Homecoming
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on 27th September 2009 by Rev Dr Jamie Walker
Reading: Joshua 4:1-11 and John 1:1-14
In the name of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
A year ago I was walking along the Scores just before Freshers Week when two returning students, who clearly lived away from St Andrews, met one another with broad grins and with a dance in their steps. They hugged one another warmly! 'I've come home', one said! 'I've come home!'
St Andrews can have that effect on all of us. 'Home' is about belonging, about close friends, about contentment, about peace, about challenge, about learning, about stimulation, about good conversation, about supporting one another, about sharing. I very much hope that St Andrews can become like that for us all, and feel 'home'.
This year in Scotland is labelled 'the year of homecoming'. Scots who live overseas are invited back to renew links with Scotland, to re-establish home ties. Many thousands have come for various events, and some events have apparently been so successful that some have said, 'We should do this every year'.
I take many weddings here in this Chapel. Weddings are mostly limited to those with a good University connection, to students and staff, to graduates and some others. So many graduates have said to me that coming back to St Andrews for their wedding is like coming home! It is where they feel they belong. It is where they had many happy years! It launched them into their life.
Our two Bible passages have this sense of homecoming about them.
(1) For the Israelites, at long long last, they were to return home. Their feet were to step on home soil for the first time for a few hundred years! The land had been promised by God to Abraham and to Sarah, who with their children had lived there many years. A terrible famine happened to a later generation and the people had moved to Egypt, eventually to become slaves. They then fled Egypt under Moses, had received the ten commandments before Mount Sinai, and had placed them in ark, a covenant box. They had then wandered around in the Sinai desert for far too long, and at last stood on the bank of the river Jordan.
Over there home! Over there places to discover. Their feelings must have been something like your own, arriving in St Andrews. What will this place be like? Will we settle? What will we be doing? Will we be welcome?
Israel¿s entry was dramatic, more dramatic, I suspect, than your arrival in St Andrews. For Israel, as they stood on the bank of the Jordan river, something miraculous occurred. As the priests picked up the ark of God's covenant and put their feet in the water, the waters parted, to one side and the other. The priests went and stood in the middle of the river bed. Israel hurried across, amazed. `What a God! God is surely with us? God is taking us home.
To come to a new place, a new University, a new situation, a new term - is so exciting! Scary perhaps, too, if you have just arrived in St Andrews - scary, but certainly exciting. All sorts of new experiences lie in front, new friends to make, new things to do, new things to learn, new halls or flats to live in. There is an eagerness about coming, and orientation week enlivens the expectations. Of course there can be too the feelings of loneliness, homesickness, inadequacy, and these can be very tough and feel overwhelming for some.
Israel in the weeks following went through such a range of emotions and experiences. Sometimes they felt on the crest of a wave as they spread out into their new land. They were exultant, excited, euphoric - perhaps echoing some of your feelings after a few days in St Andrews. Some have said to me, 'St Andrews is even better than I imagined - I never thought I could have such a good time so soon after arriving.'
Of course all did not go well for the Israelites - there were setbacks too, some pretty major ones at that. And again some of you will experience similar feelings. There can be disappointments, relationships gone wrong. There can be feelings of being used. Work can suffer. There can be a whole host of problems which can bring pain, and force the question, 'is God really with me' - as indeed defeats forced Israel to think of God as having deserted them.
How then to handle such conflicting life experiences of exhilaration but also of anxiety?
Here we come to the major emphasis in the chapter we read. The priests carried the ark of the covenant into the middle of the river, and stopped there while the people streamed past into the promised land. Once all were over, 12 people went back, one from each tribe. Near where the priests were standing, they bent down, each picking up a stone. They heaved them on to their shoulders, carried them back and set them up on land.
The heap of stones, as the story makes clear, was set up at God's command - so, so solemnly set up - a monument deserving of the greatest attention.
What was its purpose? - Israel were entering the land promised to Abraham by God, but they would have hard as well as good times in front. They needed a focus, a reminder of God. They needed a memorial in stone which would last from generation to generation. They needed something a father and a mother could tell their children about. 'Come and see this - this heap of stones, here at Gilgal, was where our forebears crossed the Jordan, where God parted the waters.' And they would be quiet, reflecting, pondering - the heap of stones was a place for remembering, but also a place for renewal.
