First Reading: Jeremiah 31:7-14
Second Reading: John 1:1-18
Sermon: The Promise of Home
Preaching: Kat Hand
Sherman Street Church
January 5, 2025 - The Promise of Home
The Old Testament reading for today is Jeremiah 31 verses 7 through 14 and can be found on page 7 88 in your pew Bibles This is what the Lord says Sing with joy for Jacob shout for the foremost of the nations Make your praises heard and say Lord save your people the remnant of Israel See I will bring them from the land of the north and gather them from the ends of the earth among them will be the blind and the lame Expectant mothers and women in labor a great throng will return. They will come with weeping They will pray as I bring them back. I Will lead them besides streams of water on a level path where they will not stumble because I am Israel's father and Ephraim is my firstborn son Hear the word of the Lord your nations proclaim it in distant coastlands he who scattered Israel will gather them and will Watch over his flock like a shepherd for the Lord will deliver Jacob and redeem them from the hand of those stronger than they They will come and shout for joy on the heights of Zion They will rejoice in the bounty of the Lord the grain the new wine and the olive oil the young of the flocks in the herds They will be like a well-watered garden and they will sorrow no more Then young women will dance and be glad young men and old as well. I will turn their mourning into gladness I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow I will satisfy the priests with abundance and my people will be filled with the bounty declares the Lord This is the word of the Lord You Today's New Testament reading can be found in the book of John Starting with chapter one and it can be found on page 1062 in your pew Bible In the beginning was the word And the word was with God and the word was God He was with God in the beginning Through him all things were made without him. Nothing was made that has been made In him was life and that life was the light of all mankind The dark the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it There was a man sent from God whose name was John He came as a witness to testify concerning that light so that through him all might believe He himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light The true light that gives light to everyone in the world to everyone was coming into the world he was in the world and Though the world was made through him the world did not recognize him He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him Yet to all who did receive him to those who believed in his name He gave the right to become children of God Children born not of a natural descent Nor of human decision or a husband's will but born of God The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us We have seen his glory the glory of the one and only son who came from the father full of grace and truth John testified concerning him He cried out saying this is the one I spoke about when I said he who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me Out of his fullness we have received grace in place of grace already given For the law was given through Moses grace and truth came through Jesus Christ No one has ever seen God But the one and only son who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the father has made him known This is the word of the Lord Good morning Sherman Street Just making sure this is okay. Can you hear me? Okay? Well, it's a little high up here. Let me see having my coat on doesn't make this easier It's really really nice to be here with you. I see a lot of familiar faces Please join me in prayer God be in our heads and in our thinking Be in our eyes and in our looking Be in our mouths and in our speaking Be in our hearts and in our understanding Amen Some of you might be familiar with the movie Brooklyn It's a movie that stars Saoirse Ronan who's one of my favorite actresses right now She's also in Little Women and she's in Lady Bird and she's in the outrun and she's in Brooklyn and Brooklyn Takes place in the 1950s It's about a young woman named Eilish who immigrates from Ireland to New York City seeking a better life and After a seasick journey by boat she arrives in New York City and gets a room in a boarding house and gets a job at a department store and she's starting to settle in and Then one day the priests that sponsored her journey to New York City Suggests that she helps serve a Christmas dinner at a soup kitchen For a group of men who are building the tunnels and bridges and roads in the very fast growing New York City and Many of these men are Irish as well And before the dinner begins they have one of the men stand and sing a song for the room it's a beautiful Gaelic love song and For that moment time kind of stops and you can see the tears welling up in the eyes of the men young and old and in Eilish's eyes and You feel the weight of their homesickness for Ireland And the emotional setting of the scene in that movie reminds me of the longing Expressed in Jeremiah 31. It's a longing to go home For the Lord will deliver Jacob and redeem them from the hand of those stronger than they they will come and shout for joy on the heights of Zion In Jeremiah 31 the Babylonians have just installed a king of their choice to rule in Judah they have destroyed the beloved temple in Jerusalem and They have deported the Judeans out of Judah in two groups Scattering them from one another and from their land The Babylonians are to use the words of verse 11 the strong hands stronger than those of God's people and Jeremiah is a really anxious book about exile biblical biblical scholars think it was edited later so that this chapter 31 along with the chapters around it would be clumped as a small series of hope in the midst of frankly the disaster of the rest of the book and These chapters contain some of the strongest messages of hope in all of the Hebrew scriptures And