Coming home

Sermon for The Parish Church, Morning Prayer 13^th February 2006

If you have read any of Susan Howach's novels, at any rate those written since she became a Christian, you will know that her heroes and heroines begin the book apparently successful and with their lives fully under control, and before long those lives start to come apart. After painful soul-searching they come through to a new understanding of themselves and they find a new and firmer security.

As part of Susan Howach's masterly story-telling, the process is made intensely dramatic. Perhaps it has to be ultra dramatic to make the reader take in some quite long explanations of psychology and theology.

I recently discovered a couple of novels of hers that I didn't know she'd written, even though they have been around for several years, and she wove her accustomed spell on me. The heroine of one is an overweight young woman (why did I identify with her?) whose self-worth is at rock bottom because of her strict and apparently cold aunt, and who binges on rich ice-cream to comfort herself and so makes her problems worse.

The hero of the second novel is a male prostitute, doing very nicely, thank you, and disdainful of the conventional world.

Each book follows the familiar general pattern of catastrophe and a winning through to a new security – something real as opposed to the make-believe world of the start. And the final part of the second book is actually entitled Coming Home.

It's a Bible pattern, too. The Old Testament has three key events, that shape all the rest, and all three involve journeys. There's the journey that Abraham made because he heard God call him. Stephen described it like this, in the speech he made immediately after the events David read to us in the second lesson. Stephen said:

The God of glory appear to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran. “Leave your country and your people,” God said, and go to the land I will show you.”

As the writer to the Hebrews puts it:

By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.

The second key Old Testament event is the Exodus. Stephen tells this story in greater detail. He knew it was a key event. The journey this time was from a settled life as slaves to the same promised land that Abraham had reached so many years before. It was a hard journey, just as the journeys of Susan Howach's characters. On one occasion, as Stephen tells the story,

Our Father refused to obey Moses. Instead they rejected him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt.

The third key event was the return from exile in Babylon. That key event preoccupies the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, the prophet of the later chapters of Isaiah, that prophet whose writings shaped Jesus' view of his own ministry. It is also a major concern of Jeremiah, our prophet of today's first lesson.

The days are coming,' declares the LORD, 'when I will bring my people Israel and Judah back from captivity and restore them to the land I gave their forefathers to possess,' says the LORD."

Those are the three key events, then – Abraham journeying in faith to an unknown region, which turns out to be Israel, or Palestine, or the Promised Land; Moses leading the people from Egyptian slavery to that same Promised Land; and the return from Babylonian exile back once again to the Promised Land.

What was the common factor? Clearly, it was a journey to the place where under God they were going to be at home.

What's so special about that? Well, I wonder if you have ever let your imagination dwell on what it is like to be homeless. It came 'home' to me, if you will excuse the pun, when I watched a TV documentary on refugees in Darfur. But suppose some terrible set of circumstances robbed you of your home, left you on the pavement with as many of your possessions as you could carry in a bag. Suppose there were no friends to take you in – as I'm sure there would be for any of us here in Street. But suppose there were none. Suppose, let us say, that you were taken in a windowless van to an entirely strange city and left without plastic money. Wouldn't the idea of home become something infinitely desirable? Shelter from the cold and from robbers and muggers, warmth and comfort, a good night's sleep, a place where you are someone. So desirable!

And if being physically 'at home' is so vital, so also is being psychologically and spiritually 'at home'. And this is where I think God may be trying to get through to you and me. I think that we, or some of us, may be missing our real, true home.

Think of Abraham. He was brought up in a highly cultivated city. Some of the jewellery and decorations from Ur can still be seen in museums. The material is gold, and the workmanship is stunning. Abraham was brought up, like everyone else in that fair city, to join in ordered worship. He might not have felt too strange, allowing for the language and customs differences, at our Morning Prayer this morning – a traditional, familiar, comforting ritual.

But then God spoke. Abraham heard the voice, we don't know how, telling him that this wasn't his real, true home. That home was at the end of a strange faith-journey. To cling to the familiar was not going to give him the real homecoming. Leave your familiar surroundings, God was saying, and come with me, and you'll find real comfort and security.

Now I hope you don't think I'm running down our Prayer Book worship. Not at all. It can be a wonderful way of worshipping God. What I am saying is that it is so wonderful that it can lull us and make us deaf to God's voice. It's possible to escape from the call to face things that are wrong in our lives – unresolved conflicts, unacknowledged fears, deep anger that we may not even be aware of – by immersing ourselves in this familiar ritual. Or in being busy. Or in hobbies. Or in 1001 displacement activities. What I am saying is that there may be more that God has for you, for me, a new way of coming home.

Or think of Moses and the Exodus. What had happened to the descendants of Abraham? They had been given a wonderful entree into Egypt, with Joseph sent to prepare the way, and they had settled down there. And gradually things changed. They had settled, and they stayed. And the people around them changed. And after the years had passed, they found that they were enslaved. All right, it probably took several generations, but the spiritual equivalent can happen more quickly. We can walk with the Lord Jesus at the beginning, and having reached a certain stage, we can settle down and not notice when things around are changing, until without being aware of it we are enslaved – by habit, by custom, by living without being sensitive to the voice of God.

