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John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church December 14, 2003 Zephaniah
3:14-20/Philippians 4:4-7
Poetry has come late to me, and I am grateful that it has.
The poet Wendell Berry has become a favorite of mine. He is,
or at least was, by trade, a Kentucky farmer, born, though,
with an artistic bent as well, which is not to say that farming
is not an art.
At any rate, Berry is also a person of faith, and every Sunday
afternoon following church he takes a long walk in his woods,
in what sounds to me like an excellent Sabbath discipline. When
he returns home from his Sabbath walk, Berry sits down and writes
a poem – “Sabbath Poems,” they are called.
They are filled with strong images of nature, an acute sense
of human longing, and an awareness of God’s providence
and majesty that is worth our remembering on this Sabbath morning.
Here is one such poem: “I too am not at home/When you
are gone/And I am here alone. /Until you come/ I am as dead,
condemned/To fractionhood, /A stillness of the blood, /Dark
in the ground. /But I rise up alive/When you come near/Our place
of flowers where/Alone I live.”
It is surely a love poem, about a missed partner. Its sentiment,
though, speaks beyond romance, to restlessness, to wandering,
to homelessness. “I too am not at home when you are gone.”
It is a kind of prayer, seeking, searching, wandering, until
the relationship is made right again.
It is the story of our faith, is it not? Our own personal journeys
and the broader journey to which we are grafted. From the fall
and our banishment from the garden to the exodus to the exile,
it is our story: departure and wandering, followed by God’s
relentless pursuit of us, God’s preparing a place for
us, God welcoming us home.
We are all prodigals, running away from so many things, and
there God is, ready, waiting, ready to welcome us home.
It is a poignant Advent theme, filled with possibility. Growing
up in a minister’s family, we never left for our grandparent’s
home until after the last Christmas Eve service of the night.
We were bundled up, sleepy, firmly convinced that every passing
airplane light or blinking radio tower was Santa’s sleigh.
We were usually asleep by the time we arrived, a condition that
rapidly changed with the promise of opening presents.
Later as one grandparent and then another and then another
died, the ritual took on different form. The place was the same,
the activities. What was different was the missing people, and
I realized much later that we, too, were not at home because
they were gone.
We work hard now to provide rituals for our family, in a world
that seems somehow diminished in its “ritualhood.”
In point of fact, the most faithful ritual is the very act of
gathering. Having now hatched our own minister family, home
is who we are, wherever we are.
And more than that -- home is faith, home is God. It is a ritual
that I will be grateful to witness even this Christmas Eve,
following the late service. The songs have been sung, the choir
has gone home, the lights are on. And lingering here and there
in the recesses of the sanctuary will be college age students,
home for the holiday, happy to see their family, yes, happy
to see friends they have grown up with in this place, yes, but
happy simply to be here, a kind of spiritual home.
And so it is that a prophet named Zephaniah pondered these
things, some 600 years prior to the birth we will celebrate
in just a little while. He knows what is coming, and what is
coming immediately is a political and military occupation that
will, eventually, drive the Israelite people from the land.
This is real exile – exile from the Promised Land, exile
from the faith, exile, it seems, from God.
Zephaniah sees it coming, and like the great Old Testament
prophets, has something to say about it. The people are full
of blame. Their life together, and particularly their religious
practice, leaves much to be desired. And it would seem, somehow,
that God would have a hand even in the process of exile, that
God called the people time and time again through the prophet’s
voice to right living, to justice, to mercy. The people would
take what they had been given for granted, or worse, think it
their own accomplishment. They would take their faith lightly.
Or, when they would consider their faith at all, they would
equate it much too tightly with somehow getting the pomp and
circumstance just right.
Worship was important to the prophet, rest assured. True worship,
though, happened in the context of God’s justice and righteousness
– for the widow and orphan, for the sojourner without
food and shelter. And true worship placed at its center always
the covenantal relationship between God and the people God had
chosen to redeem. It’s funny how often and how easily
that is forgotten, how even the people’s worship of God
can neglect God.
