University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Christ the King Sunday November 22, 2009

(This sermon is similar to one I originally preached at University Church on Christ the King Sunday of 2006, and is repeated at the request of a church member. Like the original version, this sermon owes a considerable debt to a paper on the Psalm text written by Patrick Willson for the January 2006 meeting of the Moveable Feast in Danville, California.)

            In one of his autobiographical essays, Frederick Buechner recalls a turning point in his life. The year was 1953, and Buechner was still single, living in New York City and trying to write a novel “which for one reason or another refused to come to life.” Next door to where he lived there happened to be a church, whose pastor was a man named George Buttrick. Depressed as he was about his novel and with time heavy on his hands, as he says, Buechner started going to hear Buttrick preach, because he found him well worth the hearing… given what Buechner describes as Buttrick’s “oddly ragged eloquence and… the way he could take words you had heard all your life and make you hear them and the holiness in them as though for the first time.”

It was in the middle of December that he said something in a sermon that has always stayed with me. He said that on the previous Sunday, as he was leaving the church to go home, he happened to overhear somebody out on the steps asking somebody else, “Are you going home for Christmas?” and [says Buechner] I can almost see Buttrick with his glasses glittering in the lectern light as he peered out at all those people listening to him in that large, dim sanctuary and asked it again – “Are you going home for Christmas?” – and asked it in some sort of way that brought tears to my eyes and made it almost unnecessary for him to move to his answer to the question, which was that home, finally, is the manger in Bethlehem, the place where at midnight even the oxen kneel.[1]

            There is something about the holidays, I think… something about the month of days that will begin this Thursday on Thanksgiving and continue until Christmas… something that stirs in us memories of home, and maybe even a longing for home… for the old and familiar spaces, and for the people who inhabit or inhabited them, even if they are better in our memories than they ever were in reality. The students here are not far from their first months away at college, and doubtless remember well how homesickness can sneak in at times to surprise and startle…but it’s not just during the freshman year that it happens; it can happen anytime.  I had a graduating senior tell me last year how she dreaded the “real world,” and how she wished she could go back and just be a child at home again.  I told her that I’m old enough for senior discounts, but I sometimes feel the same way. The longing for home is an affliction that affects everyone from time to time. Such longing is part and parcel of the lives most of us live… for as long as we live. Sometimes it is the longing for a particular place, with the familiar sights and sounds and scents and comforts that made it home.  More often it is some aching for a family now separated by miles or by death or by hardship or by deep divides and hurts… the family we once knew and miss so palpably.

            Throughout the Scriptures there are descriptions of people in search of home – Abraham and Sarah and Abraham’s family, wandering through the desert; the Hebrew slaves in their Exodus struggles; exiles who find it hard to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land, the cloud of witnesses in Hebrews who considered themselves “strangers and foreigners on the earth,” always in search of a homeland. The longing for home lodges deep in the human psyche, and with it, a longing for God. “You have made us for Yourself,” prayed St. Augustine in the Fourth Century… “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

            Our restlessness and our longing for home are integral to our human identity. They find their expression is many ways, but in the scriptures they find a particular locus in what are known as the “pilgrim psalms” – songs for people on the move toward home. These psalms are, as Patrick Willson says, “traveling music for people on their way to God.”[2]  

“I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’” sings the 122^nd psalm, another of these pilgrim psalms. They wanted to go to the house of the Lord; they wanted to go home. Worshippers made their way to the Temple in Jerusalem annually, it seems, and these pilgrim psalms (or songs of ascent, for going up Mount Zion) supplied music not only for their journey but also for their celebrations once they arrived at their destination. Not all of these pilgrim psalms are so ebullient and glad about going to the house of the Lord, however….

…For people then, as now, journeying to God was not a straightforward, uncomplicated business. They journeyed with joy and heartache, with hope and with the fear that all their hopes might amount to nothing. Packing on their backs the weight of hope and bearing the risk of disappointment, they made their journey, and on their way they sang their songs.

Like [other nostalgic songs, our lectionary psalm today,] the 132^nd psalm yearns for a home, a home remembered from days gone by, home with God and in God, a home yearned for and prayed for.[3]

            Together the people recall and sing to God about how life for them as a people used to be, and they call on God to remember as well. “O Lord,” they sing, “remember in David’s favor all the hardships he endured” in building a tabernacle where the people could gather with God. They sang of that place where the priests were draped in righteousness, where what was broken could be mended and what was wrong could be made right. “Home is where you can bring your hurts. Home with God is where the healing happens.” They remember and they sing.[4]

            “The tenor section picks up the psalm” now, remembering how it once was. They sing of the Ark of the Covenant, the visible sign of God’s presence, and remember carrying it into the tabernacle. They remember, and they pray, “Rise up, O Lord, and go to your resting place.” That phrase, “resting place,” speaks once more of home. They pray that God will be there, and they are on a journey based on such a hope, but they wonder if God will be home. Their uncertainty is understandable, says Willson. All the visible reminders of God’s presence in the past were gone. All the military victories were history now, in this day when foreign rulers governed the land God had promised to their ancestors. The dynasty David had built was no more than an enchanting remembrance, and the Temple, Solomon’s grand temple, lay in ruins. They would gladly worship there, even among the Temple ruins, but they wonder if God will be there.

            Then, says Willson, just when their song seems most heart-breakingly poignant, another voice interrupts their melody:

This voice does not sing of what must be remembered, and it does not sing of what must be done and has not been done, and it does not propose any sort of [conditions], but chants a new promise, a new and open future and a deep yearning deeper even than the pilgrim’s yearning. The voice is God’s, probably chanted by a priest in ancient days, though we cannot imagine a human voice daring such grand and unqualified promises.

“This is my resting place” – this is my home – “forever; here I will reside” – here I will make my home – “for I have desired it.” In spite of the ruins of the Temple, in spite of the ruins of our lives, God declares, “Here I will make a home.” In spite of all the [conditional loyalties and the failings] of David’s children… God announces, “Here I will make a home.”[5]

            And why does God do so? “For I have desired it,” God says. “I have desired it.” What a startling assertion! Just as you and I long for home, God longs for home, too.  And so God makes a home. Where? God makes a home among the people, “among those who journey toward God, hope toward God, yearn for God, wonder about God, pray to God, sometimes want to give up on God, but are here nonetheless.”[6] Here I will make a home, says the Lord, for I have desired it. And so the pilgrim is bid to come. Once there, once home, all the pilgrim has to do is trust. All the other verbs are “I” verbs from God: “I will abundantly bless… I will satisfy the poor… I will clothe… I will cause a horn to sprout up for David.” Once home, the only task of the pilgrim is to trust. God will provide the rest... here in God’s home.[7]  Are you going home … this year?

            If it seems too odd to speak of God’s longing for home on this Christ the King Sunday, this last Sunday of the Christian year, Patrick Willson says that maybe we should think back to the beginning, to the promise of an angel, whispered in a dream, “They shall name him Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.” On this last Sunday of the church year, we are bold to claim the promise of the angel’s announcement; and we can also remember how the story of God and God’s people turns out at the end of the scriptures. A loud voice calls from the throne – surely the same voice we hear in the final stanza of the 132^nd psalm – saying, “Behold, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them as their God; they will be God’s peoples.” Because God has desired it, has longed for it, from the very beginning.

            On this last Sunday of the church year, I can think of no more important promise than that one, and no more fortifying thought than that our longing for home in these days is met and matched by God’s longing, and that what we both long for the most… in the end… is each other.