Abiding God, help us to know that we are always at home in your love. Amen.
Dorothy was right, “There’s no place like home.” After two full days of travel, 10 days in Kenya, and 4 unexpected days in London, I am so glad to be home. The team that went to Kenya, Dora, Tory, and Amy, and I will have a lot more to say about the time in Kenya in the coming weeks and months, but I do want to say thank you to the Parish and the Foundation for sending us as representatives of St. Luke’s to our friends and companions in Mumias, Kenya. We had such a fantastic time and enjoyed rich food, fellowship, and worship as we further built our relationship with the Cathedral there. That being said, I think the four of us would all agree that it is so very good to be home.
Home represents a lot of things – home is about warmth, comfort, rest, identity, and belonging. We say that “home is where the heart is” and we know from games like baseball and tag that “home” is a place of safety. Those are all best-case scenarios. For some, home can a more complicated reality. There are two well-known novels titled Home, one by Toni Morrison and another by Marilynne Robinson. Both authors portray home as a place of tension and paradox, as home can also be a place of trauma and difficulty for many. This is especially the case in Morrison’s Home in which a black Korean War veteran returns home only to encounter racism and rejection. Both authors point us towards the truth that there is a difference between lowercase home and capital-H Home.
It is this more theological, capital-H Home that today’s Gospel text from Luke is all about. If the colloquial version of home is about a place where we feel comfortable and protected, the spiritual sense of being at home is more about a relationship than it is a physical place or set of conditions. Being at home, spiritually speaking, is about hearing and trusting the voice of our heavenly Father saying to us “You are my chosen and my beloved, and with you I am well pleased.”
There are so many lines in our liturgy that have a special place in my heart, but there’s one in our Eucharistic Prayer that always arrests me and reminds me that I am at home in God’s love. Towards the end of the prayer, the priest says, on all of our behalfs, that we might be “made one body with Jesus Christ, that he may dwell in us and we in him.” This is one of the throughlines in Scripture – that our lives are hidden with Christ in God. Jesus often speaks about abiding in him. Pentecost testifies to the Good News that the Holy Spirit lives in us. And Psalm 23 concludes with, “and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”
This is the point of this sermon, but it’s also the point of Creation itself and our faith in Jesus Christ – that God dwells with us, that the Spirit abides in us, that our belonging is secure, and that we that we are always at home in Jesus Christ our Lord. The passage we heard from Luke is one of the most well-known stories in all of Scripture and is a grace-filled reflection on being at home in God.
Parables in Scripture don’t have names; Jesus didn’t give titles to these stories. To name is to begin the process of interpreting, so we can call this passage the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Parable of the Father’s Abundant Love, or the Parable of the Two Lost Sons. And all of those names can work, but they put us on a particular path of interpretation. This parable is something like a jewel in a display case – we can view it from different angles and the light will reflect back to us differently. So, for this sermon, I wouldn’t use any of those aforementioned titles because that’s not the facet I’m focusing on. Instead, for today, this is the Parable of Being at Home.
One theologian has noted that the “love of God” is such a commonly used phrase that we often use it without really thinking about what it means. Instead of talking about the love of God, they suggest reading this parable through the lens of God’s welcome. Yes, of course, God loves us all, and a part of that love means that we are welcomed by God.
Welcome is one of the things that made our trip to Kenya so special. We were welcomed by a hospitality the likes of which I’ve never experienced. Though we were meeting people for the first time, they immediately accepted and treated us as long-time friends. In a sense, we are. We are all part of the one Body of Christ; we are brothers and sisters in faith. And the people of Mumias reminded us of this. They lavished us with hospitality, with food, with gifts, with fellowship. It didn’t really matter that we were 7,500 miles from our geographic homes, we felt at home because of their robust welcome. That’s actually one of the things that so many people said to us as they welcomed us to their homes, churches, and schools – “Feel at home.” It’s a reminder that capital-H Home isn’t a place, it’s a spiritual condition of being embraced and welcomed by God.
Central to the theme of home and welcome is the notion of belonging. This is why we have these icons in our worship space. In the spring of 2020, after the death of George Floyd, I met with two leaders of the black community in Salisbury. In the course of our meeting, I realized that for all of our work around racial truth telling, we hadn’t actually done anything to make this church a place of welcome for others. As lovely as they are, our stained-glass windows make the statement that this is a space marked by Whiteness, and we all know that God’s beloved community is, to borrow a phrase from Desmond Tutu, about the rainbow people of God. We wanted our worship space to reflect that we believe that people of all ages, abilities, genders, orientations, classes, and races are not only welcome here, but also welcomed and embraced by God. Saying that we believe in the love of God is great, but we strive to make this love manifest in our welcome of all of God’s children.
