Going Home
If you all have ever been in my office before, you know I have a lot of books. When I first moved here and was feeling a little bit lost and lonely, unpacking the thirty boxes of books I brought with me from Oklahoma was therapeutic. I felt like I was seeing a lot of old friends again. They made me happy. They made a place that was not yet home feel more like home.
No, I haven’t read them all. Someone wise once said that just having a library is more important than reading all the books in your library. But I have read a lot of them. Most of them are books that I’ve taught at some point in my career.
Teaching a book is a very different experience from just reading it.
The books I’ve taught are the books that stay with me. They’re the ones I took a great deal of care and concern with, the ones that I discussed with students, the ones that bring to mind memories, personal connections, conversations; everything I learned from my students and tried to teach them is packed into these books. They are the ones that I have, in some cases, fallen in love with. These books feel like home.
One of those books contains a short story called Fidelity. In this story, a man named Danny has a father, Burley, who is very sick in the hospital and is nearing death. But rather than watch Burley, his father, die in the cold, sterile environment of the hospital, Danny calmly and gently steals him away and takes him into the woods, the woods that they had known and loved all their lives.
Danny believes that there is such a thing as a good death, a death surrounded by the calm and peacefulness of nature, away from the artificial environment of the hospital. He gives his father that good death as a final parting gift. Burley opens his eyes once they get to the woods, looks around, knows the place that he loves, and smiles before peacefully fading away. He is at home.
This story resonated with me for many reasons. For one, it always reminds me of my grandfather, who loved the outdoors so much that being inside for too long made him anxious and nervous, like a caged animal. My dad is very much the same way.
It also reminds me of the death predicted for Odysseus by Tiresias in Book 11 of the Odyssey: a “seaborne death soft as this hand of mist,” Tiresias says from the Underworld, “will come upon you when you are wearied out with rich old age, your country folk in blessed peace around you.” This is the ideal promised death for an old veteran like Odysseus: not to die on the battlefield, or in the middle of the journey, but at home, with family and friends all around.
But what this story also reminds me of is our Gospel reading for today. When Jesus says “The Kingdom of God is among you,” he is saying something about home—that God’s Kingdom is not a physical place so much as a state of being that feels like home.
Another book I’ve read recently describes it this way. The author, Diana Butler Bass, describes a move her family made when she was thirteen, from the woods of the Maryland countryside to the deserts of Arizona. While most of the family adjusted quickly to this major change in scenery and weather, Bass’s mother did not: “She missed the seasons. It was too hot. The mail was slow . . . there were no trees. Everything was brown. Within a year, she was in despair. I asked her what was wrong. ‘I don’t feel like I belong here,’ she replied. ‘I miss home.’”
It’s a simple but profound experience that some of you have already had, and that all of you will have at some point in life: the feeling of dislocation, of dis-ease, occasioned by a move away from home.
As Bass says, “home is more than a house. It is a sacred location, a place of aspiration and dreams, of learning and habit, of relationships and heart. Home is the geography of our souls.”
Where is home for you?
What makes you feel at home?
What does it feel like to long for home?
The people Jesus was talking to were trying to imagine how the Kingdom of God, something about which Jesus talked all the time, would arrive. Would it be a physical kingdom? Would it have walls, and cities, and battlements, and towers?
And Jesus’s response is that The Kingdom is simply home—not a place, but a state of being, the place in which we know ourselves and God. It is the “geography of our souls,” to use Bass’s term.
So when Jesus is talking about the Kingdom of God to his friends in this story, he reminds them that God’s Kingdom isn’t like other kingdoms. It’s not a conqueror marching in the streets, with conquered people in chains, which was the typical way of proclaiming a new kingdom at the time.
It’s not a series of royal messengers riding through the kingdom with trumpets and fanfare, and reminding the peasants that they have a new person to whom they owe their lives, their taxes, their labor, their blood, sweat, and tears.
Or the way we might envision it today: there’s no inauguration or celebration or coronation. In fact, it’s nothing you can see at all, Jesus says.
The Kingdom of God is profoundly simple, Jesus teaches: it’s the Love of God, the Love that transforms the world, and—this is the important part, pay attention, listen up, he tells them—it’s already here.
