YOU CAN COME HOME
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Text: Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16, 25-27, 29, 31-5:2
A few weeks ago I preached a sermon entitled “You Can’t Go Home.” It was based on Jesus’ difficult experience when he tried to preach in his home synagogue in Nazareth and was run out of town. Now it seems as if I am contradicting myself by asserting that you can come home. Well, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said long ago, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” At least I can delude myself momentarily.
In the Nazareth story, Jesus wanted to go home, tried to go home, but his home could no longer contain him or hear we what he had to say or accept his prophetic power. This is a downside of homecoming, when home will not recognize your growth or allow you to be who you have become. Remember we speculated that in Jesus’ time, Nazareth consisted of maybe 120 to 150 people who were mostly Jesus’ extended family. They thought they knew all they needed to know about him, about Mary’s son. There was no room there for him to be Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
But this morning we want to consider other aspects of home, for surely one story cannot contain the whole picture of such a deep-seated and sacred concept. Actually, we’ve spent a fair amount of time in the past few weeks considering various dimensions of home and homecoming – in the story of Jesus’ visit to Nazareth, three consecutive sermons on the Parable of the Prodigal Son and even in exploring habits of the heart.
I am sure home weighs heavy on my heart right now as I have made two sad journeys to my own hometown to say farewell to my brother and be with the rest of my family. Home was the place to be but it was not easy - so many memories, good and bad, joyous and painful, challenging and healing. I know I have an ambivalent relationship to my hometown. For many reasons, I left long ago. I got on a train when I was 18 and headed for the big city. In some ways, I have never looked back. I have never wanted to live there. It is too conservative, too provincial, too full of difficult and painful memories. I have operated on the belief that I have outgrown my hometown. It’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. The church I grew up in has little to say to me. Its worship style, theology and spiritual practice do not speak to me or touch me or move me. My mother stills finds a church home there, which is good for her, but it’s not for me.
Still, there is sadness in those words for me. There remains at a deep level a longing for something that my town and my church represented in my youth. There was home there that nurtured me and helped to shape who I am today. There were people who embraced me and cared for me and prayed for me and supported me. There are people there who still do, even when they don’t understand me or what I’m about. Home is always bittersweet to some degree. But home is not necessarily place bound and so you can come home somewhere even if it’s not exactly where you started. Home can be right here.
In his wonderful novel, Jayber Crow, the great American writer and thinker, Wendell Berry, tells the tale of an iconoclastic character, one Jonah Crow, eventually known as Jayber by the good folk of Port William, Kentucky, where he lives and works as the village barber. Jayber was born in Port William, orphaned at 10, after which he was raised in a church-run orphanage where he feels the call to preach. It is only in Bible college that his questions get the better of him, so he sets out on journey that leads him back to the village of his birth. The novel tracks Jayber’s life in and reflection on village life in and around Port William through the great social upheavals of most of the twentieth century. Though he remains a bachelor in unrequited love for Mattie Chatham, his life is rich in association with the various characters that make up the village and the surrounding countryside on the banks of the Kentucky River. He loves the rhythms and rituals that make up its life and the people that are its community.
Eventually he takes on the duties of church custodian and grave digger. He walks to church every Sunday over a “cobble of quibbles” and sees himself as the “ultimate Protestant” who believes that “Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one.” He understands Christ as one who “must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of his creatures.” And always these creatures journey together in community of one sort or another. Jayber sits in the empty sanctuary and ruminates about the community that gathers there: “What they came together for was to acknowledge, just by coming, their losses and failures and sorrows, their need for comfort, their faith always needing to be greater, their wish (in spite of all words and acts to the contrary) to love one another and to forgive and be forgiven, their need for one another’s help and company and divine gifts, their hope (and experience) of love surpassing death, their gratitude.” Here was home.
I’m not going to dwell on this morning’s reading from Ephesians. It is quite clear and speaks for itself. The old image is rich and compelling, there is one body of Christ with many parts, each with its own function, each a gift to the whole. The parts all have to work together and look after one another for the body to be healthy and functional. “…lead a life,” the apostle adjures, “worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” What if home was really like that – filled with humility, gentleness, patience, love and peace? What if we really did speak the truth in love – not undervaluing one at the expense of the other? What if home was a place in which we were truly honest with one another BECAUSE of our love for one another? What if we lived to promote “the body’s growth in building itself up in love”? What if we really dedicated our home life to putting away “all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice” and decided to “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven...”? What difference would these qualities and practices make in our own lives and what difference might we then make in the world around us?
That sounds to me like a home that would worth be coming back to. In fact, there is enough of that here already to draw us back Sunday after Sunday, walking over the “cobbles of our quibbles,” carrying all our assorted baggage, looking for answers and living our questions, seeking to be faithful, hearts tinged with compassion. Whether we experience it occasionally or regularly, this is what Homecoming is about – finding the place where we can acknowledge losses and failures and sorrows, where we can find comfort, where faith can grow, where love and forgiveness and hope can be experienced, where gratitude can be expressed. This is such a place. At our best, we are this sort of community. It is our strength and it is the good news we have to carry to a wider world. There is home here and you can come home. Welcome home!