coming home as promised land

Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost ● September 1, 2024

Rev. Alexis Lillie © 2024

You can view the full worship video recording at:

https://youtu.be/kk3nP2neKwk

Scripture Readings: 

Numbers 6:24-25 (The Inclusive Bible)

The texts of the readings are in the worship bulletin linked here.

"Where are you from?" "Where's home?" This are often questions you get asked when you’re first meeting someone, making small talk – they are seemingly easy to answer! But, as many of you know, I grew up military so this is hard for me to answer. It’s complicated! So I’m an interesting person to be talking about coming home. I never really felt like I had a place to come home to in a traditional sense. Now, NYC is home, but I’m not "from" here, I don't have that place of comfort, solidity, return. I sometimes use the metaphor that many of my years were spent like a turtle: carrying my home on my back!

I realize it’s not just military experience that can lead to feeling a lack of home. There are lots of ways "home" -- whether a literal, physical space or otherwise -- may not be comforting. It may be that you don’t feel home in the place that is “traditionally” home for you; or that you don’t feel home in your own family; in your own body! These can lead us to long, long journeys of discovery, and often a lot of difficulty.

My mom often spoke of us as the children of Israel ... wandering in the desert! This metaphor harkens back to the Hebrew scriptures when the early Israelites escaped slavery in Egypt but, for a whole host of reasons, spent a generation in the desert before they came to the so-called promised land.

Which made me think: if many of us don’t have a "home," or feel like we're wandering without a sense of rootedness, it begs the question: what is the promised land we're searching for? And, are we always searching but never arriving? I think this "promised land" is similar to how we talk about kin-dom of God and similar to how we talk about chosen family. It’s something we create that is always becoming, and always here. So yes, there's a sense of longing for it, but not in a way that leads us to a lack of fulfillment or discontentment

The passage that we read together reveals this for me. I say it as a blessing every night for Junia when I put her to bed. Now admittedly, we don't often read - or preach - from this book, Numbers. It’s a lot of genealogy and kind of obscure ancient Hebrew history. But tucked in all of that is this blessing which, kind of ironically, is a blessing for leaving (home), a blessing for what is to come! A prayer that the journey from the place, people, situation you're familiar with be fruitful. And yet for me, it is also the blessing itself that makes my spirit restful, makes me feel like I can pause, take a breath, arrive, and be at peace. It fosters a sense of belonging.

And that is a big piece of "coming home" or finding home -- this sense of belonging. What does that feel like? We often know what it doesn’t feel like!! That’s a lot of those things we referred to at the beginning: feeling unrooted, not being seen or understood, not having a solid place of return. How do we know we do belong? That’s a question I want us to hold, and let our psyches and spirits work on, we'll come back to it later.

As we ponder this, I think we innately have a sense of it, even if it's hard to put a finger on. For me I feel like I belong when I have a sense of shared language, shared experience, when I feel that I can start from a certain jumping-off point and not have to do a lot of explanation or work on curating other's experience of me! That’s not the only way I feel like I belong, but many of the times I can point to as feeling a particular sense of belonging have to do when I meet people who have some significant shared experience with me. This happens when I meet other military brats, other ex-vangelicals, other people who have done specific types of healing work. I find myself talking open-heartedly, sharing things that are important, and feel met and understood. It’s like my spirit is relaxing, exhaling.

This is why I like the Numbers passage, it does this for me. I'm sure it has something to do with using it every night with Junia, I have created positive connotations with it over many years. And, I'm sure I started using it for the first time way back when because there was something about it that just hit -- that resonated as a place to rest, to come home to.

That's what a vision of a promised land, or a kin-dom of God does. It's a little bit like that turtle metaphor: A way of being that we carry with us. One that isn't dependent on circumstances, that may have very little to do with our actual, literal home. Because an internal sense of home allows us to (at least aim for!) being content, feeling like we belong, sensing that there is grace and rest -- no matter what is going on around us.It’s not that we're closed off or impervious to our reality (of course not!!) ... but that we have this "home base" within us. And we know what people, places, things external to us, lead us to feel more or less at home.

Home isn't a place -  or, it doesn't always have to be! It is a Promised Land, a kin-dom vision that we are both aiming for, and that we are continually creating and carrying around inside of us.