Home is People, Not a Place

Author: Pastor Heidi Eickstadt (from sermon on 11/28/21)

There’s not a lot of Thanksgiving holiday movies out there but there is one that maybe some of you have seen called “Planes, Trains & Automobiles.” It’s not a movie to gather around with the kids. At times it sounds a bit like a truck-stop with all the profanity, but underneath all that there’s actually a really profound and heartwarming story.

Steve Martin plays a fancy advertising executive trying to make it home to Chicago from Manhattan for Thanksgiving. He’s supposed to simply fly back after his meeting but his flight is diverted because of a snow storm and he ends up trapped in Wichita, Kansas. Another passenger, Dale Griffith, a shower curtain salesman played by John Candy, offers to help him find a hotel, where they’re forced to stay together in the only remaining room.

From there, they continue their odyssey to get home, seemingly stymied at every turn. The flights out of Wichita are canceled, they take a train and it breaks down in Missouri, they take a rental car but it catches fire. At every turn, Neal is confronted with one disaster after another. You can empathize with is anger and frustration as he despairs of ever making it home. All he wants to do is make it home, to see his wife and kids, to be with the ones he loves as they share the turkey and pumpkin pie.

Our theme this first Sunday of Advent is “Homesick,” a word that originated in 1765 from the German word Heimweh, meaning “home pain or woe.” It a word for the aching longing for home. It’s not a physical place as author Robin Hobb notes. She says “Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.”

Home are those relationships that create a space of belonging, where you feel like you can be fully yourself and fully welcomed. A space of certainty and familiarity where you know you are loved and wanted. Some of us have known that space and ache for it when we are at a distance from those people in our lives or they have passed on. Some of us have not experienced those kind of relationships or that kind of space but nonetheless, still feel that ache and longing for a space of a home that never was.

In this time of pandemic, we’ve all been experiencing some homesickness as we’ve been distanced from people, those that we love as well as just other people in general as we minimize our contact with others to lower our chances of catching and spreading this virus.

We’ve been distanced from the community and routines that made life feel familiar and certain, our place in the world more sure. As a society, we’ve felt isolated and disconnected from others due to the pandemic but also because of deep political divides and widely diverging narratives that make you wonder if you and your neighbor or coworker, friend or family member are living in the same reality.

It is a time of great grief and worry, a time of lamentation. It may feel like we are going through a time similar to what Jesus is describing in the Gospel of Luke today. “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

It is a vision of great suffering and pain, fear and despair. Not exactly the joyous holly jolly Christmas stuff we’re seeing and hearing everywhere, right? Why this text on the first Sunday of Advent, the season of anticipation for the arrival of baby Jesus, the season of anticipation and wonder?

But here’s the thing: Advent isn’t a season of pre-Christmas, simply an escalating leadup to the big day. Theologian Matthew Myer Boulton states in his commentary that “Advent is all about entering the shadows of despair, war, sorrow, and hate, and actively waiting for Jesus to come, lighting candles of hope, peace, joy, and love.” It’s a season where we acknowledge just how much we need a Messiah, “God with Us,” how all creation groans to be healed and reconciled with its creator.

But we just don’t remember the first Advent in this season or focus on the Kingdom come but we help each other live in this time of second Advent, as Bernard of Clairvaux calls it. This time where Jesus doesn’t show up in a manger or in all His Glory but instead, Boulton tells us: “He’s there in the knock at the door, the still small voice, the lonely prisoner, the hungry mother, the weary refugee, the migrant worker, the asylum seeker. In other words, Jesus is coming again and again, like a thousand spring buds on a fig tree long thought dead.”

Boulton goes on to say, “So be alert — lamps lit and dressed for action. Hope is a verb!” Hope is a verb, not just a feeling. Hope is trusting in God and acting out of that trust. And in these tough times especially, hope is awful hard to sustain on our own, hope requires a community where we can travel together. For we are here to walk the way together, to see Jesus in each other and to act, bringing that Kingdom of God that is our real home a little bit closer.

In the movie, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” we see Neal act in such a way when he realizes that Del doesn’t have a family or a home at the end of the journey, when he’s so close to his house he can taste the turkey. Instead, he turns around and travels back to the train station and invites Del to his home to share Thanksgiving with his family. Del is nervous as he is walking up to the door, afraid of intruding and not belonging. But Neal insists and he brings him into the house, introducing him to the family as his friend as he is warmly welcomed home.

Neal’s journey with Del has changed him and opened him up to share his home and to share his table with this stranger so unlike himself. May our Advent journey together this season and our life together as a church equip to act similarly towards others, with hope and in the spirit of joy, peace and love. May we trust and find comfort that God is with us on this journey and in this difficult season. May we gather in hope, knowing that pain and suffering and fear are not the end of the story. Though the way is rough, God is close and our home in God is real. Thanks be to God. Amen.