Creekside Church Sermon of December 3, 2000 "There's No Place Like Home" Jeremiah 33:14-16	Rev. David Bibbee
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We sometimes stop to think about how good it is to enjoy these blessings, but today I want you, if you can, to imagine life without them. Imagine some history altering event that would take everything which mattered most to you, and send them flying like leaves blowing in the wind. What would you feel? What would do?

For the people of Israel this was not an imaginary exercise. The power dominating the world in 587 BC was Assyria-a ruthless nation with which Israel tried to strike a bargain in exchange for decent treatment. Israel tried to negotiate its way out of a catastrophe, but it didn't work. Assyria systematically dismantled Israel. They lost their land. The land promised them for which they had fought so hard and waited so long was now Assyrian real estate. They lost their temple. The structure which was the heart of Israel's spiritual identity was ransacked. Uprooted from their land and religion, Israel was marched away to a foreign land where their captors mocked their belief and went to work indoctrinating them with Assyrian religion and a different way of life. They lost their land. They lost their temple. They lost their home. They not only lost their private dwellings. They lost a place where they could dwell in peace and security. Everything which had given them security and coherence was stripped away.

They were homeless. The words of an earlier exile in Babylon found in Psalm 137 expressed what was profoundly felt:

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there, we hung up our lyres for there our captors required of us songs.
And our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?

It is beyond us to know what this experience was like. But maybe we can come close to understanding by thinking about home. When I say home, I do not mean house. You can live in a fabulously furnished house and not feel at home. Home is where we are most secure and therefore most like our real selves. Robert Frost wrote in a poem that, "Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in." Home is a place preserved in our memory where everything is as it is supposed to be, and no matter how often we return, nothing changes. Some of us may have places which come close to this...places we long to return to whenever we can.

We can all think of places which are home to us, but still do not satisfy our deepest longings for home. We are living at a juncture of history where we are feeling less and less at home. Over Thanksgiving our family went to Columbus, Ohio to celebrate with my friends of 30 years and their families. The following night, four of us went to a nice restaurant for a late supper. As we approached our destination, I noticed a brightly-lit tower in the distance. "What's that building?" I asked my friend. "That's Josephinium." Josephinium is a large preparatory school for Catholic priests. I had driven by this magnificent structure hundreds of times. Years ago it stood alone in pastureland surrounded by woods. Now it is completely hemmed in by urban sprawl. It is surrounded by restaurants, IMAX and multiplex theaters, mega-malls, banks, and high-rise corporate office buildings. A place which was once so familiar, I no longer recognized. And a feeling of sadness came over me.

I looked at Josephinium surrounded by sprawl and saw in it a parable. Religious buildings which were once a prominent part of our landscape have receded into the background. The bright lights are now fixed on the gods to which millions pay homage... entertainment and economics. Here we are at the end of one millenium and the beginning of another. Instead of feeling that something is waiting to be born, there is an underlying anxiousness because everything we thought was nailed down, is coming loose.

Biblical writings like we have in Jeremiah are scripture with which we should become more familiar. The Old Testament theologian Walter Bureggemann says that like Israel in the year 587, the church in the year 2000 is in exile. Our exile doesn't involve geographic dislocation. We haven't been hauled off to a foreign land. What happened is that the familiar land has become foreign. Tell me, as time goes by, do you feel more at home in the world and at peace with the present arrangements? Do you feel at home with the way Christianity is being portrayed by the media? Today there are hundreds of television networks to choose from and it seems that most of them have only two themes... sex and violence.

Today it is okay if your faith is a personal thing between you and God. But don't expect to go unchallenged if your belief compels you to speak out and take stands on issues of injustice or inequity or public morality. You have all seen the Christian fish symbol that people are placing on the backs of their vehicles as a way of identifying the occupants as Christians. But soon afterward another fish symbol appeared. It has two little legs and inside the word, "Darwin." It's such a little thing, I know, but it's an indicator of exile.