In the parable, there are two sons who both contend with what it means to be at home in God’s welcoming love. The younger son sets out on a journey to find something that will satisfy his longings. St. Augustine famously said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Well, this younger son had a restless heart. As the band U2 would put it, he still hadn’t found what he was looking for. So he asked for his share of the inheritance so he could go off and make his own home. He didn’t feel at home at home.
It's a feeling that many have experienced – feeling restless. Henri Nouwen, a great spiritual writer, wrote a book reflecting on this parable alongside the famous Rembrandt painting called “Return of the Prodigal.” In this reflection, Nouwen writes that when the voice of God’s welcome is drowned out by the Siren song of idols, we can become lost, even at home. He notes that the “ifs” of life drive us to distant countries in search of something to fill our emptiness – if I had more money, if it had a bigger job title, if I had fresh start to be a different version of myself… if, if, if. The problem is that “if” never leads to “enough.” Capturing the “if” is rarer than catching a unicorn or finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And so the search becomes all consuming.
Eventually the younger son realizes this. He knows that not only do the slaves back at his father’s estate have it better than he does, but so do the pigs that he’s in charge of feeding. So he sets out for home. It’s important to notice that Jesus doesn’t mention that he felt repentant, only desperate. One commentator writes that his disposition is something like ,“I’ll go to daddy and sound religious.”
Of course, as the story unfolds, his father has no interest in speeches or apologies, he’s exuberant that his son is home. The younger son shows us that no matter what things we’ve done, what things we’ve left undone, what things we’ve said – we are always welcomed home by God. It doesn’t matter how big the mistake you’ve made is, God just wants you to come home. God doesn’t wait for or need our apologies or confessions. You are always loved and already forgiven, so never be anxious about coming home.
This is my prayer for the Church. St. Luke’s has a membership of about 450 people and on the average Sunday, about 120 people are in worship. There are many other people in our community who have walked away from the faith, searching for leisure on Sunday mornings instead of worship, or for whom the doubts are louder than the assurances, or who have been wounded by the Church. My prayer for them is that they will come home and know that they, forever and always, belong to God and are welcomed in this place. And you can help to spread this message of welcome to those who, for one reason or another, haven’t been to church in a while or have wandered away from the faith. Yes, God is our loving parent, but we all are a part of the welcome committee.
And then there’s the older son, who from a very different angle, also demonstrates us that we are always at home with God. What makes this son forget this isn’t that he left home, but rather he forgot that he still belonged. He did something that many erroneously do – he started to quantify love and compared himself to his brother. A lot of times children will ask a parent, “do you love my sibling more than me?” The answer, of course, is no. But we do love our children differently because each child is a different person. The older son mistook a different looking love for an inequality.
The older son was dealing with resentment borne out of comparison and was unable to receive the reassuring welcome of his father: “you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” Joy cannot coexist with resentment. The same is true for gratitude, but comparison makes gratitude impossible. Love is non-competitive; no one is more welcome in God than another. But when we lose sight of this, we can become lost, even at home.
How can we remember that we are at home in God? Well, there’s a few things that can help, and I’m sure you all could help me to come with many other things. Last Sunday, given our unplanned layover in London, I had the privilege of attending Sunday morning worship at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where I got to do something that I rarely do – stand in line for Communion. I love coming forward for Communion because it reminds me that I’m at home in God and am welcomed forward in grace. Practices of mindfulness and meditation when we simply try to sit in silence and remember that we are held in God’s love is a great way to be at home in God. Another practice is offering hospitality to others – by making room for others in the household of God, we more securely make that our dwelling as well. Sabbath, or taking some time to rest and enjoy life, is a great way to remember that we are at home in God’s care. Again, I’d love to hear from you all about what makes you feel at home in God.
Something I really enjoyed and appreciated in Kenya was the joyfulness of every gathering. There was so much singing and dancing. At one point, I mentioned to our group that when you’re dancing, you smile, and when you smile, it’s awfully hard to be angry or anxious, so it would probably do us all a lot of good to dance more often. Even though the older son heard the singing and the dancing, he couldn’t join in because he had closed himself off to it in his self-righteousness and superiority. It can be hard to accept our acceptance if we’re so focused on earning our it. It’s all about grace, but the older son struggled to know that he was at home not because he earned his place there, but because his father wouldn’t have him be anywhere else.
The belonging of both sons was secure in the love of the father. And so he says, “We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life.” This is the amazing grace of God – that Resurrection is all around us: sins are forgiven, the dead are alive in Christ, and love is making all things well. And so, we dance and rejoice as a way of participating in our belonging.
God is desperately longing for you to know that you are at home in the love of Jesus. God is eager to embrace and welcome you with joy: no matter how far off you’ve been, no matter what dissolute living you’ve been a part of, no matter how sincere, or insincere, your pleas are. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that Jesus has welcomes us home to the party of abundant and eternal life.
