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Bring Us Home
A sermon preached by the Reverend Stephanie J. Nagley, December 17, 2006 at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Bethesda, Maryland.
And God says, “I will bring you home.”
Buried deep in the words of the prophet Zephaniah are those words: “I will bring you home.”
We read ancient story, the bible, not to satisfy some nostalgic itch but to hear God speak to us as we are experiencing our days, as we are living here and now, this Advent, this December, this year of our Lord two thousand and six, in this corner of Bethesda, on this section of land, in this church.
“I will bring you home.” “We carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home...(but) to be homeless the way that people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not really be at home in any of them.” [1]
Those are the words of Fred Buechner. He’s another kind of prophet like Zephaniah, reading us like a book and seeing truth that we may try to hide. He and the prophets of old tell the truth about our troubles and our struggles and what it’s like to be refugee, to be a people in exile.
This is the early service and many of you who come to the early service know all about exile. You’ve lived through most of it. You’ve come out of the Great Depression. You’ve lived through polio epidemics and more than one war. You know what is to love and lose. You know what it is to work and to retire. Many of you have lived long enough that you may have finally seen the end of your exile and are finally home. You may indeed have found that place in your souls where you are at last at peace.
So I hope you will listen as one who may minister to that vast group of people who remain in exile, who are ridden with the anxiety of trying to find a way home. We need your wisdom to help us through, to help us understand what really matters.
Most of us are refugees, wandering around, trying to get home. We see those in exile every day. We see it in the anxiety of the young executive who is working too many hours to achieve a sense of worth. It’s there in the mother or father whose every move seems about their children - who agonize over the right schools, and the right sports and the right church or synagogue or mosque. We see it in the materialism that drives us to foolish purchases and thinking that one more thing will make our lives better.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t work hard or shouldn’t care about the welfare of our children – but it is to say that our work, our houses, our cars, our achievements are inadequate substitutes for our real longing which is to at last feel some sense of completeness and of rest – and as it has always been we are restless until we find our way to God.
I was at a meeting recently with several clergy. We pondered the question about why people should be in church. Why deal with God at all. Someone made the observation that many of us live in communities where people have most of what they need to be comfortable – nice homes, healthy bank accounts, investments, education, fabulous vacations – so why mess with God?
And then we struck on the very thing that is common to all and especially to those who seem to have everything – no ‘thing’ ever has made our world right, no ‘thing’ has ever satisfied us completely. As long as we are seeking ‘things’ and trying to live for others we remain in exile, and we long for home. Someone in the group said God matters because when you have it all there is still the waking up in the middle of the night with that anxiety that for some reason with all that you have life still doesn’t feel quite right.
The prophet Zephaniah wrote during a terrible time in Israel history. Assyria dominated Israel and Israel tried as best she could to accommodate and get along. Zephaniah wrote about all of this a long time ago but he might as well have been using a laptop at Starbucks to compose his warning or wandering the aisles of Balducci’s looking at our faces. Some things never change – at least never change when we keep trying to make it work the same old ways.
Zephaniah said God has had enough. God has had enough of economic injustice and political corruption. God has had enough. God has had enough of what turns the people inside out and right side down, that makes the people all crazy about all the wrongs things, that makes people do things in all the wrong ways. And Zephaniah heard God saying that God was going to put an end to it all – at least temporarily - by dismantling the old power systems and bringing in a new way of being.
The powers to be loved being powerful. And religion was doing more harm than good and God said enough. God has nothing to do with that. God doesn’t have to screw up our world to get us to pay attention. We’ve got the corner on that market and God knows we can screw up our world without any divine intervention. And so as it often happens when power and politics are trusted instead of goodness and mercy, everything falls apart.
Assyria blew in and destroyed Israel. But in the destruction something very important happened to the people of Israel. They finally had to face what they were most needing. Without all the stuff, they finally had to face their longing. And in their longing, the people learned to express their grief and sadness and their anger. Without all the stuff to get in the way, the people of Israel, who are now in exile, who are without a home, without a sense of wholeness, got real and really dealt with the truth of their hearts. [2]
If we really get real and are honest about our hearts we may discover that what we’re experiencing is a sense of exile. We want to go home. We want that place where we feel whole.
If the church has any reason for being, if the church has a place in this very abundant yet anxiety- driven life we live, it is because the church, this church, is meant to be the sacred container for what really matters. This is where we process what is most important to us as human beings. Sometimes people are surprised that tears well up in their eyes when they sit in church. They didn’t expect it and are surprised. But sitting before God and each other our guard drops somehow and we get to release the tears that we’ve needed to give up for a long time. The church is where we get to get real with our lives and what really matters. This is where we bring our tears and our ordinary troubles, and our laughter and our uncertainty. We play out what is most important to us here—we eat together the bread and wine of Holy Communion –we attend each other’s weddings and funerals, we are a part of each other’s baptisms.
We’re not here to be nice, or to be together in a community without conflict or tension or difficulty. We have our good times for sure, but the church is meant to get down and dirty with our souls. The church is here to hear our hearts and to be a vehicle for our healing. The church is the place where we tell the truth and where the truth leads us home.
In this season of Advent we’re given the time to get real with ourselves, with each other and with God. We’re given the space to think about and make happen the real experience of the church for an age that is driven into exile, for a people longing to find their way home.
[1] Longing for Home (back to article)
[2] William Willimon, Duke University, Sermon Archives, 1997 (back to article)
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