On Resurrection

And Our True Home

(April 4 at Lorraine Motel, Leslie Callahan)

This word from Coleman B. Brown, along with his courageous life, is my favorite Resurrection witness, especially in this time of living on the boundary between forces of evil and radical grace, being and non-being.

It directly challenges the myths of Death and exclusion in our nation and civilization. Spoken at University Church on the Lord’s Day, it is the truth and promise of the risen One, in spite of ourselves. It includes solidarity with the poor, oppressed— and all humanity. I am thankful it was included by Irene Brown in Our Hearts Are Restless Till They Find Their Rest in Thee: Prophetic Wisdom in a Time of Anguish.

But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him,” God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

1 Corinthians 2:9–10 (RSV)

This is homecoming weekend. It’s wonderful to see so many alums back with the University Church today.

But let’s admit that homecoming doesn’t mean much to lots of undergraduates—and that most of those alums who have returned to Colgate for homecoming are either asleep, beginning slowly to get into brunch somewhere, or have already left.

Then let’s admit another sort of thing: that most of us, so far as we are conscious, are more concerned about whether there’s life-after-Colgate, or life after retirement, or life after this term’s over, than we are about whether there’s life after death. (Although that’s not true of all of us.)

But then let’s admit further that there is in the idea of homecoming— and in that word, “home”—deep power.

Country music expresses, exploits even, the depth and power of home. One of the most plaintive of the country music classics is put on the lips of a man in prison, a murderer apparently, condemned to execution, who dreams:

The old hometown looks the same

as I step down from the train . . .

Yes, they’ll all come to meet me . . .

It’s so good to touch the green, green grass of home . . .

Then I awake and look around me

At four gray walls that surround me.

And I realize that I was only dreaming . . .

They’ll all come to see me in the shade of that old oak tree,

As they lay me ’neath the green, green grass of home.

Some of us may remember from the musical West Side Story a more hopeful song—one that I have recalled from this pulpit before. The word “home” is not used, and yet the song cries out in longing for home, for a new home, like none that those who sing have ever known before, yet for which they hope:

There’s a place for us,

somewhere a place for us. . . .

Hold my hand and we’re halfway there:

hold my hand and I’ll take you there,

Somehow, someday, somewhere.

One of my earliest recollections of my father is his singing that old drinking song—singing it, though, with a kind of tenderness which I cannot forget:

Show me the way to go home,

I’m tired and I want to go to bed.

I had a little drink about an hour ago, and it went right to my head.

Wherever I may roam, on land, or sea, or foam,

You can always hear me singing this song:

Show me the way to go,

Show me the way to go,

Show me the way to go home.

What is home? What is it to come home?

Few words are more powerful than “home.” But like all powerful words, like all powerful symbols, it may cut more than one way.

Any pastor knows that Christmas (how many weeks till Christmas?) is one of the hardest times for many folks: for most alcoholics, for example, for many of the elderly, and for many others, perhaps for you. Christmas in America has been made into a powerful material drama of the home, of a certain kind of ideal home, and usually of home in the past. Christmas becomes a time, for many, of intense nostalgia, of loneliness intensified, of regret and resentment—often justifiable resentment, I say. For if anything, home at its best means that no longer is one an outsider. And yet Christmas often becomes a time when many feel with especial poignancy that they are outside, that they are, in deep meanings of the term, homeless.

The word “home” can cut more than one way. The very word— “home”—can leave us with the sense that we are traveling away from life, that home is only in a receding past, that home has gone, and that we are now only outsiders.

Let me be very clear then: home is dangerous.

After all, according to both Genesis and Jesus we are all called in some sense to leave parents, to leave home. Maturity is recognition at the right time in the right way that, in certain profound respects, we cannot go home again. Or better, the day comes when we must leave home in order, truly, to go home.

