Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Coming home to a new place



Joshua 5:9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32


In the summer of 1994 I left the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County and moved into The City.  I found a job with a landscaper in the Bernal Heights neighborhood, just south of the Mission District, and a room in a house with a couple of other bachelors just up the street from the company yard.  Having checked those two items, job and house, off my list, I moved on to a third.  I got out the yellow pages and looked up “Churches—Episcopal” for one in my zip code.  That Sunday morning I left my new house and walked down Bernal Hill, across Cesar Chavez St. and up 26th to Fair Oaks, where I arrived at Holy Innocents Episcopal Church just before the 10 o’clock service.  I went in and sat down and looked around at the interior of that lovely building, designed by Ernest Coxhead, the architect of this structure.  And the organist came in and began playing his prelude, something by Johann Sebastian Bach, and I burst into tears.  I felt I had come home. 
Today’s story from Luke is one of a number of parables in the gospels that have to do with the celebration that happens when something that was lost is found again.  In the other stories in this genre, like the one about the woman who loses a silver coin, or the one about the shepherd whose sheep goes astray, it is pretty easy to say what it was that got lost.  But today’s parable is a little more complex than those. 
To be sure, the father lost his younger son when he took his share of his inheritance and went away to a far-off country and squandered it on loose living.  But the son also lost something.  He lost sight of who he was, and what was important in his life.  He went off after a kind of freedom that inflates the value of a false self and its restless desires.  And in the process he lost connection with the one person in the world who really loved him.  Until that finally that moment arrived when, as the story says, he came to himself.  And then he had to lose that false self.  He had to give up his illusion of independence, and swallow his pride, and go back to his father and say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.”
Still, I imagine that, even then, he felt just a little trace of pride in his confession of how far he’d fallen.  He planned his speech carefully and when he saw his father he delivered it exactly as he’d prepared, and he probably figured that when his father heard how terrible he felt, and how low he was willing to stoop in order to have a place in the household again, his father would give him what he asked.   But the son had to lose even that satisfaction.  He had to accept a homecoming that wasn’t on his terms, that had nothing to do with the depth of his remorse, or how convincing his performance of guilt was.  He had to surrender even that to his father, who loved him completely, and was simply overjoyed to have him back.
This story describes coming home as a surprise, the surprise of rediscovering something that you used to take for granted and didn’t really value.  When I sat down in Holy Innocents Church and heard Bach on the organ I was remembering something about my own childhood and ancestral roots and the sources of my religious imagination and how I had first discovered beauty and meaning and transcendence.  It was something about who I was, deep down, and how I was related to the world, something I didn’t value and appreciate before. 
Coming home is one of the great metaphors for the life of faith.  But today’s readings remind us that when we come home, the place we are coming to is not the place we left.  When the generations that the Israelites spent enslaved in Egypt are finally over, and the 40 years they spent wandering in the wilderness are also over at last, they come home to the land of Canaan.  The people celebrate their homecoming by completing the circle, and eating the Passover meal that they first ate the night that Pharaoh let them go.  But they make their unleavened bread with the grain of the land of Canaan.  It is the land of their ancestors, and the land of their own future—their promised home. And not one of them has ever been there before. 
When the congregation of St. John’s Episcopal Church came back into this building after two-and-a-half years of exile, many if not most of the people who were here to celebrate that joyful homecoming had never worshipped here before.  This congregation has grown since then, and perhaps many of us who have come in the last few years have experienced being here as a kind of homecoming.  But each one of us comes with a different memory of home.  Each one of us has a different story of losing and getting lost, finding and being found.  We are drawn together to seek a common vision and a shared experience of home, but the home that we are building is a place we’ve never been before.  It’s continually changing, as people come and go, as relationships change and grow, and love enlarges and transforms our understanding of what coming home really means. 
You’ll remember that in the Gospel story the father lost something, and the younger son lost something too.  But so did the older son.  He lost the capacity to love and to value his brother, and we never learn whether he got that back.  The story ends with the words and actions of his father hanging there like a question mark.  To understand why that is, we need to remember that Jesus tells this parable to some Pharisees and scribes who were grumbling because he welcomed sinners and ate with them.   Jesus is asking the grumblers if they have lost have lost the ability to see those sinners as brothers and sisters, who are worthy of love, and who just want to come home.   
In his 2nd Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul says that to be “in Christ,” means that “we no longer regard anyone from a human point of view.”  To be “in Christ” is to come to ourselves as God knows us, in the embrace of an overflowing, reconciling love.  It is to be the guest of honor at a feast that you cannot disqualify yourself from, no matter how willfully and thoughtlessly and eagerly you have strayed.  It is to receive a welcome that cannot earned, by any amount of feeling sorry or humble yourself or promising to start over again at the bottom rung of the ladder.   It is to be given a new life, for no other reason than because Jesus Christ gives his life for us, and God accepts the gift as if it came from us.
To come home to Jesus is to come to oneself in a place where the love of God embraces everyone as equally lost and equally found.  It is to find oneself in a world where self-serving judgments about who deserves a rightful share of the world’s goods and who doesn’t, who has earned a place of respect in the human family, and who hasn’t, whose life is worth saving, and whose isn’t, no longer apply.  The world we used to find so alluring, the world of the false self, and the false freedom, and the inflated sense of independence, the world of exile and alienation and meaninglessness, becomes a place of transformation, a world on the way home.  And our lives find a new focus and new purpose, as we become partners in that transformation. 
Coming home to Jesus is creating something new, a place where forgiveness and reconciliation and belonging are a gift that belongs to everyone.  It is to be a guest but also a host, at the homecoming feast of the whole world.   

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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.