Scripture: Hebrews 11:8-16
First of all, thank you to Rev. Mildred Best and to Rev. Lynn Litchfield for preaching the last two weeks in my absence. I always regret not being able to hear the sermons you all get to hear on the Sundays when I am away. I mean it doesn’t spoil my vacation or anything, but I do sometimes wish I could be on vacation and lie in bed on Sunday morning if I want to and be here to hear Mildred or Lynn or whoever it may be at the same time. In any case, thank you to them and to Rev. Mary Dockery for engaging Mildred and introducing her, and to Rev. Karen Roddy for guiding the worship.
Sermons are not travelogues or reports of “what we did on our vacation”, and this one will not be, but there will be a few, maybe several, references to vacation experiences since what I have to offer today grows partly out of some of those experiences. So I need to trust you to put up with some vacation references today and hope that you will find the sermon in the end not to be about our vacation.
Ava and I officially re-entered the country in the airport in Miami after a long, overnight flight from Santiago. We were pretty tired, half-awake at six a.m. standing at the counter where someone official looking was processing our papers. He stamped our passports, slid them across the counter, then looked up at us and said unsentimentally but sincerely, “welcome home folks”.
You wouldn’t think that would be a big thing, and it wasn’t a big thing, but it’s funny sometimes how such a small thing can trigger all sorts of emotions and all different kinds of thoughts. It didn’t have anything to do with the comment itself, which as I say was straightforward and sincere, nothing very complicated about it. Ava and I commented at the time that it was a nice gesture and it felt good to have someone say “welcome home”, as opposed to “next” or “have a good day”. So one emotion that was triggered was just appreciation for that word of welcome and the awareness that went with it that we were home in some broad sense and getting closer to the place that really is home for us. That was the simpler part. The more complicated part had nothing to do with the customs agent and all to do with me.
On the relatively few occasions when I have traveled outside the country in the past, it has most often included significant cultural experiences and sometimes has involved travel in some pretty difficult circumstances, and I have on those occasions had some trouble with re-entry into US society and this time was no exception. Not so much because we had been in third world situations, not really at all, but nevertheless some difficulty and the “welcome home” caused me to remember previous times and to reflect on my feelings returning home this time.
One thought occurred pretty quickly. So here I am asking myself how I feel this time about coming home, not how I feel about vacation being over but how I feel about coming home, and without any deep introspection or digging into my own feelings, I realized that my coming home was colored to a significant degree by the Marshall-Newman amendment, ballot question number 1, the proposed amendment to the Virginia constitution regarding the definition of marriage and restricting the rights of some Virginians, indeed ultimately all Virginians. It is not surprising that this amendment colors my return home. It colors my daily life and has for some time now.
But it does make the process of coming home a bit complicated. I like living in Charlottesville. I like where I live. I like my church. I like the people I associate with in my normal round of activity. Charlottesville is my home and it always feels good to come home, even when we haven’t been very far away or very long away. But it’s not uncomplicated and right now Marshall-Newman has a lot to do with that. Contrary to certain published reports, Charlottesville is not the number 1 place in the universe to live—for lots of reasons. In lots of ways I want it to be better. And, it’s part of Virginia and I want Virginia to be better. And, it’s part of the United States, and I want the United States to be better. And of course there are all sorts of things that go into those feelings, but Marshall-Newman particularly right now makes the words “welcome home” more complicated than they otherwise would be. Marshall-Newman cannot help but make gay and lesbian people feel un-welcome in the state of Virginia. It makes me feel un-welcome in the state of Virginia. It makes me feel less at home in this place I call home.
And then there are a whole bunch of issues, feelings that are a bit harder to express or put my finger on. They have to do with borders and making borders secure and who is welcome here and who is not and who we need to be suspicious of and who we need to protect ourselves against and whether there is not from the perspective of the United States these days a certain sense that the whole rest of the world is dangerous or hostile territory and when you re-enter the country you are home again safe and sound. “Welcome home” could be said with that kind of nationalistic flavor, as in “Well, you’ve survived that awful world out there; welcome back to the good old U.S. of A.” They have to do, these other feelings do, with in-groups and out-groups and whether you need to be back among your own kind to feel at home or whether home is where all God’s people are “homies”. Coming home I felt naturally the relief of being back in comfortable and familiar surroundings but also the awareness of the insularity, the self-centeredness, the smugness, and the sense of entitlement woven into the way of life of the United States. And being away, I felt in some obvious ways not at home, especially since neither Ava nor I speak Spanish, but also at some deeper level not so far from home after all.
