Today’s sermon is called Welcome Home.
Craig Barnes is a retired pastor and President of Princeton Seminary, and the author of several books. One of those books is called Searching for Home. In that book, Barnes tells his own story of how “home” and “family” are complicated. When Craig was a teenager, his own father walked out on the family in a haze of depression and never came back. In spite of, or maybe because of his own messy story, Craig believes that ideas like home, fathers, and mothers, are an essential part of how we understand God. Even when those parts of our own lives may be far less than perfect, it’s still important for the story of Christ to be a loving story about fathers, and mothers, and being welcomed home—a truth we may never quite see in fullness, but yearn for even still.
In the great Charlotte Bronte novel Jane Eyre, Jane is an orphan. Born to parents who love her, but who die of typhus, Jane is raised by relatives and headmasters who deny her any kind of love and care; she only knows love from childhood friends, the closest one of whom also dies of typhus, but not before telling Jane, “you are loved…there is a commission of spirits all around to guide you, Jane…can you not see it…?” The story of Jane’s whole life is guided by this idea that being loved is this promise, sometimes not quite reachable in this broken human life, but real…a promise for which so many of us are yearning, and which our Creator wants us to discover. A promise we must share with others.
I tell my children I love them all the time; I know they get sick of it. I say it to them before bed, especially on nights when I know they’re mad at me. I do it not because I’m some terrific father but because I know they are important words to hear, even when I’ve not been a perfect and loving father, and I say it because I know how many dads do not. And I tell my children I love them because I am scared to death of what happens when someone does not know love…
When people do not know that they are loved, it’s devastating. Biblical scholar Paul Hanson remembers a story he saw on the CBS Evening News in 1994. (in Interpretation biblical commentaries, Isaiah 43) Two 11 year-olds had brutally taken the life of an itinerant worker in a horrible crime. When asked about it, a girl who was their classmate said: “They clearly needed someone who loved them and showed them that, someone that really cared about them.” The girl clearly had that in her life, but the ones who had taken a life did not. I wonder about that absence of love in light of the recent shootings in Minneapolis. I wondered it about after teenagers in our own city killed 11 year-old Israel Bishop earlier this year. I wonder it about politicians who are more enamored with power than compassionate toward people who suffer. I wonder about it when I am not my own best self and not as loving as I should be…How easy it is to forget the promise that we are loved; how important it is that we remember the promise.
Isaiah 43 is one of the most beautiful, powerful, and poetic chapters in the Bible. I fear that too often, we think of the God who created us as distant, unknowable, or even frightening. But in this story, God shows up as an intensely close, personal, vulnerable, loving parent. God’s people have been through one of the hardest times of their lives, and they themselves have failed to be the people God created them to be. For all kinds of reasons, they may suspect that they are unworthy of love. But God comes close to them, and says, “Do not fear, for I am with you; I have called you by name you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you… I am the Lord, your God; …you are precious in my in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”
What an incredible blessing and promise it is to know that we are loved, to know that we were created as people who are worthy of love, and that we always will be. What an incredible thing to be promised that though there will be times in every human life when we doubt that we are loveable, when love feels out of reach or not in the cards for us, when it seems as if loneliness is bound to win out, that in the end, the greatest promise our creator gives us is “you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”
This promise is present in the life of every single created human being, but tragically, so many do not get to hear it, or have heard it, and forget. Love is the promise that animates the life of Jane Eyre even when love seems to be absent, but it still moving in her life as a powerful undercurrent that drives her story. Love is the promise that convinces a pastor like Craig Barnes that even when your own father walks out, the goodness of fatherhood, motherhood, and home, are still worth yearning for; they are worth sharing with others and talking about in church. Church is where we are called to do this rare and countercultural thing: to remind as many people as we can—you are loved. The God who created us says to every single one of us, I have called you by name, and you belong to me…you are precious in my sight and honored and I love you.
For so many of us, Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son is the most powerful and moving story in the Bible. A man has two sons. The younger one is spiteful and arrogant (he’s a teenager). His frontal lobe has not yet developed. He has no idea how good he has it, at home with his loving and generous family. So in a great insult to his father, he asks for his inheritance early and heads for a distant land. When the story says that he spends his inheritance in “dissolute living,” “devouring his property with prostitutes,” what else could possibly be going on but that the young man is searching for love, but for a seaons, he has clearly forgotten where to look; he has forgotten that that he is deserving of love. When he becomes hungry and desperate enough, he returns home. There he finds waiting the genuine, unconditional love that was part of his life all along. His father runs to him with arms and open. Jesus tells this story because even when we have done so much to spurn the love of God, God’s love is as deep, even deeper than a parent running to welcome home a lost child. “You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”
(Refrain: you are precious, and honored, and I love you…)
The story resonates with those of us who have mistreated our friends, taken our spouses for granted, or not been the parent we had imagined we would be. It resonates with us when we have been selfish and ungenerous with others, or have been dishonorable in some way and believe we no longer belong in church. The story also resonates with us when we’ve lived well and done most of the right things, but things just haven’t worked out for us, and we wonder why love seems so hard to find. It resonates when we’ve spent too much time on social media or watching bad commercials and have come to imagine that everyone else is perfect and we don’t measure up—what a lie! Or maybe a loved one has walked out on us, or in the home where we grew up, no one said “I love you,” or we work in an especially brutal environment each week where no one speaks with kindness…
For so many reasons, people can start to wonder if they are still worthy of love. And for all of these reasons, church is beautiful. For here, we are called to be part of a story that says, we are all worthy of love. Every single one of us is a less-than-perfect, messy, human being that God finds absolutely beautiful. And here at church we get to remind ourselves that we are worthy of love. That God our Creator looks upon us and says, “you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.
In a world with so much pain and suffering, is this not the very best place for us to come home? Because at church, we are not just just called to stay in here in some kind of unrealistic private enclave. No, this is the place we keep coming back for belonging and encouragement, so that we can take God’s love back out into the world, and share it with so many who need it. In church we learn love for ourselves, so that we can take it to the world.
This absolutely essential task requires every single one of us, as many as we can inspire to take on the challenge; for the task is immense, but with God’s help we can do it. We can hear the voice of God at work in our own lives, saying, ‘you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” And we can accept God’s calling for each of us, in our own way. You are to be like the parent in the story of the Prodigal Son, to find your place in the world where you may throw open the doors of the church and your life to those who think they are unlovable. At church, we train to tell all of God’s people the promise of love that has meant so very much to us. This is the place where we learn to open our arms to those who are lost. Come, with all of your flaws, all of your pain, all of your messiness, and receive the love of God and be a gift to others. Welcome home. Amen.