Welcome Home - sermon for Sept 13

“Welcome Home”

Rev. Alison Longstaff, Sept 13, 2015

Bath Church of the New Jerusalem

Exodus 29:28-46; John 14 portions; Heavenly Secrets 10153 

Welcome back!  Welcome home!

It is a wonderful feeling, this feeling of coming home.  Humans need a sense of home more than we need anything else.  After any trauma or even just after a rough day, our first instinct is to go home—home, where we are safe; home, where we can rest and heal; home, where we can be truly ourselves; home, where we are loved exactly the way we are.

We all know this truth about home, and this is the home we all long for at the end of a long day.

Unfortunately, many people in this world do not get to have that experience of “home.” From foster children who are bounced around our social system, to families struggling with troubled dynamics, to the terrible plight of today’s Syrian refugees, there are many are in this world who have no consistently safe home to which they can go at the end of the day. 

Home.  In the human hierarchy of needs, home is foundational.  It is a level one need to have shelter and physical self-care. It includes the level two need for safety and security as well.

There is a primal human need for home.  “Home” is where we go to be restored and to find our center both naturally and spiritually.  We need to return to ourselves, to gather ourselves, to rest in safety and prepare for the coming day. That is why we feel such a strong need to go home when we have had a hard day.

Just this past week a friend was voicing her distress over the plight of the Syrian refugees.  You see, she knows what it is like to be a refugee. She fled Eastern Europe as a child all those years ago.  Her family had only a suitcase and the clothes on their backs.  She remembers to this day what it felt like, and feels keenly for these Syrians.

Can you imagine having to leave your home and country forever, not knowing if you would ever come back?  This is not selling your home to go to a new one.  This is walking away from the only home you have. I have heard from several friends in California who have been going through something similar, having time to grab only a few possessions before fleeing the wild-fires; not knowing if they will ever see their home and possessions again. Most of us cannot even imagine the scope of the rootlessness and sense of disorientation such a leaving can cause. 

Refugees are lucky if they even have time to stuff a few things into a suitcase.  Everything else gets left behind.  Now imagine that you must throw even that one suitcase of belongings away to save someone else.  Into the tossing waves or the fires go your most precious books and keepsakes—the family treasures, the spare clothes, important papers—everything.  You have nothing left but your life and your clothes, and if you are lucky, your family.

 

Do you feel that?  That compassion that you may be feeling is the presence of God within you.  That sympathy and that heartbreak are the Holy Spirit speaking in your heart.  God hurts when we hurt.  We are created such that we hurt when others are hurting.  That basic human empathy is the fabric of our souls—it is our birthright—to feel joy with and for others and to feel shock and sorrow with and for others.  That energetic movement—that e-motion—is the stirring of your spiritual blood, for you are made of love.

I think of all the thousands of people who stepped up to help at ground zero in the days and weeks following the 911 attacks.  Their sense of empathy and connection compelled them to give aid any way they could. Massage therapists and trauma counselors, volunteers to deliver water and sandwiches, truck drivers and hands that unloaded trucks, each heart found a way to serve according to their call. Each one was equally valuable and needed, yes, from the elite trauma and bereavement counselors all the way down to the Porta Potty service workers who made sure the hordes of volunteers had somewhere to, um, “go.”

Somewhere to go.  Yes, even including the euphemism, isn’t that what home is all about? 

We need a home to go to.  We need repeatedly to go home.  This church is a home for many of us here, and we don’t know what we would do without it.

Home. Home is where we are safe. Home is where we can rest and heal. Home is where we can relax and be ourselves and are loved anyway. Home is the place where we belong.

I hope this church feels just that way for each person here.  If you see this place as your home church I hope it feels safe and healing, accepting and supportive.  My experience is that this congregation does pretty amazingly well at these things for each other.  My experience is also that a few among this group are excellent at welcoming spiritual refugees. Several make an effort to invite new people back to their homes to build a better sense of welcome and inclusion. For those who do, well done!

In the deepest spiritual sense, God is our home.  The God of Love is what we have come from and to whom we will return. As our truest home, God ought to be our number-one go-to haven to Whom we bring all our hurts and all our trust. Is it true that God is the One to whom you turn when you need to rest and heal? Is it true that God is the One with whom you can be truly and completely yourself knowing that God loves you exactly the way you are?  Do you live and move and have your being in God?

Does that describe your relationship with God?  Does that describe your abiding inner emotional experience of God?

If so, you are among the very few and very lucky.

If not, you are like most people. Your answer may have been closer to, “Well, not exactly….”

Just for the record, while I know with my whole head, that God is my safest haven, I have trouble remembering that and acting on it.  I have trouble trusting that it is really true.  I have trouble living that truth.  (Some might say that that disqualifies me from being a good pastor.  But from within my socks and shoes, I think it at least makes me an honest pastor, and a pastor that knows what it is like to struggle to remember the genuine reality of God’s love.  What is the old saying? “Them as can’t, teach?”)  Even Mother Theresa struggled with her faith, so maybe I’m in good company.  And so if you are like me, you are in Mother Theresa’s company too.

 

Why is it that we have so much trouble making God our home, or what is the same thing, making our home in God?  Why don’t we simply trust God and from then on live in “the peace that passes all understanding”?

