Scripture: John 21:1-14.
I was drawn to the scripture this morning by where I went on vacation. As members of the worship committee know, I was intending to preach on a different passage today, the story of Jesus meeting two of his grieving disciples on the road to Emmaus. That’s a good story too, but as things unfolded in my personal life, I had much more of an affinity for the story that you heard that takes place in Galilee around the Sea of Galilee. I am actually aware of why this story sort of drew me in.
Ava and I do not plan very well. We think of things we might do on vacation, but we often don’t get around to any specific planning so things that require some planning tend to fall by the wayside. Therefore, as of a couple of weeks ago, we didn’t really know where we were going on vacation, just away. So it was really at the last minute that we decided to go to Chicago.
Chicago, as most of you know, was home for us—20 years for Ava, 35 years for me. That’s a combined 55 person years, and of course a lot of things happened in one or both of our lives during those 55 years: schooling, choice of careers, birth of children, more schooling, marriage (these are not necessarily in chronological order), more jobs, more schooling, making of friends, fading away of friends, death of a child, death of a parent, divorce, meeting each other, marrying each other. Our lives, both individually and together, were pretty deeply rooted in Chicago, and so we decided at the last minute to go home—celebrate an anniversary, see some friends, see some adult children, see some sights, spend a couple evenings on the town.
What we found, or what I found, I should say, was that although Chicago is still familiar, although I could slip right back into being in Chicago just like you can slip right back into conversation with an old friend as though you had never been apart, although Chicago was familiar in that way, it is no longer home. And that was true, I think, in a deeper way than just the literal, physical fact that I don’t live in Chicago any more, that the place I come home to every day is now here. Home is of course a deeper thing than where you receive your mail. There is no guarantee for anyone that where you live is where you will feel at home, and there is nothing that says you can’t feel like home is somewhere other than where you live. Our trip to Chicago made me think about all those things, and feel about all those things.
So did the next few days I spent in Silver Spring, which is where my father lives and where I grew up. For the last 53 years that has not only been home for him, but in a kind of distant but still very real sense home for me. In about 10 days my father will be moving to Charlottesville, and after that the house will be sold, meaning that there will no longer be that place, that family home, to go back to. My sister asked me sometime recently if that thought bothered me, and I said (quickly) no, meaning that I have no second thoughts at all about whether to do what we had all agreed was best, but of course a simple “no” was a much too casual answer to her question.
I apologize for using the specifics of my personal life as a way to talk about all this, because the specifics are not really what I’m concerned about today. The fact is, I think, that most, if not all, of us have very complicated thoughts and feelings about “home”, especially at a place like Sojourners where a great many of us come here as migrants and have several places that have been or are or might become home for us. But for the reasons I’ve tried to describe to you, I’ve had occasion to reflect some on those issues both for myself and in general.
And that’s why I was drawn to the scripture. Because in that scripture that’s of course what the disciples, and Jesus, had done. They had gone home. Home to Galilee. Home to where they had all come from and where their adventure together had begun. In Matthew’s version of the Easter story, angels tell the disciples to go back to Galilee because that is where Jesus has gone, and in fact earlier in the story Jesus himself told the disciples that after he was raised he would meet them again in Galilee.
So that’s where we find everyone in today’s reading. Back home. But again home is not just a familiar place. Jesus and the disciples were not back in Galilee just to check out whether the blues club and the pizza place were still there. Home is where we are from in a deeper sense than someplace we have been. Home reminds us of who we are.
In a way you could look on what the disciples were doing as reminiscing. They were remembering what things had been like, going back over things that had happened, rehearsing the past not just by talking about it but by acting things out.
So here was Jesus standing on the shore, calling to the disciples. Remember when it was Jesus out on the lake calling to the disciples? How about when Jesus called to Peter to get out of the boat and come to him across the water, and now here was Peter jumping out of the boat, not fooling around with this walking on water stuff, but just swimming as fast as he could toward shore, toward Jesus. Here we have a miraculous catch of fish. Remember when that happened before, at the beginning? Here there is a meal shared of fish and bread. Remember the 5,000 and how everyone had enough and how everyone felt as close as the disciples now felt? Here we are again at the Sea of Galilee. Remember, the disciples might have said, when Jesus first came here and we didn’t know who he was but he seemed to know who we were? And now he is saying again: “Follow me.”, just as he did then. It’s pretty easy to picture this scene—Jesus and the disciples sitting around the campfire Jesus had built talking, laughing, remembering, and probably saying to themselves how good it felt to be home.
