December 2, 2021
This Advent through Epiphany, we’re embarking on a series called Close to Home. When something “hits close to home,” it means we feel it in a different way, near the core of who we are. When we are close to home – like a return at the end of a road trip – we find comfort and a new anticipation for something we have experienced before, or maybe for something we are hoping to experience for the first time. Our series begins considering what it’s like when we don’t feel so close to home, when we are longing for home, when we’re homesick.
Can you remember the first time you were homesick?
Where were you? Why were you there? What were you thinking and feeling?
Maybe like me, you were in a place you love with people you love, but it just wasn’t home, and that’s what you longed for – home.
When we take in the world around us, it doesn’t take long to see that we are not yet at home in the everlasting reign of God in its fullness. We are homesick.
We are homesick for a world without the news of new variants.
We are homesick for a world without tears and pain.
We are homesick for a world where all are fed.
We are homesick for a place to lay our heads without worry when our anxiety and isolation have been turned up to 11 for longer than we can remember.
We are homesick for God’s way and will to be here and now in their fullness.
In many ways, we are homesick for a home we have yet to experience fully. But a home that we know is on the way.
What are the signs you look for to indicate that you are close to home?
What landmarks do you try and spot? A restaurant? A road sign? A certain horizon view? The waters of Lake Travis? The smell of BBQ pits?
In last Sunday’s gospel reading (Luke 21:25-36), Jesus speaks to a worried and weary people longing for God’s kingdom to topple the harshness, violence, inequity wrought by the kingdoms in power in their time. Jesus points to the sign of the fig trees sprouting leaves that announce summer’s impending arrival. For me, I think of the ways that the red tinges on the cedars and junipers announce the arrival of allergies and stuffy sinuses.
Just as I have learned here in this place I call home the indicators of what is coming, and begun to prepare (in this case with stocking my medicine cabinet and buying more tissues), so too, are we who are formed in the waters of baptism and filled with the Holy Spirit learning the signs of God’s kingdom breaking in here and now and reassuring us that our hope and faith is not in vain, but God’s kingdom has indeed come near.
In the very moments when we are most homesick, Jesus calls us to look up and look around and see that God chooses to come and make God’s home among us in the miracle of the incarnation. We are in fact, close to home because home has come close to us.
What are you doing to stay alert and prepare for the coming of God’s kingdom?
What signs are giving you hope right now?
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Drew