This month’s letter from the Vicar
Dear friends,
‘There’s no place like home’ goes the old song and it is surely true that for virtually everyone home is important. If we’ve been away for a long time we are really eager to get back. One of the worst punishments that was handed down in the past was exile.
A permanent exclusion from home. The saying ‘home is where the heart is’ has a lot of truth in it. Of course leaving home is important. To establish our independence, our separate identity as individuals we need to break away sooner or later. But no sooner have we left home than we are trying to create home for ourselves. For most of us home is a geographical place. A house, a town, a country. Some people are clever enough to be able to feel at home in a variety of different places. Gypsies and travelling people come to mind. All they need is a caravan and their friends and family around them and they’re happy. But most of us pine for something more settled than that.
However the Christian gospel seems to suggest that home is not something we should be too comfortable with. Throughout the Bible the people of God are seen as a pilgrim people, constantly moving on. The Exodus wanderings are a classic example. Of course God promised his people a home, the promised land, Zion, Jerusalem, the temple. But in the New Testament all these things become spiritualised. Jesus teaches that God is not to be found in any particular place. And he himself leaves home and becomes an itinerant preacher, moving on from place to place. In today’s gospel we heard of the time he came back to his home town of Nazareth. It was a disaster. We are told that his fellow townspeople took offence at him. We can just imagine it. “Who does this chap think he is, trying to teach us? We can remember him running around in short trousers and no shoes and socks.” So Jesus winds up being quite rude about his home town – “prophets are not without honour except in their home town …” and so on. But what follows is also interesting and important. The very next thing that Jesus does is to send out his twelve closest followers to spread the good news of the Kingdom of God. He sends them out, away from home. He sends them with few of the luxuries that most of us take for granted as necessary for a secure life. No bread, no bag, no money, no change of clothes. Its as if he’s stripping them of anything of home. Maybe he did this in response to the way in which he was received when he went home. Maybe his thought is that if he has not been respected in his own home, then neither would they be in theirs. So better to go away from home. Perhaps people will receive the message better from outsiders. And from now on Jesus and his band seem to steer clear of home. They always seem to be on the road, moving on.
This constant moving on continues after the earthly time of Jesus. So much so that the first title applied to Christians is those who belong to ‘the way’. And early Christians reflect this in their writings. Paul teaches us (Phil. 3.20) that “our citizenship is in heaven” and in Hebrews we learn that “here we have no lasting city, for we seek the city that is to come.” Early Christians used a very strange phrase to describe themselves. They called themselves ‘resident aliens’. For although they knew they lived in this world they also knew that their real home was not here but in another place. They had a vision of something far more wonderful than any earthly home could be, a heavenly home in which they could enjoy eternal bliss in company with God.
This vision is a great challenge to you and me. We are the inheritors of the faith of those early Christians but I guess that most of us love and need the security of home. We want to feel that we have somewhere we can go back to, somewhere we really belong. So how can this paradox be resolved? On the one hand our deep need for home; on the other the teaching of the Bible and the Christian tradition that our real home is in heaven, with God. I think there is a way out and it works something like this. All of us need the experience and comfort of home. Without this, especially in our formative years, we become dislocated and disturbed. And throughout our lives we need the comforts of home to rest upon. But these comforts and even home itself should never be seen as ends in themselves. What they really are pointers to something far more real and fundamental. Indeed perhaps we could say that they are earthly reminders of where we come from and where we are all bound. For God himself is our true origin and our destiny and our earthly homes with all their comforts and contents are a distant echo of where we come from and where we shall return. So let us not invest ultimate value in our mortal homes or in all our possessions. Rather let us look through them seeing them as pointers to the one ultimate reality and our final home, God our creator and redeemer.
Richard Franklin
February 2012
