaphor used by Jesus in today’s gospel lesson, we human beings are “home” when God abides in us. The language used is of a meal. John, the most “spiritual’ of the gospels, some would say, is also the most physical, because it is very sacramental. And this is sacramental language. Did you hear it? Listen again: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.” (John 6:56 and 57) In truth, we can listen to the sentence only because we have some experience with the language. We know this is sacramental language. It’s about our sacrament, the meal that we share, commonly known to us by several names: Holy Communion, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper. Still, it’s actually a challenging image, isn’t it?

What’s at stake is a deeply spiritual reality. We are invited, week after week, season after season, generation after generation to come home to God. Coming home to God just might be the most important homecoming of our lives. And we accomplish it by issuing an invitation of our own. For the truth is that we don’t come to God as much as God comes to us. But God never overwhelms or invades. God waits. God waits for an invitation.

In a moment I’ll invite you to come to the table of the Lord. You are invited here to this table to receive this God who waits. Today I will invite you to come and kneel. You will be asked to pray. You may use this as a time to invite God into your life, as a time to invite God into your heart, as a time to invite God into your journey of faith. You can use the time to open the door, in a sense, to the one who knocks, the one who stands, the one who waits.

Pray as long as you wish. Then, when you are ready, open your hands, that I may know you are ready to receive the sacrament. I will come, to give you the elements. And I suspect that God, in Christ, will in some way come to you as well. For you are opening your hands not only to me, but to the one who sent me. Know that you are opening your hands to God as well. And, in doing so, you may indeed be coming home, just as I took a long journey this summer, to find my way here.

How was my vacation? Some have asked. It was wonderful, really. I went away for a while, that I might come home. Leaving helped me to be here in a new way. I feel as if I’m opening my hands anew, waiting for all that God will give me. I am home, because God is with me, and God is with us all.

Amen.