Longing for Home

Sermon delivered Sunday, December 21, 2014 (4 Advent, Year B), at St. Paul Lutheran Church, Oakland, CA (2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 and Luke 1:26-38).

When I think of this week’s lessons, I can’t help but think of home. What does home mean to you?

Home is that place where you feel comfortable, right? Where you can kick off your shoes, maybe (or maybe not, depending on who’s in your house) put your feet up on the coffee table, and be your whole and full and entire self. But sometimes, the emotional place of home can be elusive. Home can be that mythical land, like in dreams and fairy tales. Thinking about this elusive definition of a full concept of physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological home makes me think of my parents. My parents were both born and raised in India. They grew up with this rich history, this rich culture, this rich sense of who they were as children of what was then a newly formed independent and democratic country of India. They were also formed by their families, their schools, and even their villages... 

And then they left India... and went to Cleveland, Ohio. In 1970. In November. 

Even though they’ve lived in the US for 44 years, my parents still don’t feel like they really fit in this country; they don’t really know if they’re home or not. When my parents were finally empty nesters, they announced to my brother and me that they were moving back to the mother country. 

That only lasted two months.

When they came back to the US, they were surprisingly sad. They were happy to be back in India, but just for a little while. The India they knew was in their memories, back in the 1950s and 60s. This present-day India... they discovered that it wasn’t their home. Things were different. People got older and changed. Friends and family members died when they were stateside, buildings were torn down, and somehow my parents got older, and were maybe even more displaced because they were longing for a sense of home so much. My parents will live the rest of their lives longing to find that home, that place of belonging, where they can merge their Indian upbringing with their American present, where they can wholly and fully and entirely be themselves.

When I think of today, this fourth Sunday of Advent, I can’t help but think of home, and longing for that place to fully and wholly and truly be who God created you and me to be. I think about God’s home. Because really, where does God live? King David, in our Old Testament lesson, is convinced that God... well, that God needs better digs, and maybe an actual zip code to settle down and get out of that tent. God confronts David and tells him, “Excuse me, all this time you’ve been carting me around in this tent, have I demanded that you make me a house of cedar? No!” It seems though, that God’s cool and all right with where God’s at being amongst God’s people. God delights to be among God’s people; God tells David, “I have been with you wherever you went.” Of course, God is the God of surprises. God tells David, “Hey, guess what? I will build YOU a home, for you and your people and I will establish a dynasty. How’s that for a home?” Okay, so maybe God didn’t exactly say it that way. But this home, this dynasty? This is a significant proclamation to come from God. Especially for a people who have lived with displacement, that have a history of wandering, especially wandering around for a good forty years, and having a sense of being and no longer longing, having this home is a big deal. Huge.

What is it about home and wanting a home? Advent reminds us that we’re all sojourners. We’re all looking for God’s kingdom to come, that complete fulfillment of whatever home “is,” where we can wholly and fully and entirely be ourselves. Advent reminds of this time of our sojourn, reminds us that we’re living in-between times, reminds us that the fulfillment of the place we can call home is coming not just with the Christ child, but with the second coming of Christ.

But even though there might be a longing for home, or a longing to be... God has a place for us always, a place that we can call home... with God. God makes this promise that is to be communicated to David, “I will appoint a place for my people Israel and plant them, so that they may live in their own place and be disturbed no more... GOD will make you a house.”

What I really, really, really want to talk about is how God makes a place for us. Sure, God could build us a house. But God has done much, much more than that. Remember, God is a God of unexpectedness, a God of surprises, a God...really of scandal, a God of showing up where we least expect. Like making a home with us in a really unexpected place. Actually, it’s a place that’s really ludicrous and scandalous, and where we least expect God to show up, in the womb of a young peasant woman. Who knew that God would make a place with us, a home with us, to dwell and tent and be with us, in the incarnate Christ. Born of a young woman from a small village.

God makes God’s house in strange places. With a wandering people in a tent. Within a young woman in Palestine over 2,000 years ago.  With you and with me here today. That’s the beauty and the strangeness of today’s Gospel lesson; God doesn’t just make a house for us, but God makes a place with us in the incarnate Christ. Think about that. God tented with the Israelites in the Ark of the Covenant. God didn’t need a big ol’ house. God just needed a tent to dwell with God’s people. In reading the beginning of the Gospel of John, a translation of the first chapter states that God pitched God’s tent with us in the person of Jesus Christ. The incarnation is Christ pitching his tent with us, making a home with us, making a home for us. Not in a palatial disconnected ethereal being, but in flesh and blood, with us. This is one of the most profound and beautiful ways to profess the strangeness and beauty of God, that the anticipated and expecting coming of the Messiah doesn’t show us military or political power. Instead, the coming of the Messiah is shown in such a different and radical way. In the vulnerability of a young woman, who in the Magnificat, professes the world anew... the world anew with who has taken home in her.  

German theologian Meister Eckhart said of God’s presence with and among us, “We are all meant to be mothers of God...for God is always needing to be born.” We too are the scandalous and beautiful and broken places with where God dwells. God dwells with us in other surprising and scandalous ways. In the waters of baptism. In the simple elements of bread and wine. With this fourth Sunday of Advent coming to a close and anticipating the coming of the one we have been waiting for, where have we prepared the way? Where have we made a dwelling place, a home, for the one who is to come? In thinking of ourselves as that dwelling place, that place that can truly be called home, Sufi mystic Rumi had something to say of the body, of home, and of dwelling places. Hear what Rumi says about they body and a home for God in this poem:

The Body is like Mary, and each of us has a Jesus inside.

Who is not in labor, holy labor? Every creature is.

See the value of true art, when the earth or a soul is in

the mood to create beauty;

for the witness might then for a moment know, beyond

any doubt, God is really there within,

so innocently, drawing life from us with Her umbilical

universe—infinite existence...

though also needing to be born. Yes, God also needs

to be born!

Birth from a hand’s loving touch. Birth from a song,

from a dance, breathing life into this world.

The body is like Mary, and each of us has

a Christ within.*

*Rumi, "The Body is Like Mary." The Purity of Desire: 100 Poems of Rumi. Eds. Daniel Ladinsky & Nancy Owen Barton. New York: The Penguin Group, 2012. p. 3. Print.