“Wayfaring Strangers”
Homecoming Sermon
Robert’s Grove OFWB Church
Date: October 5, 2014
In 1822 John Howard Payne was credited with writing a song that would remain well known for 150 years. The opening lines of the song, which you will recognize in part, say
Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home;
How would you define the word “home?” The dictionary says home is “the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.” But that does not seem to fully capture the mystical attachment we have for it. Home is the place we long to be but it is fleeting in our ever-changing world and thus home is sometimes best experienced in our fond memories, which is in part perhaps what North Carolina’s son Thomas Wolfe meant when he wrote, You Can't Go Home Again.
The writer of Hebrews adds another dimension to the meaning of home in Hebrews 11:13-16 when he writes about Christians as strangers passing through a foreign land as we press on in our search for our real home.
Like the Jewish patriarchs, we who belong to God are strangers pressing onward as we pass through a foreign land in search of our home. The writer wanted to encourage the early Jewish Christians who may have been wavering in their faith due to persecution and other hardships.
He reminded them of their long history of being sojourners (or temporary residence) in the land and how their ancestors remained faithful; never turning to go back to the places they had come from. Though they saw the promises of God only from a distance, they received them with gladness and passed them on to their children. Clearly their ancestors were thinking of a better land, a heavenly land, and for that reason God adopted them as his own and prepared a heavenly city for them.
In our world today, it would be helpful to the cause of Christ and his church if Christians reacquainted themselves with the ancient notion of not becoming too comfortable with our surroundings. We would all be happier if we embraced our status as aliens in a foreign land and celebrated gatherings like this one today as opportunities to come together to encourage one another in our common journeys of faith. There would be less depression, less poverty, and less oppression in general if we could all see each other as fellow travelers in need of assistance. Like hobos leaving marks on the gatepost as we pass, “Christianity [should be] one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.”
Like those who first gathered 120 years ago, the worshipers at Robert’s Grove find comfort in their church of like-minded believers but we realize that we desire an even better place to go. This is our temporary home for now and we have no desire to go back to the spiritual darkness of our past.
It is by God’s grace that we have been handed a Godly heritage and it will be by God’s grace that we pass on that heritage to future generations. Each generation however must come to the understanding that our inheritance is material and it is not here, our inheritance in not to be comfortable and happy with this world as it is, our inheritance is to constantly on the move, pressing on to the better land. By the power of God’s Spirit and the example of his Son we strive and struggle against the forces of injustice and oppression. “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12, NRSV) We are so blessed to be counted among those yet unrecognized victors who stand as did Moses and testify saying . . . ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. . . (Deuteronomy 26:5, NRSV)
Like Moses, we may not see the promised land. We may not see the fullness of his blessings here. We may not win every struggle we enter into for good and right, but we press on, we do not turn back, and we continually work for the heavenly land that we truly desire.
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