“WHERE DO YOU LIVE?”
Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17   Matthew 22:34-46
A Sermon by the Rev. Odette Lockwood-Stewart
 

Let me tell you about Grace.  I have known her my whole life.
Grace moved away from home and a violent family at the age of sixteen into teenage pregnancy and an abusive marriage.
It was the beginning of many moves.

Grace and her children moved as far as 3000 miles away to escape one unbearable situation after another.
She changed her name, her furniture, her job and her relationships, barely surviving at times, all in an effort to find her belonging place.  Her Grace Land.  Her true home.

She changed addresses literally dozens of times, each time for a fresh start, each time to leave limitations and pain and people and problems behind her. She was one of those friends who move so often that you need to buy a new address book.

Each time she denied that the pain was inside – As if, somehow, if she could just get through this, just take care of that, change this situation, avoid those people, stop the pain, stop talking about it, everything would be OK.  

The problem was, everywhere she went she brought her pain with her. She brought herself. Three times she even tried to leave life.

I love Grace.  She is in a lot of pain right now.  Living with the last of her three children that will speak to her, finding everything unbearable, sick in mind and body and soul, she is desperately seeking home. Home to a place she’s never known.

I pray for Grace. She prays for help, but will not accept help from God or community. Physical relocation and increasing isolation will not resolve the complexity of her journey. I pray for an inbreaking of the Holy Spirit,... but not only for Grace.  For me.  For all of us with secure homes, scary homes, no homes, for all of us with stable structures of support, or searching, or alone, for all who are selfless and selfish, homeless, hidden, and holy, seeking answers outside.

Where do we look for home? Where do we live for healing and hope.
They tested Jesus.  They asked Jesus which commandment was greatest. He gave them two.  “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ And, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  He said that all the words of the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments. They tried to trick him by choosing less that God’s whole law.  He answered that in all the law and prophecy lives in love.

Love God with everything you are and everything you have... Love your neighbor as you love yourself.  These commandments are familiar to us, as they were familiar to followers of Jesus from Jewish practice and wisdom, from the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

At their heart these commandments are... about living in love ... about belonging... about home. Where do you live?
Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly wrote,
“Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return.   Eternity is at our hearts, ... calling us home unto Itself.”       (Testament of Devotion, p. 29)

 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind ... and your neighbor as yourself.”

In her book, The Grace of Coming Home:  Spirituality, Sexuality and the Struggle for Justice Melanie Morrison writes, “...You probably have a place, some special place, that may look very ordinary to others but to you is very precious because of something that happened there – an encounter in which you realized beyond all doubt that you were not alone and that you were loved. ... this special place may be a room in a house, a restaurant, a beach, or a forest where you once walked with a friend.  While you were walking, you found the courage to say out loud things you had never dared to say to another person (out of) fear ..., your friend touched your arm lightly and nodded as though to say, “It’s o.k.  You needn’t be afraid.”
At that moment in that place, you had a sense of coming home, of being found. Or maybe you were all alone...yet you sensed a presence, you felt called by name, and you knew you were loved for yourself ...and you have never quite been the same since....not because there are no more times of grief or doubt or disappointment, but because that memory of grace remains.  Whether you physically return to that place or not, you return there in memory – it has become holy ground.“ (p. 3)

The strength to carry on, to be open to real change and healing, ... let alone to be an instrument of justice or compassion for others ... comes from a power greater than ourselves that lives within us, in whom we live and move and find our meaning.

Jewish author, Etty Hillesum, died in Auschwitz at 29 years of age. She wrote, “...our human vocation, our spiritual calling is to safeguard that little piece of God that is found in each of us – to make a safe dwelling place for God to be at home in this world.”  She believed that our vocation is to help God, not the other way around. And she said that by attending to every pain and joy, we come closer to God who is within each of us.” (Morrison, p. 129)

The Psalmist praises God who is our dwelling place. Forever.  Human life is short. Grass grows, then withers. We return to dust.  But we are not defined by dust and grass.  The Lord of all creation is our dwelling place.

The Gospel calls us to live in God and to be a living place for God by loving action.

Love ... of God, neighbor, self ... is both a gift and an act of will.  Not a sentiment, love is a daily decision to live in and from the image of God that is stamped upon our hearts.  Love is an act of courage, opening us to the sanctuary within that binds us together. Our true home is not a single-family dwelling nor is it a gated community.

Dom Helder Camara was a Brazilian bishop who came under fire, literally, for his advocacy for the poor.  A journalist, looking at the walls of the monastery that were full of bullet holes, asked Bishop Camara what kind of a monastery he lived in.  How could he be at peace in the midst of such violence?  Dom Helder Camara said that he carried his monastery within.

Where do we live?  How do we experience “home?”  It is at once the most expansive and most intimate question of our lives.

In Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, there is a beautiful reminder about keeping our view of home large enough.  In the play Rebecca Gibbs describes a letter that arrived addressed to a friend. The complete address read:

Jane Crofut
The Crofut Farm
Grovers Corners
Sutton County
New Hampshire
The United States of America
The Continent of North America
The Western Hemisphere
The Earth
The Solar System
The Universe
The Mind of God

Our home is in God. We make a home for God in loving action. Amen.