Unlike my wife, Alex, I am not prone to nostalgia. However, she knows that our roles reverse periodically. On Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, times of long-standing traditions in my family growing up, she expects the mild bouts of melancholy that regularly arrive. Why? Likely homesickness.
Home. We long to get home after long trips or busy days at work. Our childhood home exerts a powerful pull on us, even as adults with homes and families of our own. As summarized in the opening line of the otherwise-incoherent song “This Must Be the Place” by the Talking Heads, “Home is where I want to be.”
Why do we as humans have such a strong conception of and attraction to home? I wonder how much of it is simply because of, at least for us as Christians, a constant feeling that we are not home. Pastor Nathan introduced the theme of home during the Ruth sermon series and showed how important that idea is to the book. Throughout Scripture, God inspired the authors to draw on this theme in at least two different ways.
One way that the Bible speaks of home focuses on the sinner in need of reclamation. Most famously, in the parable of the prodigal son, the wayward son longs for home after suffering the consequences of his rebellion and running away from his father. His father, after running to meet him on the road home, declares, “’For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found’” (Luke 15:24). Elsewhere, he is depicted as finding lost sheep and a lost coin. We were “strangers and aliens,” but Jesus made us “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19).
A second way applies to us even after our redemption. Scripture frequently reminds us that as Christians this world is not our home but that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20). “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14). As described by Michael Horton in the introduction to his systematic theology, we Christians are “a growing cast of pilgrims making [our] way together behind [our] royal Redeemer in a procession to the City of God.” As the redeemed, we possess home now in that we are a part of God’s household (the “already”) but look in hope to the time when we will end our pilgrimage and finally and fully be home (the “not yet”).
So, whenever you struggle Monday through Saturday with a lack of fulfillment and satisfaction from your job, your hobbies, and your relationships, remember. Remember that this world is not your home. Remember that Jesus saved you into the household of faith and that he will ultimately bring you to your true home in the New Heavens and the New Earth. When you forget, as we all do during the week, come to church on Sunday for a foretaste of home. Receive grace in Word, sacrament, and prayer and be reminded of the truth of the Gospel.
On behalf of the session,
Chase