A Fourth Church Sermon by Alice M. Trowbridge

May 29, 2005 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Building Home

Alice M. Trowbridge
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 46
Genesis 6:11–22, 7:24, 8:14–19
Matthew 7:21–29

“The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.”

Psalm 46:7 (NRSV)

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no feet but yours, no hands but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which the compassion
of Christ is to look out on a hurting world.
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless all now.

Teresa of Avila

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote a poem about Ulysses, who was the ruler of the island kingdom of Ithaca. Ulysses was one of the most prominent Greek leaders in the Trojan War and was the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. He was known for his cleverness and cunning and for his eloquence as a speaker. Tennyson’s poem sets Ulysses at the sunset of his life, when it would have been expected for him to retire, to be content at home, and to enjoy the remainder of his days reflecting on his robust life, from his heroic days in the Trojan War to his years of peril and triumph at sea and all that we remember from his twenty year adventure in the Mediterranean. In Ulysses’ voice, Tennyson writes,

Much have I seen and known . . . and I am a part of all that I have met. Yet all experience is an arch where gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades forever [and forever] when I move. . . . How dull it is to pause, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use. . . . There lies the port, the vessel puffs her sail. . . . Come, my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world! . . . [Though we have been] made weak by time and fate, [we are] strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

From the ancient Greeks to our lives today, there is something about the human spirit that is always searching—searching for meaning, searching for fulfillment, and, ultimately, searching for home. From this epic Greek odyssey, we are reminded of the timeless truth that the quest is never over; the human heart never rests from searching.

Frederick Buechner talks about it as a longing, a longing both for the home we remember and the home we dream (The Longing for Home, p. 3). Indeed the word home conjures up all sorts of images for us. If we’re lucky, we recall the home of our childhood with fondness: the smell of a delicious meal cooking, the routine of life together with family, the way we played cards on Sundays, or had a game of catch out on the yard before dinner in the summers. When we think of home, we might think of a certain person who loved us and cared for us in a way that we just knew it for sure. Perhaps home is where we live, our house or apartment, where we put our belongings, the things that mean something to us, a picture taken during a great vacation somewhere, or a special gift given by someone dear to us. Home might be sitting in our favorite chair and doing the Sunday crossword puzzle. Perhaps home is a feeling of peace we have with a certain someone, holding a hand or sitting quietly together.

Home means a lot of different things to us. And we have a lot of different homes throughout our life journey. But today our scripture invites us to think in a new away about the search for home—about building a spiritual home within ourselves and what that might mean for our participation in building God’s kingdom here and now and bringing stillness to our own hearts, which are restless until they rest in God, our home (St. Augustine).

I took a three-month trip after spending two-and-a-half years in the Peace Corps in Mali, West Africa, and on that trip I traveled to many places: Kenya and Tanzania, India and Nepal, Thailand and Japan. During that trip I experienced the vastness of the world in which we live, the strength of humanity, the beauty of our brothers and sisters in those places. As inspiring as those travels were, they were lonely times, and my heart was restless. I was practically unable to sit still. And so I didn’t. I set about hiking some mountains and trekking and whatnot. It was a time of wrestling, a time of trying to figure out what to do with my life. We’ve all had those times. About three quarters of the way through that trip, I realized that I was spiritually uncomfortable because I kept resisting God’s embrace. In that moment it was as if God said, “Stop your running, your trekking, your unnecessary resistance, and establish your relationship with me, make that the foundation of what you do, and don’t worry about the rest. I’ll show you the way.” I was peaceful. I was thrilled to have reached a place of clarity. I wanted to get down off that mountain and get home and get working.

But you know what I’ve realized? I think about that moment a lot, and I realize that even though it was for me the beginning of my active pursuit of my relationship with God, that moment of spiritual certainty, of feeling home, lasted about as long as it took me to fall asleep that night. Indeed I think spiritual moments where we feel at home are waiting for us each new day. But we have to look for them, pursue them, build them. It’s about building our relationship with God.

Now who is this God? Well, the God of the Noah’s ark story seems vengeful, dangerous, and ruthless at first glance. This God destroys the earth, all but those animals in the ark, Noah, who walked with God, and his family. Don’t you wonder what was so wrong with the world to have angered our creator that much?

Well, now that we think about it, if humanity was corrupt and filled with violence, that sounds kind of similar to what we know about today. Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a day when our country pauses to honor our soldiers, veterans, those who are wounded, and those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice in service to their country. We honor men and women presently serving in our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places throughout the world. We remember tomorrow those who serve because of their love for freedom. Precious, passionate, patriotic children of God. In America’s relatively brief history, we have endured many wars. Think of each and every name etched into that Vietnam Memorial or the haunting sight of Arlington National Cemetery, with row after row of graves, or the newest memorial to those who fought in the Second World War. So tomorrow we honor all who are engaged in such ways; those who are injured, we pray they know God is with them as they rebuild their lives; and for those who have died, we give thanks that they are now safe at home with their creator.

But there are heroes in quieter wars we know less about. There is Dr. Mardge Cohen of Chicago, who in the last year made four trips to Rwanda, to the place where the 1994 Hutu massacre occurred, which eliminated 10 percent of Rwanda’s total population in the course of 100 days. It is estimated that 250,000 women and girls were raped during the rebellion, while the world watched. And now, eleven years later, many of the women who survived are dying of AIDS (Chicago Tribune Magazine, 22 May 2005). Dr. Cohen seems to live by the creed that when one person is diminished, we are all diminished, and that injustice to any human being is a matter of her own personal concern.