Another heap of stones! - this chapel building! We touched on this a little last week. It is not a heap of stones, like the one at Gilgal, but stones nevertheless! It is not a memorial in stone, but a chapel in stone - but a chapel to what, for what purpose. What does this chapel building mean?
37 years after the University was founded, the foundation stone was laid for this Chapel, and it took 10 years, until 1460, to be finished. I do not know the size of the University in 1450, but in 1413 there were about 30-40 students, 11 or so in each year. The existence of a Chapel was considered an essential element in there being a University. There was something of `home¿ about it.
It was a place of belonging, a focal point, a gathering point. All came to Chapel. It was a place of acceptance, of being quiet before God, of singing to God, of giving God a place in their lives, of bringing to God their hopes and fears, of remembering what God had done for them. Like the Israelites heading back every so often to the stones by the river Jordan, students and staff at the University have gathered here over the centuries to remember, to pray, to worship, and townsfolk have come too. What is so lovely about this Chapel, unlike other collegiate chapels, the main doors open not into the quadrangle but into the street, inviting townsfolk to come too.
This Chapel is a reminder to us of God. God was with those who set up these stones in the 1450s, with those who set them up in prayer and thankfulness, set them up for worship and for mission. We - all of us - carry on that worshipping tradition. Many a time we will come, I hope, to God thankful for his presence, heading into this chapel to pray - heading in on a Sunday, or through the week, to sit in silence, in quiet thankfulness or to pour our hearts in anguish and pain.
(2) But there is a much deeper sense of `home¿ about this place, and here we turn to our other passage, the one from John. We turn to one verse in particular. The Word became flesh and lived among us. Literally, the Word pitched his tent among us, The Word made his home among us.
Here John is speaking about what God did 2000 years ago. God moved house, if we may put it like this. God came to live in a place he had never lived in before. He came to live as a human. He came with all the anticipation of what lay before him, but also all the trepidation of what lay in front.
Among all the things that lay in front of him was meeting people, making friends, gathering together friends - almost like an good academic family - friends that felt like family. Lying in front of him were wonderful experiences but also tough ones too, and he needed friends around him. Some experiences were so tough that we cannot begin to imagine how tough they were.
His making his home among us, becoming one of us, meant that he took on himself our sins and our failings, and went to the cross, carrying our sins before the judgement of God. What went on in those hours on the cross we cannot begin to imagine. We can only watch and listen in wonder. For they meant that God was on our side, that God himself was carrying our sins. God's homecoming to us was such that it tore a terrible rent in the heart of God, between Father and Son, but tore a rent because Father and Son wanted it, because they loved us so much. The homemaking, for them, was utterly worthwhile.
And it emerged into an incredible joy between Father and Son. The Son had made his home among us, and brought us into their own home - a home of wonderful communion and indwelling, a home of love and acceptance, of peace and togetherness.
Jesus expands on this theme of `home¿. He says, 'If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him'. There is a wonderful togetherness between Father and Son, and here it is opened wide to include us too. God will come and make his home in us too!
This theme of 'home' and 'homecoming' reverberates through the Bible. The monument over there, based on the second last chapter of the Bible, speaks of this theme too! It speaks of God's final homecoming to us, of God's holy city coming down from heaven, of God renewing everything. And with this vibrant sense of 'homecoming', and 'home-belonging', this Chapel was built right in the heart of the University.
The homecoming of God was not just for those 2000 years ago, but for us here today. God meets us and loves us just as we are - there is no need to become a better person in order to be loved. God went through everything that he did for us here today, and he seeks to make his home with us, in us, day by day.
I began this sermon with two returning students, one saying to the other, 'I've come home, I've come home'. How wonderful it would be for each us, if we come to the stage of saying the same words this year, saying it in a much deeper sense than those students said it. How wonderful it would be if we could say, knowing God's homecoming, 'I've come home, I've come home', as we tap into, and experience, the deepest aspects of God's homecoming to us - acceptance, love, friendship, forgiveness, kindness, sharing, trusting.
Please come along Sunday by Sunday or whenever, here in these beautifully constructed stones, a reminder of God's making his home with us, and a means of renewing our sense of living in God's home. Here we come not just to reminisce, but to take strength for going on. Here we come, reflect, tell stories, share laughter and tears, and refreshed, move forward in a new week and new semester. We've come home!
Amen and to God be glory and praise for ever and ever.