And the prophets say "enough!” And the prophets
call, time after time after time, the people back to one another,
back to their heritage, back to true worship, back to compassion
and loving-kindness, back to God. Back home.
True prophets do not stop there, however. Whatever brokenness
they foresee, they do not allow things to stop at that point.
God does not allow things to stop at that point. God is in the
homecoming business, and so the words of the prophets are homecoming
words.
Even in the face of exile, listen to this promise: “I
will remove disaster from you, so that you will not bear reproach
for it. I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And
I will save the lame and gather the outcast. I will gather the
outcast. And I will change their shame into praise…At
that time, I will bring you home, at the time when I gather
you…”
I will bring you home, we are promised. God is in the business
of homecoming.
Yeats wrote: “An old man stirs the fire to a blaze, /In
the house of a child, or a friend, or a brother. /He has over-lingered
his welcome; the days, /Grown desolate, whisper and sigh to
each other;/ He hears the storm in the chimney above, /And bends
to the fire and shakes with the cold, /While his heart still
dreams of battle and love, /And the cry of the hounds on the
hills of old.”
Who knows how that old man, how we, who are old and young and
in-between, how we, who are seeker and believer and in-between,
how we, who are searching ever for such homecoming, will be
welcomed home. Who knows, precisely.
But what we know is that God is in the homecoming business.
This Advent is about just that, about preparing our hearts,
about a fierce anticipation, about an expectation that surpasses
even the wildest of our expectant imaginings.
Who knows “how.” We simply know “yes.”
We simply know that the baby whose birth we anticipate will
be the one, finally, to bring us home, whose very incarnation
will make the things that drive us away disappear, whose words
will punctuate every prophetic word spoken by every prophet
and make them come true.
Who knows, but here is what I imagine: God will bring us home
to whatever home we need.
· Perhaps our doubt is leading us to despair. God will
bring us home.
· Perhaps our living, the choices we make, is leading
to our dying. God will bring us home.
· Perhaps a broken relationship is leading to deep sadness.
God will bring us home.
· Perhaps a death, a diagnosis, a disease, is leading
to our exile. God will bring us home.
Perhaps we have wandered for so long, personally, spiritually,
vocationally, that we would not know what home looked like even
if we encountered it. That is our history as well. And that
is the reason, after all, for this little baby’s coming
among us. To show us God. To show us love. To bring us home.
When words failed to work, the word came and lived among us,
full of grace and truth, flesh and blood truth. The baby has
not even been born yet, and yet we cannot help but leap to the
man this baby will become, and remember who he welcomed in and
how he welcomed in. Healing the lame, giving sight to the blind.
Speaking with the outcast – the leper, the tax collector,
the prostitute. He was home for them; he is home for us.
And we cannot forget, in this Advent season, the justice component
to all this. If God is in the homecoming business, that at becomes
our business too. Homecoming in Northern Ireland, in Israel
and Palestine -- conflicts that have been, really, about home,
about who lives where. Homecoming in Iraq, in the face of this
morning’s news. Homecoming in the United States, in Rochester.
Homecoming for the homeless. That becomes our business as we
hear again about a God who gathers all of us, all of us, into
God’s promised welcome.
I do not know how, or in what way, you are wandering this crisp,
snowy morning. I do not know from what you are exiled, and how
such an exile is working in your life. I do not know what “home”
would look like to you – perhaps a place, but more probably
a person, or a relationship, or a way of being.
But I do know this – that God’s promises are real
and true, and that God endeavors in big and mighty ways and
small and quiet ways to redeem us, to turn our mourning into
dancing, to welcome us home. And this little baby will have
a gracious heart that will have room enough for all of us. And
that we will be at our very best as we get ready for that birth.
I long ago learned a hymn that has become, perhaps, my most
meaningful. It is not particularly Christmas-y, a version of
Psalm 23. You have heard it before; you will, no doubt, hear
it again. And if you are indeed away from this church for Christmas,
perhaps its vision will travel with you. “The sure provisions
of my God, attend me all my days. / O may thy house be my abode,
and all my work be praise. / There would I find a settled rest,
while others go and come. / No more a stranger or a guest, but
like a child at home.”
Amen.