Moreover, home can be the source of ethical failure; home can collapse our courage. “Why was there not more resistance from within Germany to the Nazis?” people ask naively. To resist injustice and evil is usually to risk the security of home. Why has there not been more resistance to racism in America by men and women—white and black—who have wanted racial justice? Because it might cost them their homes.

How many wars have been fought basically by appeal to the feeling for home? And there has been incalculable injustice tolerated because of love for home. Is it so today?

Jesus’ followers left him when his showdown came. Where did his disciples go? They went home. Even as he foresaw: “You will be scattered, every one to his home, and will leave me alone.”

Deep feeling for home may lead us away from our self as well as bring us to ourself.

And what is our true home?

There has been, probably, too much preaching about the furniture of heaven and the temperature of hell.

To talk too easily about heaven as our true home can betray faith and love . . . rather than witness to it. A friend of mine, who became one of the most effective ministers I ever knew, lost his father when he was about nine years old. Such a loss cannot be calculated. Various persons in the church took this boy aside to tell him about heaven, or their idea of it. Someone told him that his dad had died because God wanted him so much; but all the boy could think of was that he wanted his dad too—as much as God, he reckoned; his feelings toward God only became charged with resentment after that conversation. Heaven was no consolation for him. He remembers that what helped sustain him was a man, an elder in the church, who put his arm around his shoulder and said simply, in effect, “I don’t know why your Dad died, but I miss him terribly, and I know you do,” and became the boy’s friend.

As those of you who have passed through or now live with grief discover, if healing is to begin, what must be acknowledged someday, in its mysterious depth, is this: he-she-the one I love is dead.

It is instructive, I think, that the writers of the great Christian creeds experienced this, knew this. In the Apostles’ Creed they confess thus their faith in Jesus Christ: “conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,” he was “crucified, dead, and buried.”

Only when we begin to face the mystery and reality of death can we begin to enter into resurrection faith.

There is a deep word from Kierkegaard that I am constrained to share at this moment: “Whether a person has been helped . . . depends essentially upon the degree of intellectual passion he has employed to understand that help was impossible, and next upon how honest he is toward the Power which helped him nevertheless.”

The word “home” may well arouse in us only nostalgia and loneliness; I understand that very well. Or “home” may lead us to cowardice, to betrayal of our responsibility to do justice, to resist injustice: I understand that, too.

But the symbol, the word “home” may also help open us to the rule of God, to the kingdom of heaven, to what Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed and called Beloved Community.

The New Testament writers beheld in the death of Jesus God’s purpose to bring us home to ourselves, to one another, and, yes, to God. Christ, approaching his death, says this:

“Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.”

Home: our true home: yet how can we speak it?

Robert Frost helps me in the impossible task with his poem “The Death of the Hired Man.” Silas, a single man, an ordinary and not particularly outstanding man, has come back ill and ready to die to a farm home where he has worked as hired help before. Warren, the decent owner of the farm, is not happy that Silas has come back; Silas has let him down in the past. He relents only so far as to admit that “home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” But Mary, his wife, goes further, and she says of home, “I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Mary is right. If we have to earn our home, our true home, what chance have we?

What can we say of our true home? You must speak for yourself. There will be clues in the home you’ve had; but also in the home you’ve never had. Let me say this: There will be privacy there as well as togetherness; and work—satisfying tasks for which we have had some chance to become competent; and there will be leisure, and we shall learn to play again. And, yes, there will be the special others—whose very names become more hallowed with the years; I cannot conceive it otherwise. But not only they are there.

For there will be other homes in our true home—homes linked to homes, and many kinds of homes, not just those created by [parents] and their children. And there will be gatherings, and celebrations. And we shall learn to worship.

It will be familiar, and renewing, and ever new. It is not just “gemütlichkeit,” not just friendliness and warmth and welcome—because love without justice is not fully love; but justice without love is not even justice.

So there will be a welcome there without having to earn it: and forgiveness.

And so I dream of our true home, even as I remember, remember death, and what Matthew Arnold calls “the eternal note of sadness.”

