Welcome Home
I know you will find this hard to believe but when I recently came home from abroad the customs officer made me take my sunglasses off and then examined my face carefully – why? Because she couldn’t believe I was 50. She thought I was younger. Yes. Result.
Apart from that one occasion, customs officers are one thing I envy about the USA. Whenever I travel to the States I am consumed with jealousy as I stand “in line” in the customs hall with my passport and visitor card at the ready. Why so jealous? It is the difference in the greeting the customs officer gives an American compared to the greeting he is going to give me.
As I gingerly approach the desk and am told to step back and have my picture taken, my fingers printed, my passport examined, I can overhear the American at the next desk being greeted with “Welcome home.”
I think that is really powerful and I wish our customs officers said it to me when I come home.
“Welcome home”.
It changes the relationship between the customs officer and the traveller in a miraculous instant. It goes from hostility, caution and scrutiny of the weak by the strong - to the openness, friendliness and welcome for the child by the parent.
I know that for some people their experience of home and family is not a good one. So when I speak of home in warm tones we recognise that for you this may be a something for which you long but which you have never experienced. You are not sure if it is safe or if you will be accepted.
My message is all the more poignant for you. But “home” is a compelling and welcoming thought for most people and it is one that Jesus uses often to help us understand where we are headed as we follow him.
I posted a forum this week and asked the question, “what does home mean to you?” Someone blogged this:
A base from which to explore the world (or even just Yorkshire). Familiarity. Security. A place of safety. Of comfort. Of belonging. Of warmth. A place to bring people into - a place that's welcoming? A place where I am me and not the projected image of me. A place of acceptance. A place with good food and a nice cosy bed!
Think of times when you come home – from a business trip or from holiday. When you have been stuck for hours in the snow. When you came back to your parents after your first term away at college or after you had moved out of the family home.
There are other senses of “home”.
When you get lost on a website or within the inner menus of a gadget you can usually press “home” and you get taken back to the beginning to start again. A fresh start.
When Alison and I went to our very first Vineyard housegroup back in 1987 we drove to London from Nottingham (you think your journey to housegroup is bit far!) to park outside a terraced house in Chiswick. What are we doing here we wondered? We hardly know these people (we had met some of them briefly in the previous weeks), we are hundreds of miles from home, and what is the Vineyard?
We said to each other, “the worst that can happen is that everyone will be very pleasant, we will use up an evening and we will get home at 2.00am. Or we will know we are meant to be there”.
Later that evening, as we drove back up the M1 we concluded that when we walked into that house we had come home. Over the years I have lost count of the number of people who, like me, had wandered from the Lord and then found their way into a housegroup or a Sunday morning at the Vineyard and knew that they had come home.
When we baptise people, one of the things we do is, symbolically, welcome them home. Part of the sacrament of baptism is the recognition that an individual is moving from the foreign kingdom of darkness into the light-filled kingdom of God. We welcome the candidates into the family of the church. Welcome home.
These are different ways of thinking about home.
Where are you right now? Do you feel at home?
Are you a long way from God? Have you rebelled and run off?
Do you feel a foreigner to the kingdom of God?
Are you lost deep in the website of life and need to press home and get back to the start?
Do you feel at home with the Father who loves you?
For everyone I have good news today. This is the story:
We have a loving heavenly Father, just like the father in the story of the runaway son (or the running father). He loves you so much that he leaves you free to leave home.
But amazingly he is so gracious that he welcomes you back. In fact, he is willing to make himself look a fool in order to favour you. And you are welcome back, welcome home.
I want to speak to those of you who find this hard to believe.
Is God really like that? Does he really love me? Can I love him? Can I trust him?
You know you have not lived a perfect life and you would just love to find a way to deal with those deep-seated compulsions, selfishnesses, losses of control and the harsh words that sometimes explode from your mouth.
You are not alone. We know just what this feels like. In fact Paul wrote about it nearly 2000 years ago:
Romans 7
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing. What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The runaway son is your story and mine. He is sitting in a pigsty, literally. Surrounded by unclean pigs, he feels unclean. He has no friends. He is hungry. Homeless in the deepest sense.
Desperate for his father, desperate for the food of life, desperate to feel deeply clean again.
His speech and ours starts with, “I have sinned and am unworthy”.
Maybe you just believe that deep down you are unworthy. On the surface you might look great, but you know the truth. You have given up on yourself and you think everyone else given up too. Maybe you are in a place where you feel guilt and shame.
Unto us a child is born
The damage spreads quickly
As the sun of his presence
slips away, dark fingers
spread their dismal grasp
into every corner of our lives.
Still we call to one another
like children, lost upon a midnight moor,
piping up at any distant glimmer
that might be lights, or torches,
expecting at last
the footsteps of our father,
come to find and bring us home.
Godfrey Rust
Is it possible that you could be welcomed home, whatever you have done? Can you press “home” and get a fresh start? Can you be back in relationship with your heavenly Father however much you have squandered your inheritance or insulted his love?
We have all walked away, made poor choices, found ourselves alone and acting out a deep search for the love of the Father.
Romans 3:23
…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
And there is the good news. He has paid the ultimate price, one that takes the punishment for every wrong thing done or thought; a price that wipes the record clean; a price that pays off the debt.
When Jesus went through the brutality of the cross, dying a criminal’s death, he paid that price. The pain was inflicted, the life was executed, Father and Son were cosmically separated. And then, proving God’s power over death, Jesus rose from the dead and we bear witness to his presence in our lives every day.
When we baptise people we symbolise this: as they are lowered under the water it symbolises them dying to their old life and as we lift them up out of the water it symbolises them coming back to a new life.
And I want to reach out to you with this good news; Like the Father’s footsteps in the poem, if there are 1,000 steps between you and God, he has taken 999. All you have to do is take one step. It is your choice. Choose life.
If you will turn and face toward the God who truly loves you, if you will just take a hesitating step toward him, he runs to you, reaches to you with open arms and a “welcome home”. You can say, as the son in the story said, “Father I have sinned, I am no longer worthy to be called your son/daughter.” And the Father will say “this son/daughter of mine was dead and is alive again; he/she was lost and is found” … and then we celebrate.
So this is it, this is your opportunity to make a choice to Love God. Wherever you are. However inadequate or imperfect you feel. You won’t feel worthy, you don’t have to be well dressed, with a nice family, educated, healthy or anything. Come as you are.
David Flowers, 13/12/2010