VIEW FROM THE MANSE 2.0 January 2024

 

                    “There’s no place like home.”                “Home is where the heart is.”

          All of us have heard these words. Perhaps we have even said them. We love where we live. We love the people who fill a building with warmth and memories and transform it into a home. We love the fields where we pour out our sweat and blood. But sometimes these words about home don’t sit right with us. A place we love can become haunted by a faded memory and a past forgotten. The people who filled our homes with laughter are gone. The job we loved and the co-workers we spent so much time with are lost to us. All of a sudden, we may not feel at home in this world.

          When I was growing up, we used to sing, “This world is not my home. I’m just a-passing through. My treasures are laid up, somewhere beyond the blue.” We also sang, “I’ll Fly Away”, but I’ll spare you those lyrics. Sometimes, this world seems familiar and sometimes it seems strange. In her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson has her character, a pastor in a small town, wrestle with this idea by saying, “We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I'd walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a friend-egg sandwich and listen to the radio.”

          We believe that this world, with devils filled, is passing away. And we belong to the age to come. Followers of Jesus have been transferred from the kingdom of death to the kingdom of life. And so, we often feel displaced in the now and not yet. The writer of Hebrews reminds us, “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.” In 1 Peter, we read, “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.”

          But in the beginning, God created the world good. And there are still goods to be claimed and received with thanksgiving by the followers of the Way. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, “There was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with a sense of 'exile'." We know that the good things of this life are echoes and whispers of the good to come.

          Tim Keller said, “It is true that this world is not our home. But one day, it will be.” When Christ returns all will be made new. Tears will be wiped away. We will be given incorruptible bodies. The will of God will be done on earth as it is in heaven with no disparity or confusion.

          Some of you have asked me, “Bryan, what do you make of the mess of the world in our moment?” This is a good question. We continue to see reports of earthquakes in China, suicide bombers in Pakistan, wars in Ukraine and Israel and we wonder, “How long will this world feel like a foreign place? Are we exiles here or are we heirs with Christ?”

          We are heirs with Christ and we will reign with him when he comes back. Until that day, things will feel both familiar and unfamiliar. You will be at home and ill-at-ease.

Bryan Fitzgerald, Pastor

                                                      (bryan@argylepresbyterian.org)

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