Again, God spoke. He spoke to Moses at the burning bush, and told him to do what Moses knew was impossible – to win freedom for the enslaved people. Those people were led out from Egypt after a series of very scary events. Becoming free again will probably not be without trauma. And those people embarked on life as a nomad nation. They lost the false security of the slave-hovels for the high-wire safety of walking in the will of God.

You probably read Jane's article in this month's LIFE. A few years ago Jane was told that she wasn't a risk-taker. Well she certainly is now. She is going to northern Nigeria, where Sharia law has been adopted by a number of provinces; she is going as a woman to an area where male dominance is reinforced by custom and by religion. But she is going where she is convinced the voice of God is calling, and in doing that she is staying in the place of real and true security, in the centre of God's will.

Or think of the Exile. Centuries passed since Moses led the Exodus. There had been good times and bad times. A succession of prophets came, warning the successors of the Exodus nation that they were going wrong, keeping religious observance while forgetting God's voice and his will, getting their worship music perfect while doing nothing to help the poor. The prophets told them that the result of being unfaithful to their husband-God would be terrible punishment, exile from that Promised Land.

And it happened. For the larger part of God's people, that exile was permanent. Ten of the 12 tribes of Israel vanished from history. For the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin there was exile, yes, but it was for a limited period. The prophet had predicted a 70-year exile. In fact the people seem to have been given parole, and the return came after only 35 years. But whenever it happened, it was the third defining event in Israel's history. After centuries of unfaithfulness to God, of whoring after strange gods, as the King James Bible puts it, the lesson of the Exile was learned. They were driven into exile as a beaten and humiliated nation; they came back as a purified people, who would never again allow any God to be worshipped among them but the LORD, Yahweh. It's not as if everything from then on was right and wonderful; our Lord Jesus found the leaders wanting in several important respects. But they were whole-hearted in aiming to serve the LORD.

For us, the Exile is echoed in our various failures, and their consequences. It may be a family feud or a divorce; it may be some more public wrongdoing with perhaps a law-court appearance to follow, or exposure in the papers. It may be something quite secret, that cuts us off from God. These things can knock us right off course, send us into a kind of exile that we feel powerless to resist.

Our natural instinct may be to move house, if the catastrophe is public; or to keep the matter bottled up, if it is private. What we really need is to face the facts, receive the help of God through his direct action and through his people, and so to receive healing, to come home. Don't let your God be too small. Don't be satisfied with a God who accepts you when you are good but rejects you when you go wrong – or when you can't cover up your wrongdoing. Open your heart and mind to the God of the return from exile. That God spoke through Jeremiah:

No one wants you as a friend

or cares what happens to you.

But I will heal your injuries,

and you will get well.

Could that be true – for you? Could those injuries that have crippled you all these years, that have kept you from knowing real joy and contentment, that have made worship seem a remote thing, even a pretence, that have robbed you of being properly 'at home', could God heal those injuries of yours, so that you will get well? If God is the God of the return from exile, it could all be true for you.

Let me read a bit of one of those novels to illustrate how it might be. This is heightened fictional drama, but the underlying spiritual facts are truly portrayed. The narrator, the former male prostitute, is attending a healing service, and has asked a woman named Carta, a lawyer, to perform the laying-on of hands. She has a very intellectual approach to Christianity. They have been tempted to become lovers, but now they are more like brother and sister. This is not the end of his healing, but it's a step on the way. By the way, he doesn't like to use the name Jesus. He just calls him 'the Bloke.'

I remove my glasses. I don't need to hide behind them any more, and at last Carta and I are face to face. ... She open her mouth. Being Carta she's rehearsed the next words as carefully as she's researched them, and knowing what they'll be I've framed my response. She's going to ask: “Any special prayer you'd like me to say?” and I'm going to answer: “Pray for you and me and our journey, and for all those who love and pray for us.”

But she doesn't say what she's planned to say, and I don't say what I've planned to say either. In the end we say nothing at all.

That's because in a flash we're beyond words. The greatest, the most profound truths are beyond words anyway. We look at each other and we love each other and that's enough. We don't need to do any more.

I see the tears in her eyes as she finally understands. This is where all your books get closed, Carta. This is where you unplug the computer. “Love one another,” said the Bloke all those years ago in one of the greatest of all commandments, and that's what we're doing, we're totally lined up with him, and as the line-up locks into place we're dead centre in the path of this colossal power.

I yell in my head: “HEAL HER!” - yeah, I don't think of me, only of her – but the words are just an unnecessary reflex ... He understands, he knows, he's here – and suddenly Carta's calm. She's one hundred per cent sure she's doing the right thing in the right place at the right time – and because of this she knows, just as I do, that nothing at all, neither storms, nor earthquakes, nor typhoons, nor tornados, nor rivers, nor mountains, nor shark-infested seas – nor phobias, nor complexes, nor hang-ups, nor freak-outs, nor fear in all its many destructive forms – nothing, NOTHING can block us both now from our journey's end and coming home.

She reaches up with confidence. She puts her hands gently on my head, and as I gasp for my next breath the colossal power scores a direct hit on my brain.

The Bloke's standing right behind her. He's streamed right through her and he's taken over her hands....

Is there something the Bloke can do for you?