Be Home

 

Ojibway writer, Richard Wagamese wrote: Home is the culmination of my hopes and dreams and desires. Home is a feeling in the centre of my chest of rightness, balance and harmony of mind, body and spirit. Home is where the channel to Creator and the Grandmothers gets opened every day and where life gains its focal point. To be away from it even for a day, is that acute awareness. It is also knowing that home is what I bring to it, and in that is the sure and quiet knowledge that home is within me and always was.

 

Our Advent theme of shelter has given me time to think about home and what home means to me. Home is a feeling in the centre of my chest… Wagamese describes home as being within and alludes to life as a journey, a going out and a coming in, from home that always was and is, here (hands on heart), within. Within, I have a home where God resides, and the wise ones are encountered. John the Baptizer, in his own way, invited and invites people to return home. His words open the door for people to step across the threshold, away from the interruptions of the day, and to find shelter in living God’s covenant. It is no mistake that John mentions Abraham and the ancestors in his argument, which reminds the people of safety and hope in God’s promises and familial ties. Dwelling in John’s words there is an admonishment that the people have wandered away from God’s promises into wilderness, desert, and inhabitable places. Preparing the way, opening the door for the coming Messiah, John urges the people to return home; home as the culmination of centuries of prophetic hopes and dreams and desires of a whole people.   

The Psalms chosen for our journey through Advent were chosen because of their focus on shelter. Psalm 107, this morning’s, is a Psalm of Thanksgiving on return from exile. It expresses home as resettlement in the land and a return to covenant living with God, God being at the centre of covenant relationship.

Home for me is built and nurtured, in and from God and covenant relationship. Psalm 107 describes my sense of home, the feeling in the centre of my chest of rightness, balance and harmony of mind, body and spirit, by inclusion of the words: steadfast, love, endures, gathered, inhabited, satisfied, saved from distress, fruitful, established, blessed, makes their families like flocks.

These words for me represent home, home as a sense of permanence and belonging.

 

I led a retreat where the participants brought their Bibles, for some that meant accessing the translation of their choosing via the Biblegateway site on their phones. During the reading of the text from Luke, the person reading received a phone call. Now the phone was on silent so none of us knew, except that the person stopped reading abruptly mid-thought. Whoever has two coats must … the incoming call interrupted the reading because the pop-up notification covered the words being read.

Interrupted.

This had me consider that John the Baptist’s call inviting people to return home, was a voice interrupting the people of his day and their habits, a people who were lost, having wandered away from home without even noticing. They were a people passing through the Temple without finding sanctuary, following laws just because one was supposed to, and subsisting in the land but land occupied by strangers. John’s voice from the wilderness interrupted lives that were filled with fake shelter; shelter that was inadequate to meet the peoples’ needs.

The inquisitiveness of the people in the wilderness illustrates the human desire for home, for a sense of permanence and belonging; the feeling in the centre of the chest of rightness, balance and harmony. John the Baptist’s direction to those who asked, “what shall I do?” is simple enough, he opens the door to the home of God’s covenant. To be home one is to care and share. John’s message: Care and share, is covenant living in a nutshell. The message is the same as all prophets and teachers: love God, love your neighbour.

More specifically commentators describe John’s directions of care and share as building home through merciful justice, radical generosity, and vocational integrity. Each addressed to specific kinds of home to be created based on the askers’ roles in society and their skills. Covenant living, living from the home of one’s being is to create home for others, to invite others home, and to prepare the way for permanence and belonging.

 

Home for me is really about heart connections. Home is people close to me, the ones I feel that I can face any circumstance of life with, the ones I can ask for help, the ones I act most like myself around.

Caring and sharing for me come from the heart of my relationship with God.

 

There is a vast array of reasons for people to be excluded from home, from a sense of permanence and belonging. Often reasons are out of a person’s control. Whatever the reasons, broken relationships, having no social equity or resources, makes one very much alone, with no backup plan or people to gather around when in need of support. John the Baptist’s words have interrupted us in this house, in this spiritual home, where for us we have found a sense of belonging and permanence, caring and sharing in community. John calls us to care and share, not just in this home, but in living God’s covenant in all of our relationships … and because we have experienced home as described in the Psalm 107: steadfast, love, endures, gathered, inhabited, satisfied, saved from distress, fruitful, established, blessed, makes their families like flocks; we can prepare the way and create home for those searching for home.

 

With hands on heart:

Within this house, God abide,

A home of steadfast love inside.

Inhabiting peace by caring,

Building home by sharing.

Ever welcoming

Permanently belonging.

Home – an indwelling of God.

Home – to be cared and shared in the world.