As we survey what is happening in the world, we see certainties that no longer are certain. There is a fretful feel that the old, familiar order is being taken apart. We are not sure whether our time-honored institutions will hold up. It won't be long, they tell us, before the social security system runs dry. Government is in gridlock. Churches are folding up like chairs after a potluck. People say, "Nothing is sacred anymore," and most days we are inclined to agree. We now see the truth of the observation made by a Russian novelist who said, "In a world without God, everything is permitted." Restraint is nearly non-existent.

It has been said that most of the material in the Hebrew scriptures was written when Israel was going into, living in, or going out of exile. In exile they learned to weep and grieve and asked the hard question, "Why?" "Why does it seem that God has abandoned us?" But the children of Israel would not settle in, settle down, nor make themselves at home in Assyria. No matter how distraught they were over what had happened, they continued to watch, sing, and pray. Their way home was on a route called Hope, and their hope was built on the belief that there were larger forces at work in the world, and that one day, as Julian of Norwich said, "All would be well."

There is good reason why we don't feel at home today. This world is not home. Your home isn't the place you grew up, though we are sometimes homesick for it. If our longing was only for the home of our past we left behind, we could go back and the longing would be satisfied. But there is a reason the past and present does not feel like home. Home is elsewhere.

Last week my best friend and band buddy and I were talking about Christmas music. I shared how much I enjoyed English carols played on the classical guitar. Then I asked him, "What's your favorite Christmas hymn?" "That's easy," he said. "O Come, O Come, Immanuel. It's the story of God's people." He got it right. Written 1,500 years ago it describes our current condition, but even more, our hope. Let's sing the first verse of O Come, O Come Immanuel on page 172 of your blue hymnal.

While Israel was still in the iron grip of its captors, the prophet Jeremiah spoke, "The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety." As Christians we believe that day came when God entered the world in Bethlehem. It was God's way of showing us how to find our way home. Our home is in God's heart. And God's dwelling place is among us. But there is more to come. Perhaps more is happening today than meets the eye. Maybe what feels like the death of something is actually a birth. Maybe the dismantling of the world's systems is an in-breaking of God. Maybe God is the one taking things apart.

Advent is the time to be honest about present conditions. But Advent is also a season of orientation toward Christ... to believe the days are yet coming when God will fulfill the promises he made to his people. It is not a time to be mired down in defeat and despair. It's no time for the church to cower in the corner. It's time instead to receive God's grace so we might live more boldly, bravely, and beautifully for him.

When I was a senior in college, I took a class which spent three weeks in Bogota, Columbia. It was my first time out of the country, and the first time seeing the conditions in which nearly þ of the world's population lives. I saw bands of homeless, parentless children sleeping on sidewalks and rummaging through trash for something to eat. We visited the barrios, communities literally built up on mountains of trash with homes made of cardboard. As we walked through the squalid streets, children came out and took us by the hands and walked with us. All wore ragged clothing and the littlest ones, no clothing at all, and many had stomachs distended from malnutrition.

After three weeks I was ready to come home to family and comfortable surroundings. Several of us decided the first thing we were going to eat when we landed in Miami was a hamburger. I never had a Whopper that tasted so good, but then I started thinking about the children I had seen only two days before. The hamburger was losing its flavor. I went home the next day, but realized it wouldn't be home in the way it had been before. I understood what Frederick Buechner meant when he said, "...there can be no peace for any of us until there is real peace for all of us." From that moment on, home meant something different.

The letter to the Hebrews says it like this, "They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land they had left behind, they would have had an opportunity to return. But, as it is, they desire a better country, a heavenly one."

At Advent we remember that we are exiles living here, yet knowing the longing we carry within will never be satisfied until we are finally at home with Him. At Advent, when day is short and night is long, we look to the light of Him that shines in the darkness and train our ears to hear... "The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promises I have made...

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