Sermonette: Home

I recently returned from a long and emotional trip. I enjoyed myself, that is for sure, but as many of you will agree, weddings are exhausting. Family is fun, but can be exhausting. Sleeping in different places is fun, but again, exhausting. I’ve never been what people might call a “homebody,” but certainly there’s a point on every vacation when I can hear the bed at home calling me. This is nothing compared to the soldier I ran into the other day who spent a month training thousands of miles away. Or the soldiers deployed overseas for months and years. I can’t imagine how loudly their home calls to them. “Home” seems to be a concept ingrained in human beings. A place to be. A place to relax. A place to find peace.

The day after I returned home, I was reading Hebrews 11, what some call the “Faith Hall of Fame.” In chapter 11, the author brings up various examples of faith from the Old Testament. People like Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah and others who exemplified faith worth imitating. I’ve read Hebrews 11 many times, but I’d never noticed verse 14 before.

“For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.”

– Hebrews 11:14-16

The author looks at the life of these faith "heroes" and notices that they talk as though they have no home. Because they don’t, on earth. Their home is in heaven, with God. While they walked this earth, they walked it as people without a home. Reading this on my couch, in my home, I missed the significance of this. It took me coming home after a week-long vacation to suddenly realize what the author was trying to say. They talked and lived as though they sought a home. They didn’t consider earth to be their "safe space," their place where they truly rested, their place where they found peace. All the earth was little more than a vacation, sleeping on an uncomfortable RV mattress. When I longed for my bed, and my back step on a North Dakota morning to read my Bible on, they longed for a place that couldn’t be reached. That’s a tough way to live.

And yet, that’s the example laid before us. If that’s how Abraham and the rest of them did it, then that’s how we should as well. This world is not our home. If we seek our peace here, we’ll forget our longing for heaven and we’ll begin to act like we belong here. We don’t. Those of us who have been chosen and cleansed by Jesus’ blood are no longer citizens here. This is not our home. As difficult as that is, we must live this life as travelers, longing for a bed that we won’t sleep in tonight. This world is our RV mattress and we must live that way so we never forget where our home truly is.