So when you hear “kingdom” don’t think of heaven, and don’t think of some ethereal, angelic royal palace. Think of this room. Think of these oak trees. Think of this perfect, beautiful, gorgeous day.
Think of the moment in your life that you have felt the most loved, the most safe, the most cared for, the most free, the most truly happy you’ve ever been. Think of home.
A little Greek lesson: the phrase translated as “among you” in the Gospel reading can have at least three similar meanings. The Kingdom is “among you”; the kingdom is “within your grasp”; and the kingdom is “within you.” And while scholars have debated which one of these three is the “correct” meaning of the phrase, I’m going to suggest that all three are correct, and give you a picture of what each one of them might look like.
1. The Kingdom is among you.
When we think of the Kingdom of God as among us, we see it in each other.
As Rabbi Joshua ben Levi says, “every person walking upon this earth has a procession of angels that goes before them, and as they go these angels are proclaiming, ‘make way, make way for the image of God!”
The Kingdom of God is among us in the presence of Love, whenever we encounter God in each other, in our friends and family. I believe that we even see the Kingdom of God among us in our pets, these creatures that often inexplicably love us unconditionally and whose presence reminds us therefore of God’s unconditional love.
When we perceive the Kingdom of God among us, we also see it in the beauty of Creation around us. Hopefully you have already been somewhere on this planet that literally took your breath away.
If not, I hope that you have the chance to.
Moments like these remind us that the Kingdom of God is among us, and that this world is our home, simultaneously awe-inspiring, majestic, resilient, and yet fragile, delicate, and imperiled.
2. The Kingdom is within your grasp.
If we think of the Kingdom as close at hand, as within our grasp, then we are motivated to strive for those important manifestations of God’s love that are not yet here but that, at the same time, we desperately wish were here.
We think of the things toward which we aspire; a world in which justice is not delayed or denied but fully and perfectly accomplished for all people. A world in which no one, especially no child, goes hungry. A world in which the reality of gun violence is no more.
The Kingdom, Jesus says, is within your grasp. You’re almost there.
I love this image, the image of us reaching out to meet the hand of God, to say yes to God’s insistent request that we partner with God to bring about the Kingdom on earth, as it is in heaven.
And if those things I just listed seem too difficult to strive for, too far off, we can say two things:
One, that with God’s help, nothing is impossible. And two, even less ambitious realities that we might desire for our world are within our grasp. A better relationship with our parents—or our children.
More boldness, as the reading from First John suggests, to love without fear. Resolving to be more kind.
Resolving to speak less and listen more. Resolving to try to understand each other rather than move quickly to harsh judgment. These are kingdom realities that are within our grasp, daily.
3. The Kingdom is within you.
If we think of the Kingdom of God as within us, we are thinking of how we connect to God, each of us, within our own soul.
This idea of the Kingdom is very personal to each one of us.
What is the one part of your soul that no one else knows, that no one else pays attention to, that no one else can see?
If the Kingdom of God is within us, we believe that God sees that place, pays attention to it,
honors it, and loves it.
The Kingdom of God is an inner transformation that is always happening.
It is the transformation from selfishness to selflessness;
from impatience to patience;
from hatred to kindness; from apathy to passion;
from sarcastic detachment to sincere connection.
The Kingdom of God within us is a pilgrimage, in fact, that we have been on since our birth and that will carry us throughout our entire life without taking a single physical step.
When we consider the Kingdom of God within us, we think about the things in life that bring us the greatest joy and fulfillment.
So: the spiritual revolution Jesus preaches is this:
don’t look for the Kingdom where you think you might find it.
Look for it where you don’t think you could otherwise find it.
Look right in front of you.
The Kingdom is always right in front of us, hidden in plain sight.
What needs to change is not the world around us but our own perception.
Friends, we long for home because God has put the longing for home in our hearts. As St. Augustine says, “O God, our hearts are restless till they rest in you.”
God does not dwell far off in heaven, away from us, away from our grasp, away from our daily needs and frustrations and fears.
God’s Kingdom is among us. God is here.
We are home already even as we continue to long for our true home in God.
As one writer puts it:
The whole universe is God’s dwelling. Earth, a very small,
uniquely blessed corner of that universe, gifted with unique natural blessings, is humanity’s home, and humans are never so much at home as when God dwells with them.
The Kingdom of God is among us. Here, now. Thanks be to God!
AMEN.