March 18, 2007
Luke 15:1-32
“Can I Go Home?”

Can I Go Home? It all depends on what you mean by home. Where is home to you? Is home a place where you can open and close doors, eat a meal, sleep in late, sit and relax or leave in a huff? Or is home a group of people, wherever they are located, who are related to you biologically, by marriage, or by friendship? Perhaps home is something more spiritual, a situation or condition where you feel most in touch with God, with nature, with yourself, or with that deep stream that seems to flow through the universe? Or, as I suspect it is with many of us, is home a combination of all of these and more?

As I think about these remaining weeks and days in Lent, and Jesus’ journey to the cross, I cannot help but think he saw himself going anywhere but home. If home for him was a place, his trip to Jerusalem was away from Bethlehem, the town of his birth, Nazareth, the town in which he grew up, or even away from Bethany, where his best friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus lived. No, I would be hard pressed to say that Jerusalem was Jesus’ home... unless you see the events that led up to his crucifixion on Calvary as a means for Jesus to go to his spiritual home: heaven.

My good friend, Mary Kay, who is an excellent preacher, upon hearing my sermon title recommended we sing “Softly and Tenderly.” I differed with her, saying that my experience was that this was primarily a funeral hymn, reassuring us that upon our last breath, God was calling us all to that heavenly home of which we dream:
Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me; see, on the portals he's waiting and watching, watching for you and for me. Refrain: Come home, come home; ye who are weary come home; earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling, O sinner, come home!
Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps God can call us “home” with God calling us “HOME!” Maybe the song does call us to that spiritual experience in the here-and-now where God is felt most present and Christ’s love is most powerful.

Can I come home? It was the question in the prodigal son’s mind for a good while before he actually got up the nerve to act on it. For much of the first part of the story, the question really was, “When am I gonna get out of this place?” It’s hard to imagine from the scant details Jesus gives us why the younger son would be so anxious to break with tradition, risk offending his father, family, and community for life, and go out on his own, but he does. He leaves home, presumably with no though of ever returning. Maybe he had a perfectly good reason to leave.

In any case, he made his home with others... the kind of folks our parents and grandparents might call “the wrong crowd.” He probably thought that home would last for a while, but he quickly learned such homes are dependent upon one thing and one thing only: a cash cow, and he was prime rib!

For a while, then the cash ran out and he found himself with a different kind of livestock. Slopping the pigs must have been difficult for the young man. Partly because he’d just been wining and dining with the best of ‘em, but also because, well, they were pigs! Bob Collins was trying to convince those of us gathered for lunch after the workday yesterday that pigs were more wholesome creatures than chickens were (and I won’t go into details here!) but few of us were buying it. Pigs are pigs.

And as his home in the barn got more and more “settled in,” he began to dream of a different home... the home of his childhood, where his family still remained. And while he probably didn’t have Aunty Em out on the porch yelling “Dorothy!” “Dorothy!” the prodigal was surely closing his eyes at night repeating the phrase “there’s no place like home... there’s no place like home...”

“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”

Thinking about what was going on in the young man’s mind reminded me of the popular song by Bon Jovi and Jennifer Nettles

I spent 20 years trying to get out of this place
I was looking for something I couldn't replace
I was running away from the only thing I've ever known
Like a blind dog without a bone
I was a gypsy lost in the twilight zone
I hijacked a rainbow and crashed into a pot of gold
I been there, done that and I ain't lookin' back on the seeds I've sown,
Saving dimes, spending too much time on the telephone
Who says you can't go home

And as he screwed up his courage, practiced his apology speech, and began walking, he was met by a surprise. Not waiting for his youngest son to make it all the way to the porch, the father ran out to meet him, embrace him, and forgive him. Before he could even get the question out of his mouth, “Can I come ho...?” his father had already answered it with a hug that reaches down through time and spans cultures and geography.