But, as I say, I see this as more than idle reminiscence. It is not a way of wallowing in the past, or just to let good memories comfort you in a time of distress. It was a way of the disciples remembering who they were, not just who they had been, but who they still were.
I like this story for that reason. This going home to Galilee was not just a way to retreat into the past, not a trip for nostalgia’s sake, not some effort to turn back the clock, not a hope to just go back to a previous life, pretend nothing had ever happened and go back to fishing. It was not that kind of going home. It was a recalling—a re-calling—a taking up your identity again, finding yourself again, not letting yourself be defined by the traumas that had taken place in Jerusalem, or by this strange story of Jesus rising from the dead.
What I see happening in this story is a kind of reorientation of the disciples as to what their lives are to be about now, as Christians. I hear Christ saying to the disciples: Remember the sharing of meals, not for the sake of nostalgia but because that is who you are. Remember when I called you to follow me, not for the sake of nostalgia but because that is who you are. Remember when I asked you to step out of the boat, not for the sake of nostalgia, but because that is who you are. This business of being a Christian is not just about telling people that I, Jesus, was crucified and then raised from the dead. We’re back here in Galilee to remember what we’re about. We’re about feeding, and healing. We’re about maybe swimming toward Jesus or finding him in our midst or knowing ourselves called by him. We’re about gathering around the campfire and we’re about telling stories. We are not simply here to proclaim Jesus crucified and risen, though in our own ways we may do that too. All of this is what I hear being said in this story of Jesus and the disciples going home. It is what I hear that story saying to me.
And there’s more. The “more” I’m thinking of may not be contained all within these few verses. The more has to do with the rest of the story, the rest of the Biblical story, which of course doesn’t end with Galilee, and the rest of our stories, which doesn’t end with any of the homes we may have had in the past.
My personal experiences over the last few weeks have led me to reflect on the impermanence of things, including our homes, including homes that may have been homes for a very long time. My childhood home has been there for most of my life, until now. I lived long enough in one place in Chicago, that when I was visited by friends or when they somehow found out that I was “still there” they would just shake their head in amazement.
But things do not stay the same. Homes don’t stay homes. People move. I know the impermanence of home is something that many people here know very well, since it has always been part of life, those who came from military families for instance, or God help you, from minister’s families. Some people have moved so often from such an early age that they have never known anything other than the impermanence of home. And sometimes we can stay in one place but things change around us, or the ground is taken out from underneath us and what was once home is no longer home.
I’ve been thinking about the impermanence of home, and going along with that the elusiveness of even the idea of home. What is it we mean when we talk about home? Is it someplace that is stable, that is always there, that doesn’t change? Is it the place we go at the end of the day where we don’t have to be what others want us to be any more, where we don’t have to pretend or put on a brave front to meet the world? Is it a place that is safe in every way? Is it a place that is filled with love? Do we expect it to shield us from loneliness or depression or anxiety or confusion or conflict? What we expect or want home to be is probably not entirely clear at any given time, and what we need it to be may be somewhat different over time. And whatever it is that we expect home to be, chances are that our real life homes, past and present, are something less than what we wish they were or what they might be.
And then on top of all that there is of course the spiritual insight that in fact there is no place on earth we can really call home. It is our nature, scripture says in various voices, to live a kind of nomadic existence, spiritually speaking anyway, to be in constant need of leaving some place and moving on. The Hebrew scriptures say that the Jewish story always begins by people saying, “My ancestors were wandering Arameans…” with the implication that that sense of searching and movement and being pilgrims is deeply planted in us. And Christians remember that Jesus said, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”, with the implication that followers of Jesus will have that same sense of being loose on the earth.
And yet for all its impermanence and elusiveness, home remains a compelling thought for us humans, whether our actual homes have been mostly happy or mostly not. It is more than a thought, a pull, a destination, some place that we need to go but don’t quite know how to speak of, a place we may feel like we have been separated from and that we somehow are trying to return to. The words we use sometimes are true but maybe misleading. Home is God. Or, heaven is our home. True words because they remind us that all our shelters here are just temporary. But misleading because the way we use words like “God” or “heaven” too often lacks the sense of mystery that is with us all along the way.
We don’t really need to be too clear about where “home” is or how we get there. In the end, home in the sense we understand it in the light of faith, home is not someplace we can return to. It is someplace we have never been, yet it is where our various journeys are leading us. It is that place where all are safe, where all are one, where all belong. We may not have ever been there before, but when we arrive, we will know that this is the place we have been searching for. We will know that we have come home. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 29, 2001