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Sermon, June 26, 2005

“Coming Home”

A strange thing happened to me last Sunday. We went to a barbeque that my daughter’s fiancée’s family held. When I arrived there his step-mother told me that her neighbor was dating a guy I had gone to high school with. In fact, they were coming over to the barbeque that evening.

It was one of those blasts from the past. Chris, the guy from my high school, had been one of my best friends. He had moved away after tenth grade and I had never heard from him again. And now, after thirty-seven years, we were about to meet.

It was a great meeting. Naturally we were both a little older and a little gray, but I could see in him the same guy who had been my friend years before. Afterward my daughter remarked that she could see why we had been good friends, that we thought the same way.

I was really happy to see him again. It took me back to a very special time in my life and reminded me of the close bonds that were forged in our school. How could they not be close? There were twenty-three kids in my grade. You either became friends with people, or you perished.

At the same time, our meeting saddened me. I was particularly saddened to realize that here was a friendship I let die thirty-seven years ago, when I didn’t need to. In fact many of my friends from high school maintain close ties. I’m one of the few who hasn’t.

And I was feeling more than a nostalgic desire to return to a wonderful time in my life. Some thing inside me was being shaken.

The next morning I awoke still thinking about this. And suddenly I saw something about my own life.

I realized that when I left high school, I essentially severed all relationships with my friends from that school.

Similarly, when I left Wagner College in my senior year to attend a fundamentalist Bible school, I severed all my relationships with my friends and fraternity brothers at Wagner.

When the church I attended during Bible school split, I severed all my relationships there also.

And when the church I served at as an assistant pastor imploded, I broke off all relationships with the people there for many years. Even today, I only remain in sporadic contact with one couple out of the hundreds of people I knew and cared about in that church.

During graduate school I developed very close friendships with a handful of students. Even when I moved to Syracuse, we would talk once or twice a week, and I would often visit them in New York. I still remember my good friend Mike, who used to call me just to tell me he found a great new word in the dictionary (I’m not saying we weren’t dorks, but we were the cool dorks).

But years ago I cut off all contact with these friends. It’s not that I don’t think about them from time to time. I just don’t call them and didn’t bother to give them my new phone number when I moved four years ago.

Being as intelligent as I am, I saw a pattern here. Then I looked a little forward and thought about what I’m about to do. In a month I’m going to move to a city where I don’t have an apartment or a job; where I don’t know anybody. In fact, I’m moving to a city that I’ve never even visited.

And the first question that came to mind was, “Why am I always running away?” Of course the answers are slightly different in each case. Running when the churches split up was a simple act of survival. If you’ve ever been around the breakup of a fundamentalist church you know how vicious that can be. Your best friends turn against you and attack. When a fundamentalist church splits (or maybe any type of church for that matter) the best strategy is to head for the hills. If you remain on the battlefield, you’ll be bludgeoned to death by people singing hymns; hymns like, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

And then there were the times I ran away from my friends because I didn’t feel worthy of their love. It’s a funny thing. Sometimes what you think your friends expect from you is so much more than they really do. And sometimes you feel like you’ll never measure up to their expectations, so you just leave before you fail them.

The truth is, your friends probably don’t love you for the things you think they do. They probably don’t think you are as smart or as funny or as caring as you do anyway. And they probably don’t love you for your success or because you never screw anything up. They usually love you for something that is deeper and more abiding. They usually love you for you, without all the things you try to add to your personal portfolio.

The other thing I realized is that I wasn’t just running away. I was running toward something. I was looking for something. A place to belong and fit in.

Several years ago I was interviewed for a job at a college. They asked me what my professional goals were. I forget what I told them, probably the standard BS about publication and growing as a scholar. What I really wanted to tell them was that I would like to teach at a college that cared about me half as much as I cared about the students. That I wanted to teach at a place where I could pour my heart into my classes without worrying about the politics or whether I would get tenure or not. I was looking for a community. I was looking for a home.

As I reflected more on this pattern, it struck me that I keep running away from the very thing I already had, the community of friends I kept leaving behind.

But I don’t think my actions are only the manifestation of some personal neurosis (if they are, feel free to ignore the rest of this sermon). I think people do this all the time. I think we are constantly looking for what we already have, constantly searching the neighborhood for the puppy that’s sleeping on our porch.