Yes, the world is still corrupt. Creation is violent, O God. Are we any different than before the flood? What has changed? Human nature is complicated, and left to our own devices, we can fall prey to our lesser instincts, and we don’t always do what we know we should.

And yet we know God asks us to keep an open house, to be generous with our lives. By opening up to others, we prompt people to open up with God.

What we know about God from our scriptures today is that God is a living God. Just as we are alive and always growing, the God we meet in Genesis is working out the relationship with humanity, with creation. No flood, no punishment, no vengeance can wipe away our imperfect ways. And God knows that. Walter Brueggemann says that here in Genesis, the world is at a distance from God, but the world belongs to God and has no life without God (Interpretation Bible Commentary: Genesis, p. 17). So in God’s grief, God’s anger with us, there is this flood and the emergence of a new creation, a new humanity, a second chance. And there is the establishment of a covenant, a promise, and later that covenant is given its ultimate significance, the covenant of new life in Jesus Christ, who taught us how to live.

God loves us more than we can understand. And God wants us to establish all that we say and do upon the foundation of Christ, his teachings, all that he spoke about in the Sermon on the Mount. God wants us to strive for living life at that level so that we might be agents for building home, God’s home, in our world today. Instead of seeing the ark as a place of “who’s in, who’s out,” we need to be thinking of the entire globe as God’s ark. Let us continue to join our voices with progressive people of faith who are willing to be led by God’s vision for home, where there is a oneness of humanity, a willingness to honor all people as holy creations of God—Gay, straight, black, white, liberal, conservative, rich, poor, the proud and the humble, politicians and advocacy groups, Muslim and Buddhist, Jewish, Christian. Let us strive for preserving and protecting the earth and its resources for future generations, caring for trees and air and pure water. Let us build toward the day when the earth is one home. But we can’t start out there. We have to first start in our hearts.

Joan Chittister has a relatively new book out called In the Heart of the Temple, and in it she claims that “the heart of the temple is the world itself, in all its beauty as well as its corruption.” She describes that sometimes

the fervor of one’s search for deeper meaning in life, for purer depths of the soul, can grow tired and be subject to drought. We can become complacent, and instead of being builders of home we can become too settled. Sometimes it is when disorder erupts that we see what we have falsely accepted for much too long. And then, shaken out of our idleness, we begin again that conversation with God that leads us to transformation, to new understanding, to new life.

Chittister writes, “Where the person of spirit is, there the world becomes a spiritual place” (pp. xvi–xviii).

And that is how God works through us, making us builders of the kingdom, so that all God’s people will know they’re home.

Jesus says, “Be wise and build your house on a rock. Establish your relationship with me as the foundation for your life, and I will be with you in all times, and I will show you the way, and I will use you to build my kingdom, so that some day, the world will be one home.” Jesus is talking to you and me, to the people who participate, who hear his words, who do good deeds, and who are interested in doing good works, who are interested in freedom, in making the world a better place.

But I think Jesus is getting to something even deeper than that. It’s a deep, private, personal matter, yet it benefits neighbors and strangers and all God’s children. It is not about a tangible end-result; it is not about building a fortress or setting an expectation that is clear and distinct and readily measurable (an idea inspired by The Wounded Healer, by Henri Nouwen). That is not what Jesus means when he urges us to build our houses on a rock.

I believe it has something to do with mustering the courage to trust that God is with us. It has something to do with accepting that our journey, our own epic voyage in search of meaning and purpose, starts when we move into our own uncertainties, our own suffering, our own dark places of loneliness (The Wounded Healer, p. 91). There we enter and experience the safety of home, the love of God, our refuge and our strength. There we allow ourselves to be lifted into God’s hand and be transformed by God’s promises to us that we are so dearly loved and we will never be left alone. When we let go into that mystery—the realization that the ocean is so vast and our boats are so small and that we cannot go it alone—when we let go into that mystery and let ourselves be still with God, that is when God can work with us and shape us and reshape us, and that is when we become builders of the kingdom.

In every good home there is the spirit of hospitality, the ability to receive the stranger as family. I remember one of the most distinctive moments of home was when I was leaving the village where I lived in Mali, Africa, for more than two years. I had spanned the spectrum from arriving as stranger to becoming a friend. And the day I left, the chief of the village, the Dugutigi, paid me the honor of coming to my hut, which had been my home for the last two years. The Dugutigi was probably about seventy years old. He was a very wise man and a devout Muslim, and we had become dear to one another over my stay there. It is a custom in Mali to go to the village chief when you are leaving your village and to ask for his blessing as you take to the road. This morning, however, he and his council of elders, with their walking sticks and Bubus and orange-stained teeth from the bitter kola nut tucked in their cheek, came to me, and the chief said to me something I’ll never forget. He took his walking stick, and on the dirt ground he began to draw with it. In the swirls he made two designs. One, he said, was America. The other was the village. He said that though I must return to America, that I am like a daughter to him, and that the village will always welcome me home.

It has been seven years since that day, yet that moment could have happened new this morning. It was a moment of true home, true oneness. If the Dugutigi, who was in his seventies, who speaks only Bambara, who practices Islam, and who has scarcely been to his own capital city in his lifetime, if he could communicate to me such a pure welcome, if he could live open to the mystery of God’s definition of home and the oneness of the human family, maybe we can too.

Home is where the heart is. Home is where we are intimate with God. Home is where a person who doesn’t need to, welcomes us in the spirit of love. Home is in God, the Lord of hosts, the God of Jacob, who wrestled with God and was blessed. Home is every day, in the new creation we are given through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us be builders, then, builders of God’s home.

May it be so.

Amen.