There’s No Place Like Home
Psalm 84:1-4; Luke 15:11-24
Preached September 7, 2008
Rev. Jeanne Thomas
“There’s no place like home.” And it wasn’t just Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz who thought so. Robert Frost wrote: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Emily Dickinson wrote, “Where thou art, that is home.” And we’re all familiar with John Howard Payne’s lyrics, “Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.”
But the reality is, few homes look and sound as idyllic as that of the Huxtable family on The Cosby Show, where everyone gets along, listens to each other, accepts parental advice, and all of the bedrooms, dishes, and laundry are always picked up. In fact, I would argue that it really isn’t a “home” at all; a house, perhaps, but not “home.”
For a home is that place where we bring our stress and anger and pain, as well as our joys. It is where life gets messy at times and issues get fought out, but can also be resolved, because if we’re lucky, home is where there is grace and love as well. A house is a shell, a facade. But as poet James Whitcomb Riley puts it, “It takes a heap o’ livin’ to make a house a home.”
We don’t know why the prodigal son really left his home. Maybe he felt stifled as a younger brother. Maybe he was a typical teenager who wanted to try out his wings in a new place and in a new way. Was he fed up with his self-righteous older brother? Was he just selfish and lazy and greedy? The story doesn’t give us details. It only tells us that he asked his surprised, but gracious father for his share of the inheritance well before it was appropriate or respectful to do so, and then left home and squandered it all, setting us up to assume that he would never be welcomed home again.
And in fact, in most Jewish households of 2,000 years ago, he wouldn’t have been. And certainly the scribes and Pharisees wouldn’t have welcomed him either. Earlier in the same chapter, they grilled Jesus on his willingness to break bread with sinners and tax collectors and condemned him for keeping company with them. The temple, the house of worship was reserved for the pure and the righteous, or so they thought; not the sinner and outcast. And the scribes and Pharisees counted themselves among the pious ones.
Jesus responds to their distorted view of themselves and of God by telling them three parables: one of a woman seeking a lost coin, one of a shepherd looking for his single lost sheep, and one of a man anxiously awaiting the return of his wayward son.
Who was this God whom Jesus worshipped? One of unbounded grace and love; one who ate with the disenfranchised and the outsiders. One who threw parties for errant children and ran to meet them when they returned home. No wonder the scribes and Pharisees hated him. They liked setting the rules of the temple and determining who was allowed in God’s house. Grace? It wasn’t a part of their vocabulary. It didn’t have to be. Not while they established all the rules.
But Jesus knew that, while the temple may have been called a house of worship, it wasn’t God’s home. God’s home is a place where things aren’t always black and white. It’s a place where the spirit of the law, and not the letter of the law prevails. It’s a place where people can make mistakes and leave for a while and be forgiven and loved upon their return.
It’s the kind of home to which a man named Lee Buck finally returned after many years. His withdrawal from God began when his father died. He writes, “There was that indefinable sense of rejection within me as I grew up. Difficult to understand, much less explain, how a child somehow feels abandoned by the mother or father who dies. Mother loved and cared for me. But without realizing it at the time, I suffered from not having a father’s love. Every man I came in contact with as I grew up became an adversary to overcome. He was a competitor in business, a challenger on the tennis court, someone before whom I had to prove myself.
Finally, all the drive and stress and competition took its toll. I suffered a massive heart attack and underwent open heart surgery. The surgeon worked on me for eight hours and that night I groggily awakened in the recovery room unable to move. But there in that darkened room with its pulsing beepers and blinking lights, I surrendered myself finally to the love of God. At the age of sixty, for the first time in my life I knew the unconditional love of a Father who welcomed my home. And deep within I was able to forgive my own earthly Father — and myself.[i]
What is God’s home like? It’s a place where we can make mistakes and wrong assumptions and even leave for a while, and know we can return when we’re ready. It’s a place where we can be lost, but come to our senses –and recognize the empty place inside of us, the gnawing hunger and restlessness of a God who can’t wait for our homecoming. It’s a place where we can’t stop the party, or decide who God will invite to it—we can only join in.
Philip Yancey tells a story a lot like this parable, a story about a young girl who grows up in Traverse City, Michigan. And she becomes a teenager, and you know how that goes – her folks aren’t happy about her nose ring or the music she listens to or how long her skirts are so they’re always knocking heads until finally one day she says to her father, “I hate you!” And she runs away from home. And she runs all the way to Detroit where she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. And he gives her some pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt before. And she goes to work for him. And she starts selling herself in the streets. And before long she’s an addict and she’s spending a lot of time sleeping in the street. And her boss doesn’t seem like such a great guy anymore.
One night she’s cold and she’s scared and she starts to think about the cherry trees in Traverse City and she thinks about her mom and dad and she gets up the nerve and she dials a payphone. And she gets an answering machine and she says, “Mom, Dad, it’s me. I was wondering maybe about coming home. I‘m catching a bus up your way and I’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there at the station, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.” And so that night she rides the bus back to Traverse City, and she wonders if anyone will be there. What if her folks never got the message? What if they did get it and they’re just written her off? And she’s scared – really scared.
The bus gets to the station and she walks into the terminal, not knowing what to expect. But nothing could have ever prepared her for what she sees – up against the wall, forty brothers, sisters, great-aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, all waiting for her. And they’re all wearing silly hats and holding a big banner that says Welcome Home. And when she tries to apologize to her Dad, he says, “Shhhh, there’s no time for that. We’re late for a party that we’ve having in your honor.”[ii]
That’s as good an image of what the church is supposed to be as anything you’ll ever see or hear. We’re supposed to be those people in silly hats in a bus station at midnight welcoming the prodigal back home. And that’s what God’s home looks like.
For as Fredrick Buechner writes, “the home we long for and belong to is finally where Christ is. That home is Christ’s kingdom, which exists both within us and among us as we wend our prodigal ways through this world….”[iii]
As we gather around the table this day, the motley crew that we are, as varied as we can be in our backgrounds, our experiences, our politics, our hopes and our dreams, my prayer is that we, too would wend our way back to the loving, gracious, forgiving arms of Christ Jesus our Savior and Lord. After all, there is NO place like home. Amen.
Gracious God, you are our prodigal God, ready to lavish upon us your grace and mercy. Your table has been set; your feast prepared. So help us to find our way home and join in the party. Amen.