Jeremiah 31 is not just a song about longing for home. It's a promise from God That the Judeans will go home He who scattered Israel will gather them and will watch over his flock like a shepherd Home is such a core piece of our human lives Yet it can be very fluid and very uncertain My hope this morning is to invite us to find the ways Jeremiah 31 relates to our own experiences of returning home And to invite us to consider how the promise of home in Jeremiah and in John Can comfort and change us wherever we may find ourselves today? The first way we maybe can relate to to Jeremiah 31 is because like the Judeans our lives are in two places The Christian life in many ways is like living between two homes We live faithfully in this world and yet we trust that we are made for a home with God that is yet to come The Judeans are living in Babylon while longing to return to the restored nation of Judah Which God is promising to restore someday So what human experiences echo this? Let's listen for a moment to the experience of someone living between two homes. I Took a class at Western Theological Seminary in Holland with Dr. Alberto La Rosa Rojas He immigrated from the to the US from Peru with his family at a very young age He wrote an essay called liturgies of belonging and in that essay He points out that migrants lead the way when it comes to thinking about a proper love of home Because in his words and from his experience the challenging Demand placed on migrants is living responsibly and faithfully in two nations two people's two cultures He explains that while his parents desired a better life for their children They also faithfully instilled in them the values celebrations and language of Peru They repeated frequently never forget that you are Peruvian and When I die bury me in my homeland Later in the essay he points out that our world is Increasingly inhabited by those who experience displacement and or a lack of belonging Here's a quote from him Many whether displaced or not Express a profound sense of existential rootlessness and a lack of belonging our lifestyles render ecosystems uninhabitable forcing entire species into ecological homelessness xenophobic nationalism is on the rise in such a world thinking about faithful hopeful loving ways of being at home in the world is Of dire importance and quote So as we live between two homes, how can we be faithful amidst our longings? By listening to those who are displaced we can find a very concrete and real example We can find ways to live faithfully illustrated by those for whom living between two homes is their very literal lived experience Here's another way we can relate to this passage in Jeremiah any of us who went back home to family this Christmas likely experienced it It's the fact that returning home is often both joyful and complicated Maybe you came back from college for the first time and you realized that your home didn't change, but you did Maybe you returned home to find out the people you love changed in ways you did not expect And there can be sorrow in those experiences in Jeremiah 31 There's also sorrow with weeping they shall come it says traumatized and broken the parade of the weakest The passage calls the Judaeans a great company and those words contrast the great company of Babylonians that overtook them God leads the people of Judah home not as triumphant warriors, but as beloved and broken people And that's a bit jarring for our imaginations for example It mentions women on the verge of giving birth making that journey That is not a 100% happy reality the promise of restoration in this passage doesn't hide the reality of pain and Suffering that the people have endured Homecoming is complicated emotionally I wonder if you have ever experienced or observed a homecoming like that. I Have an example Thanks to will Ferrell of all people I Didn't watch elf this Christmas break actually, but I did recently finish the documentary will and Harper It focuses on actor will Ferrell and his right his friend writer Harper steel Harper is a transgender woman who came out to will while she was in her 50s The documentary tells the story of them taking a coast-to-coast road trip Stopping along the way at bars truck stops and a steakhouse Harper used to do this kind of thing all the time when she presented as a man But what they find on their road trip this time as they expected is that returning to those places is very different now and In some places it is unsafe for Harper while she after so many years of dysphoria and pain has made the change she longed for The places she that she used to feel at home in don't all feel that way anymore So while she experiences a kind of homecoming within herself the homecoming to places she loves is fraught and While the home of will and Harper's friendship is strong and in many ways very much the same as before they are both changed and there are new aspects of their friendship that weren't there before in Returning to the home of their friendship. They refined a renewed sense of belonging But that comes with tears and difficult conversations and deep trust The relationships that are steadfast homes for us will change When relationship lasts through that change it is a beautiful thing of growth We all long for people we can find a home in and we all long to feel at home with ourselves Yet, I know and maybe you know too that it's complicated sometimes relationships fade or if they last they have to change which can be hard and requires courage and we have to change too and Finding a way to be at home with ourselves is also not always easy Recently I had a bad cold different cold than the one I have today and I was and my husband came home And he found me on the couch still trying to get work done And it was in this moment that he observed to me in love that I had no ability to let myself turn my brain off Even though I had taken a sick day It's so ironic and so true that even our own minds