But one person’s definition of home sometimes conflicts with another’s definition of home. For just as the father made certain that home was a place of abundant forgiveness and unconditional hospitality, the older brother was wondering whether or not home was a place for fairness and reason. He had come to believe that home was the place where, when you did what you were told and what had to be done for the good of the family, you were rewarded. Now it appeared that there was ample room for waste, irresponsibility, and frivolity.

“Home may be where the heart is, but clearly it’s not where the brain is!”

The older brother might answer Bon Jovi and Nettle’s chorus:

Who says you can't go home?  There's only one place they call me one of their own
Just a hometown boy, born a rolling stone, who says you can't go home
Who says you can't go back, been all around the world and as a matter of fact
There's only one place left I want to go, who says you can't go home

with a resounding, “I do, that’s who!” And try as he may, the father’s assurances of his devotion and gratitude to the elder son are rebuffed.

So throughout history, the story stands here, at this moment of awkward resolution for some of us, and awkward disruption for others.

One of the places I found great comfort in this week was a parallel story to our “Prodigal Son” text in the Robert Frost poem, Death of the Hired Hand. And while I cannot read the entire poem to you, although I pondered for a long time whether or not I could, I do want to read you the passage that best captures this tense, unresolved struggle with grace, forgiveness, and redemption.

In it Silas, a hired hand who walked off of the farm in the middle of haying one year, has come back to his former employers, clearly ill and dying. Mary, the wife, is on the front porch with her husband, Warren, trying to convince him to relax, let the man stay with them, and find some semblance of mercy in his heart for Silas. Essentially, Silas is asking the question, “Can I come home?”

Part of a moon was falling down the west,
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw
And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand
Among the harp-like morning-glory strings,

Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,
As if she played unheard the tenderness
That wrought on him beside her in the night.
“Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”

“Home,” he mocked gently.
“Yes, 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.”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”
“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Of course the famous quote from this line, the one that comes out of Warren’s mocking voice, is “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” But his wife sees it differently. Home is a place that you “somehow haven’t to deserve.” Home is, Mary is saying, a place that is your birthright, a place that you cannot earn, but that is yours outright.

And even though Silas has “an older brother,” who lives just thirteen miles up the road, his home is not Silas’ home, for there, we surmise, Silas finds only ridicule, shame, and belittling. No, he has come “home” to a place where, even though there were problems, it was still a place where he knew he would be respected as a human being, given a fair chance, and ultimately treated with mercy. Home is a place where you know you have a chance at forgiveness.

Where can you be assured you can find forgiveness in your life? Where is your home?

And this, of course, brings us back to the cross. The cross of Jesus Christ is a sure and secure place for each and every one of us to find the forgiveness for which we crave, we long, we hope. Thus, our home is the cross, undeserved and yet all, all ours.

“Can I come home?” Of course you can, of course we can. This is why we make this Lenten trek each and every year, because we are always in need of forgiveness and the deep rest and renewal that comes from God’s abundant grace. We are the prodigal, screwing up our courage to go back home, praying for our father’s forgiveness. We are the elder son, who may not realize it right now, but who will also be turning to his father someday in need of that same, overflowing, wasteful forgiveness. We are Silas, having lived a troubled life, who bypass the buildings where our biological families live, in order to make our way “home” to where true family gathers, in order to show and receive mercy. We are Mary and Warren, always wondering how much to forgive, and when to forget, and when to just let folks be.

“Can I come home?” As your pastor, I hope and pray there are times when you come to this church and say, “I am home here.” But I also know we are all on a journey, and my deepest prayer is that you and I and others are all headed to the cross, our true home, the unsurpassable place of forgiveness, grace, and rest.”
Amen.

Rev. Allen V. Harris
Franklin Circle Christian Church
www.FranklinCircleChurch.org


 

Copyright 2007 -- The Rev. Allen V. Harris

Franklin Circle Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

1688 Fulton Rd., Cleveland, OH 44113-3096