Some of you have worried about becoming sad during this sermon, and some of you have fought it. Indeed, there are at least two dangers in matters like these: sentimentality is one . . . a little religious emotion, a little nostalgia, a little pie in the sky by and by, and then back to business as usual. But the second danger in the face of sadness is refusal of it with a quiet coldness—in fact, a certain kind of nihilism, if a very conventional nihilism. We will not allow the sadness to enter because dreams of home and justice and love threaten our “management” of our lives; and so we turn cold; we stare intently as into a black hole, and seek to steel ourselves, and feel nothing except the cold, indeed to feel nothing . . . except nothing.

To those of us in this second danger—and it can be any and all of us—to you I say, for God’s sake allow the sadness, even the eternal note of sadness in! It is a way back, perhaps the only way back.

So you find the notion of our true home an impossible dream, and talk of heaven impossible to follow or to feel, all right! But let the sadness that is linked in this world to our dreams and hopes for home, let that sadness be.

Homecoming is a symbol. Home is a symbol. Heaven is a symbol.

“Just symbols?” someone asks.

Of course not just symbols!

Like all true symbols, homecoming and home participate in that which is too deep for words, in that “which no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived,” in that which has been “revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.”

Will you hope with me that prayers, like my father’s very secular but very tender prayer—“show me the way to go home”—that my Dad, who at eight years old watched his mother die, and lost his childhood home there at the foot of her bed, that he and all like him will, verily, be shown the way to go home—to a true and real home?

Will you hope with me—and translate hope into action, those of you who think the sermon has been escapist—will you hope and work for prisoners, some kind of prisoners, and perhaps even real criminals and would-be criminals, that they may find—and not merely six feet under—the green, green grass of home?

Will you hope, will you work and hope, pray and work and hope that there may be a place for us, for all of us, somewhere a place for us, for (dare I say it, in the face of their awful suffering?) for the starving… and the countless homeless of our great cities, and the burnt out…? Will you take on commitment to the hope that peace and quiet and open air wait for us, somewhere? Can you let your life turn around so that your life shows your dream of that home where there begins to be time together with time to spare, time to learn, time to care? Will you dare hope together that we will find a new way of living, that we will find a way of forgiving?

There may be no way without tears; increasingly I think so, but I don’t know. Save us from sentimentality, O God! But save us no less from a shallow positive thinking! And save us from the coldness that denies the symbols, the words, the dreams in which sadness and joy, sadness and hope, sadness and courage, sadness and love are inseparable! Save us from that coldness which we prefer in order that all our problems can remain “manageable”! How can we “manage” heartache and death and joy, and our human longing for a real homecoming, a real home?

Well, listen to something a guy I know has written:

“The gospel shouts the good news that God is making his home with us, that we are homeless wanderers no more. We are not yet home, but we are going home. Going home to that homecoming banquet where elder brother and prodigal son, father and son, mother and daughter, exile and stranger, man and woman, white and Black, East and West, Arab and Jew, poor and rich, lion and lamb will sit down together in peace. The biblical word of new creation, of resurrection, suggests that all our history— personal and communal, over all the aeons, over all the earth and throughout the entire cosmos—is not lost or forgotten. Rather, all is gathered up, restored, offered, celebrated, shared, brought into communion. As in the . . . Creed, “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” Yes, I look and keep on looking, and sometimes I think I glimpse it from afar. And if someone tells me that “eternity is in an hour” and that homeland heaven is available right now on homeland earth, I will nod and celebrate and enjoy. But I will still wonder about the mystery which is to come—the mystery in which we shall all be changed, the mystery of that communion of the saints streaming in the gates of home when no one will be on the outside, ever again.”

So let’s turn to our neighbors and offer them “the peace of God.”

And may we hear our neighbor’s greeting to us as a call to live as those who know life to be on the way home; to live in anticipation of our great homecoming; to live revealing the hope that one day no one will be on the outside ever again.

“The peace of God be with you.”