Coming Home

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

August 23, 2015

Coming Home

Psalm 84:1-4, 10

How lovely is your dwelling place,

O Lord of hosts!

My soul longs, indeed it faints

for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh sing for joy

to the living God.

Even the sparrow finds a home,

and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at your altars, O Lord of hosts,

my King and my God.

Happy are those who live in your house,

ever singing your praise….

 For a day in your courts is better

than a thousand elsewhere.

**************************************

People come,

people go;

people join,

people leave.

Churches are places with open doors

that are also revolving doors.

We use the word  “church” to describe a place

where people come together

to worship God

in the name of Jesus Christ.

It is one word,

one God,

one Lord.

Yet each church is as different

and as distinct as a snowflakes falling in January.

Churches are small and large,

rural and urban,

gothic and colonial,

quiet and boisterous,

sleepy and active;

and, yes, faithful and unfaithful.

The differences and distinctions reflect

the people who make up the church,

those who sit in the pews,

serve on the committees,

contribute their time, talent, and treasure.  

Every church,

no matter how homogenous it may seem,

no matter how uniform it may look on the surface.

is a sea of diversity,

a place of differences,

and distinctions.

Here, or in any other church,

as we worship on a Sunday morning,

you are likely to find that a hymn that was sung

resonated profoundly with one person,

even as another person thought it uninteresting.  

The preacher’s words in a sermon,

mine or anyone else’s,

may touch deeply the heart and mind

of one person,

even as another person tunes out.

Over the years I have worshiped at many churches,

both Presbyterian and other denominations,  

and I have always been struck by

how much we have in common

even as surface differences

are so readily apparent.

When I began my career as a lawyer

back in the early 1980s,

I lived in downtown Chicago.

and I worshiped occasionally at the

Fourth Presbyterian Church

which was right in the heart of downtown.

It was very big,

and it was very formal:

the ushers were men dressed in morning suits,

the kind of formal wear that we see now

only in movies from the 1930s and 40s:

long tail coats and striped trousers

were worn in the daytime,

as opposed to the white tie and tails or tuxedo

the well-dressed man would wear in the evening.

As slow as churches are to embrace change,

I am guessing the morning suits are long gone,

and the brigade of ushers is no longer exclusively male,

but Fourth is still big,

and, I am guessing, still fairly formal,

vastly different from the small Congregational church

in Dorset where I worship when I am on vacation,

or our own church.

We are all drawn to church for different reasons,

but some 400 of us have been drawn here

to this church, our church,

the place we have made our church home,

the place we call our church home.

It is our home because we feel welcome here,

each of us,

accepted,

a part of the community.

We can go away on vacation,

or, travel extensively for business,

or, as in the case of our young folks

head off to college,

and even if we’re gone for weeks or months,

still we know that when we return,

we’ll feel at home.

                                   

The Psalmist knew this feeling as he wrote

more than 2000 years ago,

long before the faithful gathered in a church,

gathered as a church, to worship.

For the psalmist, just going to the Temple,

the synagogue,

stepping up to the altar to offer his sacrifice to the priest

was to immerse himself in the presence of God,

to feel himself wrapped in the everlasting,

everloving arms of God:

My soul longs, indeed it faints

for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh sing for joy

to the living God.

It is God who creates the feeling of home,

for this is God’s house,

but we, you and I, are the church,

and we can either enhance that feeling,

or we can tear it apart, tear it down.

There are many churches

that don’t feel like home;

that feel more like battle grounds,

with angry people boiling in the pews.

Some churches try to ensure harmony

by demanding that anyone who wants to join,

who wants to be part of the church,

must agree to the particular church’s creed

and statement of belief.

“Sign on the dotted line,” they say,

“to assure us you think like us,

and won’t cause any trouble.

Sign and then we’ll welcome you.”

We don’t do that here,

because Jesus didn’t do that.

Think about how that first

body of Christ was formed,

those men who made up the first group of followers:

Did they call come from the same background?

No.

Were they all men of unshakable faith?

Hardly.

Were they all men of deep theological

understanding?

Hardly.

Were they all men who could set aside

their human feelings,

like envy, jealousy, anger, and impatience

so they would show nothing but

Christian love to one another?

In a word: no.

The Reverend Frederick Buechner observes

“Jesus made his church out of human beings

with more or less the same mixtures in them

of cowardice and guts,

of intelligence and stupidity,

of selfishness and generosity,

of openness of heart and sheer cussedness

as you would be apt to find in any of us.”

(Secrets in the Dark, 147)

Those first twelve disciples,

along with the women who joined them,

those women we heard about a few weeks back,

they were you and me 2000 years ago.

“Cussedness” is such a wonderful word,

so appropriate for someone who lives in Vermont,

as Buechner does,

just down the road from where I stay

each year on vacation.

It means “annoying” or “stubborn”

and certainly it’s a word that

can describe any one of us

from time to time,

if we are honest.

And yet, even if cussedness is all too easy to find

in any body of Christ,

still we come together in the name of Christ

to try our best to work together,

as we follow our Lord Jesus,

as we try to model our lives on his life,

and as we try to live as Jesus teaches us to live.

We know that Jesus wants us to create a church

not of unbending theological purity,

but rather a place that is home,

a place that is welcoming,

accepting,

nurturing;

a place of peace,

a place of healing,

a place of wholeness.

We need this church as home

because we are restless,

and, as Augustine wrote so long ago,

our hearts will never come to rest

until they come to rest in God,

until we find our way home,

drawing ourselves into the presence of God.

Rev. Buechner, who is now nearing 90,

has written that even if we don’t acknowledge it,

our lives are spent searching,

searching for

“a good self to be and for good work to do;

searching to become human in a world

that tempts us always to be less than human;

searching to love and be loved;

and in a world where it is often hard to believe

in much of anything,

searching to believe in something holy

and beautiful

and life-transcending

that will give meaning and purpose

to the lives we live.”

Our church home helps us to find

what we are searching for,

helps us to set our hearts, our minds at rest,

gracing us with peace,

restoring us and making us whole.

This imperfect place,

filled with imperfect people – me and you –

is the place we call church,

the place we call home,

home for me, home for you,

home for each of us.

For here we can find holiness,

here we can find beauty,

often in such unlikely, unexpected ways:

the holiness of a child who

while she waits impatiently

for her parents at coffee hour,

scribbles words on a white board,

“I love Jesus”;

the beauty of laughter coming from a group of knitters

who find such joy in their service;

the holiness and beauty of such a large

disparate group of men and women

who gather faithfully each Sunday

eyes, minds, and hearts focused on the cross.

It is here in church that we find,

“warmth and love,

[our selves] submerged in a larger, richer life.”

(Buechner)

It is here we find home.

“How lovely is your dwelling place,

O Lord of hosts!

My soul longs, indeed it faints
for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh sing for joy

to the living God.

Even the sparrow finds a home,

and the swallow a nest for herself,

where she may lay her young,

at your altars, O Lord of hosts,

my King and my God.

Happy are those who live in your house,

ever singing your praise….

For a day in your courts is better

than a thousand elsewhere.”

AMEN