One of my favorite films is, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” with Jimmy Stewart. You may remember the film. Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, the manager of a Savings and Loan in Bedford Falls. He thinks that life has passed him by, that real happiness is to be found somewhere else, anywhere else for that matter. A crisis brings him to the verge of suicide, when Clancy, his guardian angel shows him the wealth of relationships he has in that town and the good he has accomplished there.

He discovers that despite the fact that his life has not measured up to his dreams, his friends and his family love, respect and care for him. He finds out that despite feeling like a failure, he’s a success in ways he never imagined. He discovers that what he is looking for is not somewhere else. It’s right there, all around him.

He also discovers the way his life has impacted others. He discovers the good he has done, the good he has never noticed. He learns that his impact on others doesn’t lie in great accomplishments, but in the small acts of caring that reflect his character. And he is loved not because he has done great things, he is loved for who he is.

You could say that George Bailey finally comes to recognize his own gifts, and how the quiet exercise of these gifts has made the life of those around him better.

It’s funny how we sometimes not only fail to see what we have, we fail to see what we have to give. We think we have to be more like this or more like that in order to offer something to others. We think we must reach some particular level of proficiency, or education, or maturity before we can contribute meaningfully to the lives around us.

I remember when I began mentoring teenagers a few years ago. I think they appreciated the fact that I treated them like I would treat adults, like they actually had something to give to me, that our relationship was not just about me giving to them. And they did have wisdom to share. Even at fourteen or fifteen, they had enough experience in life that I could learn from them. The idea that young people don’t have gifts to give is simply ridiculous. There is wisdom in all of us.

There’s a professor at Le Moyne who says that the hardest part about teaching is getting the students to recognize that they are smart. I know one of the hardest parts of teaching reading at OCC is to get kids to not freak out when they are handed an article or textbook to analyze, not to immediately decide they can’t understand it; but to take their time, sit back and think about what they just read. When they do, they discover that they understand what they read, that they have more ability than they think.

When I look out at this congregation, I see an untapped wealth, an embarrassment of riches. I don’t always know if you see that. Sometimes when you speak, I wonder what I’m doing here (I guess I’m instigating). I think to myself, “They don’t need a minister, they need to minister.”

That’s not to say that you could stand up on fifteen minutes notice and the perfect sermon would magically flow from your mouth. There is a learning curve. But that’s where understanding that people don’t love you for your oratorical skills comes into play. They love you for who you are.

In a community of love, there is room to try, to fail, and to try again. It is a place where you don’t already have to be something special, someone perfect. It is a place where it’s safe to grow. It’s kind of like home.

The exercise of your gifts involves discovering something that is already there, deep inside you. When I’m faced with a particular difficult situation, I don’t reach for a book or plumb some sort of encyclopedic knowledge of counseling or theology or whatever. I wait. And the answer I need, the thing that needs to be said, and the knowledge of how to say it, comes bubbling up. The answer is already there inside me. I just have to let it rise to the surface. The answers are also already in you. You have all been taught by life.

Wisdom is in the heart, not the head. In fact, the head usually gets in the way of the heart. Developing and expressing you gifts is a process of letting what you already know and already are manifest themselves.

How much of our life is spent searching for what we already have? How much of our life is spent trying to become something special, when we already are something special? And how much of our life is spent searching for home, when we are already there?

There is a film I really love called, “The Trip to Bountiful.” It’s about an elderly woman who lives in an apartment in Houston with her son and daughter-in-law; but desperately wants to visit her hometown of Bountiful, Texas, one last time. She finally manages to sneak off and get there. Throughout the film, they play an old hymn (one of the nice ones no one sings anymore). One of the lines of the hymn says, “Come home, come home. You who are weary, come home.”

The hymn expresses the longing we have to find a place where we are loved and can be ourselves without fear of rejection. It reflects the fact that we sometimes spend our lives running away from what we want, thinking we are running toward it. It is a good day when we discover that we already have what we desire, that we already are the person we ought to be, that we already are home. It is a good day when we stop looking somewhere else to go and stop trying to be someone else.

As for my high school friend, we’re having dinner tomorrow night. Maybe we will discover that we both have changed too much to renew our friendship. That happens. Or maybe we’ll discover that we just wasted thirty-seven years looking for something we already had.

And I’m still going to North Carolina. But I’m going to work at keeping important relationships alive this time. I’m going to work at making this a strategic move, and not just another time when I’m running away.

And as nervous as you might get, you have to promise me you will express your gifts and try to do the things you fear. And what better place to do that, than here, at your spiritual home, among your spiritual family.

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