Swedenborg would say that our difficulty being able to sense and believe in the Divine presence is the natural result of our being temporarily stuck in physical bodies.  He would say that while we all have spiritual senses that will awaken after this physical body dies, meanwhile those senses are dulled, bogged down, or even switched off while we are conscious in these dense physical bodies. These physical eyes and ears are designed to see and hear physical things, not spiritual things.  And when we are plugged in to this physical reality which is so very, well, REAL to us, it is well-nigh impossible to believe in anything else. It is a bit like being a fish, with eyes and ears and senses designed to work in water.  While we live in the water, we have almost no idea what is going on above the water and may have trouble believing such a reality even exists.

Not only are our spirits cloaked in physical bodies, it often seems that when we need God the most, God is nowhere to be “seen”!  Of course we lose faith!  It takes training to learn to see God in the midst of the darkest times, and often our own anger and disappointment and sense of abandonment create a block to our inner senses.  We become so disillusioned about God that we don’t even want to hear an explanation of where God was when we needed Him/Her.  But if we look at our mortal condition through the eyes of love, it is hard to feel judgment for our understandable struggle to believe.  Of course we doubt and look elsewhere for security and comfort! It is only, well, natural.

Exactly.

I almost wonder if God designed our mortal condition the way it is to encourage us “grow up” spiritually.  How many of us would ever leave the comfort of God’s arms if we weren’t drawn irresistibly away?  How many children would learn to walk or run or do things for themselves if they never left their mother’s lap?  Looking back over my spiritual evolution, I strongly suspect that I would NEVER have left the spiritual nest or learned to fly if God hadn’t gently but firmly pushed me out.

Perhaps we cannot truly appreciate God as our safe haven until we have lived for a long time without that presence?  Rather like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, perhaps we need to go somewhere very different for a while, because the struggle to find our way back teaches us to value what we had all along.  Perhaps it is the way God sets us down a few steps away and then beckons with parental arms and an encouraging smile, “Now come back to me!  You can do it!” and waits to sweep us up in joy when our faltering steps make our haphazard way back to the Divine embrace.

That is how we grow stronger.  That is how we learn to become spiritual adults. And God sets us down again and again, inviting us back. And we grow stronger with each step.

Before we end, I will just dip briefly into the gems of the internal meaning of John 14.  John 14 starts with, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”  It starts with, “Don’t worry so much!”

The rest of the chapter is about finding our way back home, which is couched in a discussion of the Father and the Son being one.  Father is “concept” and Son is “action.” Father is “intention” and Son is “fulfillment.” These two things MUST become one in our lives, or they are without meaning or power. When Jesus commands, “You believe in God, believe also in Me,” he is saying, “You love the idea of God, now realize that you must walk the path I set before you to find your way home.  You’ve got the ideas; now start living them.”

But Philip (representing us) says, “Show us the father and we will be satisfied.”  “Philip” means “a lover of horses.”  “Horses” in the Word always symbolize our understanding, so “Philip” is our love of ideas.  Philip is saying, “Isn’t if good enough if we just think and talk about the ideas?”  This shows our reluctance to make changes in our way of living.  WE are satisfied by just having shiny and interesting ideas.  We balk at allowing God’s teachings to transform our feelings and lives.  This is rejecting a lived theology (Jesus).  There is a part of us that is happy to keep God as a concept, far away, up in the sky, not right here, down on the ground, in this moment and in this choice.

Jesus says, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?”  He is saying, “I have walked with you and asked you to walk with me.  I have loved you and asked you to love me, and still you are saying, ‘I’d rather just keep it all about ideas, okay?’”

The only possible answer to that is, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  Keeping the commandments means allowing the golden rule to guide us. It means that the learning we do in this space shows up in a transformed life out there.  It means that we become more aware day by day of how we are not as kind as we might be, or not as trusting as we might be, or not as wise as we might be, and we make small changes. It is in these moment by moment wobbly choices that we take our baby steps back to our true home.  God’s love and wisdom find their home in our lives through small, daily changes.

John 14 ends with, “Let us arise and go from here.”  Jesus is saying is time to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. It is time to move on towards our true spiritual home, which is with God.

The closer we draw to this state of spiritual homecoming, the closer we will get to that place where we feel most alive and most ourselves.  Yes, it takes work, but the more we do the work, the better the work feels, until the life of heaven becomes something we love and which gives us joy.

May you continue to walk towards your truest home, for as you do, the more clearly you will hear and feel God’s message in your hearts:

“Welcome back. Welcome home!”

The Readings

Exodus 29: 38-46 portions “Now this is what you shall offer on the altar: two lambs of the first year, day by day continually.  This shall be a continual burnt offering throughout your generations at the door of the tabernacle of meeting before the Lord, where I will meet you to speak with you.  I will dwell among the Israelites, and I will be their God. And they shall know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt that I might dwell among them; I am the Lord their God.

John 14: 1, 8-9, 18, 23, 27, 31 

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in Me.

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”  

Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?

“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. 

“If you love Me, keep My commandments; and My Father will love you, and We will come to you and make Our home with you. Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. 

But that the world may know that I love the Father, I live as he commanded me. Arise, let us go from here.

Heavenly Secrets 10153. 

The statement, “And I will dwell in the midst of the children of Israel” from Exodus is describing a spiritual dynamic. It is describing the way the Lord flows into and is present within the loving-kindness of those “in heaven” and those “in the Church.” “In the midst” is describing those things that live most deeply inside us, which always starts out good because it is from God.

The Lord flows into and is present within a person’s kindness and good intentions, which are always from the Divine Love. This goodness is each person's true self, for each person’s character is made of good desires. “Goodness,” here means what we love; everything we love we call “good” anyway.