2 Corinthians 5.6-10, 14-17, Mark 4.26-34
The Third Sunday after Trinity, 17 June 2018
Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth
I’ve had a few conversations lately with people who’ve been away on holiday or visiting relatives; and more than once, when I’ve asked if they enjoyed it, people have said, “Oh, yes - but I’m glad to be home.”
You know that feeling, don’t you - I hope you do - when you get back home - to that familiar place, that well-loved place, which is where, more than anywhere else, you feel safe and secure, you feel you most deeply belong.
When someone tells you, “Put wood in th’oil” it’s not just about keeping the cold out; it’s about putting the worries of the world behind you, in that safe secure place, as you sit in your favourite chair while the kettle boils. And when we say that a flock is hefted to an area of land we mean that they’ve inherited a deep knowledge of their territory through generations before them passing on their instinctive learning of that place.
The Welsh have a word called hiraeth. It means a longing for one's homeland, but it's not just homesickness. It's an expression of the bond a person feels with their home country when they’re away from it. This tells us that you don’t necessarily need to be physically placed at home to be able to carry home around with you; for home - in another well-known phrase - home is where the heart is.
And the mind. I visited a very elderly gent the other day who now lives a long way from the place he thinks of as home. But in his mind he’s still living in Austwick. He asked me how business was at The Smithy, and what had happened to that house on The Green which had recently had a fire. A sense of home transcends the false boundaries of time and place.
To help meet our deep needs of well-being and self-worth, we need a sense of belonging. Arguably we need this sense of belonging more than we need wealth or physical comfort. This need to know ourselves as rooted and grounded; the need to know our home: this is why we are constantly drawn back to the traditional ways of doing things; this is why we are prone to nostalgia. And in a rapidly-changing world neither traditionalism nor nostalgia should be too-easily dismissed because they are rooted in this deep and genuine human longing for home. [1]
Not everybody feels at home, of course. Today is the beginning of Refugee Week and in thinking about this theme of home, and what it means, we must keep in our minds those whose homes have become places of terror from which they’ve had to flee, we must think about their search to find a place where they can, now, truly feel at home. We might better understand their need to hold on to aspects of their traditional culture when they come to a new place, for that’s vital in helping them feel at home there. [2]
Some here may have had, or be having, the experience of no longer feeling at home, even in a place you’ve been in a long time, because something vital has changed - maybe losing a partner who you’d made home with for so many years; maybe declining health making mobility in this place a challenge now, causing you to start feeling estranged from the space you live in.
And taking a wider view, many here might understandably say that we don’t feel at home in this world which we’ve made, this fast-moving world of mass transportation and digital communication; this world where competitiveness is privileged over community, where human identity seems to be more about image than about substance. Every generation feels this, it’s not just the old.
No wonder we grasp after things which we hope will strengthen our sense of who we are - our sense of belonging - our sense of home. We should be careful in what we grasp for: for when nationalism spills over into racial hatred, or when nostalgia for doing things the old way creates barriers to healthy innovation or creativity and stops the young from having their say or their day: that’s when our grasping for home gets misshapen. But there’s nothing wrong with the instinct. We should keep searching for home, and building it when we find it. In the place we live; in our hearts and in our minds.
Now this is where I want to introduce the phrase which Jesus used so often in his teaching that it’s clearly very important to him that we understand it. Our English translations call it The Kingdom of God, or The Kingdom of Heaven.
The word ‘kingdom’ maybe conjures up for you the idea of a nation united beneath a monarchy; a top-down ruler whose subjects we are. That goes a little way towards helping us understand what Jesus is saying. But - check out the Good Book - you’ll see that Jesus is never concerned with imposing power on others from on high. Just the opposite, as we know, from our reading of the Sermon on the Mount.
I’d like to suggest that we can understand The Kingdom of God as the place where God is at home; The Kingdom of Heaven as the place where we are at home with God.
Most famously, as we hear at funeral services, Jesus tells his followers that he is “going to prepare a place for them” [3], which is him assuring us that we have a home with God for eternity. That is why the old traditional gospel song goes,
This world is not my home, I'm just a-passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
The angels beckon me from heaven's open door
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore. [4]
But Jesus’ teachings about The Kingdom of God, The Kingdom of Heaven also firmly suggest that whilst we wait with longing for heaven, in the meantime we can be at home with God on this earth, this changing, challenging space we share with others not like us: we can be at home with God on earth.
Jesus’ teaching breaks down any supposed divisions between a heavenly, spiritual kingdom and an earthly, physical kingdom. That's why he came to earth of course. To bring heaven and earth together. To completely and intimately connect the spiritual and the physical. [5]
And, though we hold to the hope of a final wondrous home where we will live with God, Jesus teaches us that our foretaste of that heaven, and our preparation for it, are to be found in the here and now. The Kingdom of Heaven is 'in your midst', Jesus says in Luke, or translated another way, The Kingdom of Heaven is 'within your grasp'. [6]
This is crucial for the times we are living through. For we are a homeless people grasping for our identity in things which may harm and embitter us, which may divide and alienate us from each other. If we can grasp that in God comes our sense of self-worth, that in God comes our safety and security, that in God comes our well-being - then we have truly come home.
The Kingdom of God is like a homecoming. It is living day to day in the knowledge of the presence of God in our lives and in the everyday world. It is being able to look forward in hope because we understand that heaven is ahead of us and around us.
How much our prodigal society needs to come home.
How much our homeless society needs to know that our Father God is waiting in longing to welcome us home.
This is the great secret grounded in our faith; Jesus sowed the tiny seeds in his teaching about the Kingdom of God. He trusts you and me to be the ones to water and nurture the growth of that Kingdom as we embrace God’s presence in our own everyday lives, as we look out for what God is doing in the world around us, and as we help others to find their home in him.
Notes
[1] I’m indebted to Andrew Rumsey for these reflections on nostalgia and the Kingdom. Andrew Rumsey, Nostalgia should not be dismissed. Church Times, 15 June 2018.
[2] Refugee Week website: “Refugee Week takes place every year across the world in the week around World Refugee Day on the 20 June. In the UK, Refugee Week is a nationwide programme of arts, cultural and educational events that celebrate the contribution of refugees to the UK, and encourages a better understanding between communities.”
[3] John 14.1-6.
[4] Many renditions of this traditional spiritual are easily found with an online search. I got to know and love it many years ago through Maria McKee and Lone Justice’s characteristically raucous take on it. Lovely bluegrass version by Blue Highway, here.
[5] A nod here to a 2017 sermon, The kingdom of heaven is here.
[6] Luke 17.21. My Heaven in Ordinary material from 2007 explores this theme in depth.
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