If you didn’t know, you will shortly know a very important unwritten rule, an unwritten rule that extends beyond ritual or tradition and taps into the yearnings of a people and a place.
You see, if you have ever flown to San Juan, Puerto Rico—the capital of the indisputably most beautiful island in the world—then you probably experienced this unwritten rule as the plane’s wheels touched the ground and Puerto Ricans on the plane began to clap. Now, you have to understand that the clapping is not just an affirmation of the pilot’s or crew’s skills. No matter the quality of the landing, we clap. It is the fact of the landing that we applaud.
For so many of us, landing back in this island is not just the beginning of a vacation but an emotional return to a place we seek and yet struggle to find: home. There’s something powerful in that small but meaningful word: home. There’s also something sad, challenging, even forlorn for many of us in this word. There is a certain bittersweetness in that Caribbean air, in the taste of comida criolla, in the view of the Puerto Rican coast from the plane window that breaks the blue expanse of ocean. Home for some of us is both promise and grief, joy and lament, hope and despair.
You see, certain kinds of imperial and colonial imaginations have made home, let’s say, complicated for some of us. For Puerto Ricans, colonial rule has taken the resources of the island and then spread many of us in a diaspora across the United States and the world. Puerto Ricans are not alone in this ambivalent posture toward home.
For other communities, the slave ship tore apart families and place and belonging. For yet others, it was warfare and privation that led to migration. For yet others, it was rejection at home, or at school, or at church about whom God had made you to be.
That is, home for many of us feels like it is somewhere else but it’s a somewhere else that lives largely in our hopes and imaginations. A somewhere else to which we cannot descend on a plane, even if we clap as the wheels touch the ground.
Our texts today dwell on these thorny questions of home in all its complexity. These Scriptures help illuminate our imaginations about a notion seemingly so simple yet so full of meaning.
The God narrated in the Scriptures is a promise maker. With a rainbow, God promised to set the world right not by the path of destruction but through the proliferation of life. With Abraham, God made a promise to bless the peoples of the world through the choosing of a people, Israel. With the prophets, God made a promise to restore justice where injustice once prevailed. And in the book of Revelation, God made a promise to end grief and its cruel source, death. In the Scriptures, God is characterized via promises made.
Among these many promises, we turn in our texts to yet another promise: God’s promise to abide with, among, and for us. A promise not to remain at arm’s length but to draw near to us. A promise to make God’s home here and there and everywhere.
In 1 Kings 8, we read about Solomon bringing the ark of the covenant into the temple in Jerusalem. The ark’s arrival causes a cloud to descend upon the inner sanctuary, symbolizing God’s abiding presence. Solomon exclaims, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!” That is, God dwells in the temple but is not contained by its walls. So also, God can dwell anywhere, anyplace, but nowhere and no place can contain God’s presence, restrict God’s movements, narrow who God is.
Psalm 84 begins with praise: “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!” The psalm continues by vocalizing longing, the recognition that as lovely as the Lord’s house is, it can remain so far away from us today. The psalmist then concludes with hope at the end of all that longing: “For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.” The “elsewhere” reminds us that our sojourn for now includes broken homes, difficult belonging, an incomplete abiding of God’s presence. We praise God’s home and its beauty even as we lament the limitations of our current moments.
The last and most difficult reading is John’s narrating of a teaching that causes some of Jesus’ followers to shrink from discipleship. Jesus here declares that those who eat of his flesh and drink of his blood abide in him, and he in them. Even now, even those of us shaped and formed by sacramental theologies, even those of us who yearn for the bread and wine of communion might wonder how to make sense of this command. In fact some of the disciples muse aloud, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” Some of the disciples, John writes, “turned back and no longer went about with Jesus.” Turning to the twelve, Jesus asks them if they would leave him too. Simon Peter responds, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
Where else is there to go? When others desert you, Jesus, we, your disciples, linger because we have left homes and families to follow you. When others recoil, we abide because you have abided with us. When others wonder about the words of eternal life spilling from your lips, we stay because there is nowhere else to go. There is no home for us save the home you create when you abide with us.
The God narrated in the Scripture is a promise maker. The God narrated in the Scriptures is also a keeper of these promises, for God indeed has drawn close to us. The God narrated in Scripture’s deepest, hard won hopes is a promise keeper. Notice that in each case we read above, it is God’s initiative to draw close to us not our action to draw close to God that makes all the difference. It is God who has abided among us. And that abiding changes everything.
But notice one other vital insight: God’s abiding among us happens precisely amid, alongside, within the complexities of our experiences with home and with belonging.
You see, too many of us have been taught that grace is a zero-sum game, that our thriving requires the suffering of others, that there simply isn’t enough to go around so we must desperately hold on to whatever we have. That is we abide in fear rather than the grace of God.
Empire has lied to us that grace for others means loss for us. We abide in scarcity rather than God’s abundance.
Our politics too often suggest that others are not neighbors but threats. And thus we abide in resentment rather than God’s deliverance.
Our economic systems nurture in us a sense that there is something missing in my life that a purchase can fill. We abide in our lack, rather than the generosity of God.
Home, my friends, is a promise. It is a promise ever before us. And so I yearn to be on a plane again heading to an island that makes me who I am, an island whose influence reverberates in the lives of those I love. I want to gaze expectedly to the horizon, waiting to see those green shores. I can’t wait for that first step on the jet bridge, that first whiff of Caribbean air. I can’t wait to be home again.
And I also know that that feeling will remain unrequited in some ways. That home I yearn for no longer really exists. But what does exist is not the home I imagine, but the tangible, real home I’ve created here, in this house, with this family, with these friends. Home is a place, yes, but it’s also a commitment, a demand that God’s justice would unfurl here and now, a faith that expects to taste God’s grace in the people and places where God has planted us.
Yes, home is a feeling, a commitment but also a sense of loss, an absence, an unfulfilled promise. And in all these yearnings for home, in all these hopes and disappointments, Jesus is our companion and so also are all these beloved neighbors yearning for home and finding it wherever we can.
In the end, home is tinged with grief for many of us. God’s promise is that home can also be a recognition, hard-won to be sure, of the immense grace that yet surrounds us. Perhaps as we clap when we land, we grieve what we have lost and yet treasure the many gifts that have kept us alive. And in that space between grief and hope, loss and promise, we discover anew the shape of God’s grace and just maybe catch a glimpse of home, right here and right now.