sometimes don't feel like home to us When heaven and earth are fully reconciled when there is perfect shalom We trust that everything will finally fit together We will fit together even though we carry scars and a difficult past with us Just like the promise in Jeremiah They will be like a well-watered garden and they will sorrow no more The Last way we can relate to this passage is because it reminds us that sin and shame are not our true home Before this hopeful passage God has proclaimed to God's people that the exile they are currently experiencing is their fault The prophet proclaims that the destruction the anguish is a result of unfaithful living In our passage for today. It says that God ransoms them from hands too strong for them So whose hands are we talking about then? is it really Babylon's hands or Could these strong hands be their own unfaithful hands or Even more uncomfortable are they God's hands? Perhaps the answer is all of the above But Jeremiah 31 changes this home of shame and scatteredness to a home with God surrounded by God's grace Even the priests who would be the first to blame for the people sins are feasting by the end of the passage I will satisfy the priests with abundance God's well of love is deep enough to love and shepherd his people home and God does not just show them mercy but feeds them abundantly So God's wrath and judgment is not the foregone conclusion here. God's love is the conclusion God's grace and the everlasting promise of home The Judeans don't have to live in the reality of their shame and neither do we Here's another way. I like to think about this Grace does not allow us to settle for the words. It's too late In fact in the very next chapter Jeremiah actually buys a field in Judah Even though he is about to be deported He puts his money where his mouth is and the prophecy of their return home starts to materialize So Jeremiah 31 is a hopeful promise of home for the Judeans and it reminds us that even though our sense of home is Complicated by displacement imperfect relationships and shame God will bring us home When we hear Jeremiah 31, I find myself able to hold in my hands both longing and hope both joy and pain And what God illustrates for us is a beautiful dream of an everlasting home with God But at Christmas there is another promise of home which we read about in John and this promise is not a dream This promise was born in a manger The promise of Christmas is not that we return home, but that God makes God's home with us and This promise of Jesus making his home with us is not just a comforting reminder that God's got this This promise should change how we live So often when we imagine where God is making a home this is About how big we imagine that home to be but Jesus helps us look to the outside of that circle He was born in a dirty stable He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him He said at one time foxes have dens and birds have nests But the son of man has no place to lay his head He was crucified outside the city Jesus lived in literal and spiritual poverty on the outside and In response, we are to zoom out on the tiny circle of our own experience and look in the corners We have been missing and expect Jesus to be there and For those of us who have been cast to the outside Christ is there with us like us Jesus had a particular home and a particular experience with that home In his essay that I mentioned before La Rosa writes about how Jesus both understood the joy of being at home and also the woundedness that comes with it He writes God's indwelling in the land of Galilee through the incarnate sun is Simultaneously as Carl Bart puts it the son of God's journey into the far country Jesus suffers rejection not only at the hands of the socio-religious elite in Jerusalem, but also in his hometown and Indeed even in his own family end quote To close I invite us to reflect on the grace Accessible to us because of Jesus's homecoming here Verse 16 and 17 in the John passage for today says out of his fullness We have all received grace in place of grace already given for the law was given through Moses Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ and out of his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace So God's grace was the law and then God's grace came again in human form and out of the fullness of Jesus We received new grace every day In the complicated places we call home This summer my high schoolers did their service trip in our home city of Grand Rapids and One of the things my group did was we biked the Oxford trails And one of the things we saw while we did this was the old Butterworth landfill where they are building solar panels on top of the landfill New grace in our home We also learned about plant blindness. I Hadn't realized how easy it is to just not see trees Especially downtown or in other metropolitan areas, but they are there tucked among the buildings and hanging over the streets Now that I know to look I can start to ask could there be more trees My eyes were opened new grace Where can God's grace transform our homes that we find ourselves in right now our city our relationships our church communities our Society and how can God's grace transform how we see those homes I am sure that all of us in Some form or another know that trust in God's grace Can lead to the create creativity and courage to look at what has been familiar What has been difficult and what has seemed impossible and say this doesn't need to be that way anymore? May we all together let this promise of home overflow into all times and places so that we are comforted changed and ready to act to change what must change May we trust this promise of home by the grace of God amen Creator God Create in us anew this promise of home Let it transform our lives one day at a time In your son's holy name we pray Amen.
First Reading: Jeremiah 31:7-14 Second Reading: John 1:1-18 Sermon: The Promise of Home Preaching: Kat Hand