This past week I conducted a memorial service for one of our members—the fourth one in the month of April. Almost always at such a service I read the opening verses of John 14, which follow right on the heels of this morning’s gospel. Today we heard Jesus saying, “Where I am going you cannot come,” but then immediately in John 14 he will say that he goes to prepare a place for us in his Father’s house, a house with many rooms. Often, of course, we speak of death as “going home.” It is a comforting image, and an important one.
And yet it is equally important to realize that for us being “home with Christ” is not merely a future promise. In the passage we heard a moment ago from the book of Revelation there are these words: “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals.’” I’d like to think with you for a few minutes about what it means that the home of God is among mortals—that is to say, among you and me. God makes his home with us, God dwells with us—not just in heaven, not just in some future state, but now, today, here—God makes his home with us.
One of Robert Frost’s most beloved poems is “The Death of the Hired Man.” It tells the rather lengthy story of Warren and Mary, a farm couple, and Silas, their longtime hired man. Some months ago, Silas left the farm where he had worked for so many years. Times were tough, and he thought Warren didn’t pay him enough. Warren told him at the time that if he left, he would not be welcomed back. But now Silas has returned, and it is obvious that he is very seriously ill. Silas has one brother to whom he is not close, and he has not had his own home really since childhood. Now, weak and tired, he returns to Warren and Mary’s farm, really the only home he knows—returns, as it turns out, to die.
Warren and Mary sit quietly that evening by lamplight and reflect on what it means that their house is this hired man’s home. Warren mocks the idea that their home is the hired man’s home. “Yes,” Mary muses. “What else but home?”
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”
Warren replies,
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”
And Mary: “I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
Their definitions are haunting. “Home is the place where, when you have to go there/ They have to take you in.” It is a rather troubling phrase, isn’t it—full of obligation and duty—and yet we know just what Warren means. Sociologists tell us that in these difficult times, more and more adult children who have left home have come back to live with their parents for economic reasons. A recent study showed that some 40% of college graduates in 2008 have moved back home because they just can’t make it on their own. Home has always been the place of last resort, the place the prodigal comes when all the money is gone and he can’t stand the pigs anymore.
There are people who think of God in that way. God is the last resort! When everything fails, we can depend on God; when we have to go to God, he has to take us in. It’s his duty!
Of course it isn’t really like that at all! The home that God makes with us—well, it’s more like the joyous and wonderful home of a newly married couple. That’s in our text too, you know. “I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” Oh, the excitement and thrill of newlyweds moving into their first home, making their first home with one another! What a sense of delight! That’s what it’s like to be at home with God, to have God dwelling with you! God delights in us! It is as Luther’s Small Catechism says so eloquently: Christ has done all this for me so that I may be his own! He has chosen me! He has chosen to dwell with me!
One of my favorite Garrison Keillor stories is called “The Storm Home.” It seems that Mr. Detman, principal of Lake Wobegon High School, was terrified of what might happen if one of those Minnesota blizzards struck during school hours, and all the country children were stranded in town. So he set up a system of “storm homes”—people who lived in town who, in the event of a serious storm, might give shelter to children who could not make it to their own home in safety. In Keillor’s story, his storm home was that of Mr. and Mrs. Kloeckl. He didn’t know them, indeed he never met them, because during his school years the storms were always conveniently on weekends or during vacations. But each day he would pass by that house, his storm home, and he would fantasize about what it would be like to be there. He imagined “that the Klockls had personally chosen [him] as their storm child because they liked [him]. ‘Him!’ they had told Mr. Detman. ‘In the event of a blizzard, we want that boy—the skinny one, with the thick glasses.’”
“Blizzards aren’t the only storms,” Keillor writes, “and not the worst by any means. . . . If the worst should come, I could go to the Klockls’. ‘Hello,’ I’d say, ‘I’m your storm child.’ ‘Oh, I know,’ she’d say. ‘I was wondering when you’d come. Oh, it’s good to see you. How would you like a hot chocolate and an oatmeal cookie? . . . We’re so glad to have you! Carl! Come down and see who’s here!’ ‘The storm child?’ ‘Yes, himself, in the flesh.’”
“Blizzards aren’t the only storms, and not the worst by any means.” You know that from your own life! But there is a home, you see, where you are welcomed and embraced and loved, because you have been chosen by Christ to live with him, to be at home with him. “See, the home of God is with you!”
And so Warren has it all wrong when he suggests that “home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Our home is with Christ—and he doesn’t have to take you in, he longs to take you, longs to have you with him. He delights in you!
Mary replies to Warren: “I should have called home/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Now that’s more like it. “Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Again a phrase from the Small Catechism comes to mind: “All this [God] does out of fatherly and divine goodness and mercy, though I do not deserve it.”
Perhaps you’ve heard the story of the Yankee traveler, who stopped for breakfast in a North Carolina town. He ordered bacon and eggs, but along with it came this strange white substance he didn’t recognized. “Waitress,” he said, “I didn’t order this.” “Honey,” she said, “that’s grits. You don’t order grits, they just come.” “Home is something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” It just comes. It is grace—the grace of home, the gift of welcome. You haven’t to deserve it, it is just there, lovingly there for you.
See, the home of God is among you. He will dwell with you as your God. You will be his own. God himself will be with you. He will wipe every tear from your eye. Such a promise! Such a God! Such a home!
Richard O. Johnson
Peace Lutheran Church
Grass Valley CA
2010 All rights reserved.
Sources:
Robert Frost poem:
Robert Frost, North of Boston (1914). Published on-line by Bartleby.com,
Inc., July 1999.
Garrison Keillor story from Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days (Viking,
1985), pp. 248-249.