For me, the best example of what I’m trying to say here came with a worship service we attended on Easter Island. It was a Catholic church—97% of the 4,000 residents of Easter Island are Catholic. That in itself would be sufficient to make me feel like an outsider. I didn’t grow up Catholic and always feel a bit out of place in Catholic worship services. In addition, the mass was conducted in Spanish and in Rapa Nui, the term that refers to the Polynesian language and to the people of Easter Island. I could pretty much pick up when God and Jesus were being talked about but didn’t really understand anything that was being said. In one sense I could not have felt more out of place. In another sense I felt very much at home, and in spite of the Catholic liturgy and atmosphere and the Spanish and Polynesian language, I felt like it was not so very different from Sojourners. There was a kind of communal feel to the service, like I experience at Sojourners, and a kind of “down-to-earth-ness” that allowed for people to just be who they are, kind of come-as-you-are atmosphere both in dress and in other ways as well, and a sense of welcome that communicated that as far as the Rapa Nui people were concerned, we all belonged, tourists and all. Indeed the service began with a statement that everyone was welcome to receive communion, which I know because the woman whose house we were staying at translated that part for me because I had asked whether it would be appropriate for us to receive communion. So I am able to report that there are welcoming Christian congregations, sisters to us in the spirit, in very distant places where a couple of Sojourners could at least in some ways feel at home and such that if a few people from Easter Island were to come visit with us, I believe they would feel at least somewhat at home. It is possible, I am trying to say, to be very far away and yet to feel in some ways very much at home. It is also possible to be in the ordinary sense of the word home and yet not to feel completely at home, to feel strangely alien in the place we call home. This business of coming “home” is not necessarily such a straightforward thing.
And that was emphasized in a slightly different way by three people we met while we were on Easter Island, well two people we met in the flesh and one we met in the spirit. The one person was actually dead, although I’m not sure Easter Islanders would say that, ancestors being very much alive in that culture, but we met him only through his granddaughter, who spent a day guiding us around Easter Island. Her grandfather had been one of the early archeologists who explored Easter Island and he had spent a lot of time there over the years because, according his granddaughter, his letters said very clearly that he felt more at home on Easter Island than he did in Europe or the United States. It wasn’t just a job site. He came as often as he could and stayed as long as he could and asked to be buried there, where he felt most at home.
His granddaughter had been raised in the United States, went to college, went on for an MBA, and spent ten years working in banking. But her father was Rapa Nui and to get more in touch with her roots, she quit her job and went for what she thought would be an extended visit that has ended up being a permanent relocation. The owner of the guest house we stayed at is a woman who was born in Quebec, lived most of her life in Michigan, and went to Easter Island on a kind of spiritual retreat with a group of women. One thing led to another and soon enough she was splitting her time between Easter Island and Michigan and eventually spending all her time there. I know she thinks of Easter Island now as her home.
These stories obviously are not numerous or typical, but they are instructive. There is a lot more to coming home than returning to someplace that is comfortable or familiar. Coming home is a spiritual journey, and you never know where your search for home may lead you. And the fact that for most of us the search for home is not so outwardly dramatic and doesn’t lead us to move ourselves to far away places is only a camouflage for the reality that we are each engaged in our own versions of such journeys, just a lot less noticeably. We are all in one way or another trying to find our way home. And those who, like the folks we met on Easter Island, have made some major changes in their lives would also be quick to say that as important as their decisions may have been for them, they have still not arrived. They are a bit closer to home, maybe, but the journey is not over. Because finally, for all of us, home is someplace we have never been.
In all of this Abraham is our ancestor. “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land…For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God…All of these died in faith without having received the promises…they confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth (some translations say sojourners), for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been seeking the land they left behind, they would have opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is a heavenly one.”
I hardly need comment on the words from Hebrews. It is what I have been trying to say all morning. But I do have just one more quick thing I want to say. Like Abraham, like the few people we encountered on Easter Island, like the person sitting next to you right now, we each have very individual, very personal journeys we are making that I think can be described as a search for home. But I do not imagine these journeys as entirely separate from each other, and in my fanciful vision I don’t picture coming home as being when each one of individually finds rest say in the heart of God. Sometimes that kind of a vision has meaning for me, but more often the vision is one where all our separate journeys end in some grand reunion where God’s people are reunited and finally able to embrace freely, no longer separated by borders and security checks or anything at all. In that sense I want to sing the last words of the hymn we are about to sing this way: “I do not know how long ‘twill be, or what the future holds for me, but this I know, if Jesus leads me, we shall get home some day. “ Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 15, 2006