"Home" - Sermon for Sunday, Sept 10th

Sermon:

Text: Exodus 12:1-14

Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who brings us home.

            I’m not going to go too long, but did want to say a few things about our texts for today.

            I’ve been in my house for about a year and a quarter now, enough time that I definitely refer and call it home. There are things I need to work on at it, there are things I wish were different, but it’s still home, my place, safety and comfort.

            My Uncle and Aunt, John and Kathy, live up in Grand Forks and in many of the Red River floods they had their entire house surrounded by sandbags, my dad and mom went up in 2007 to help do all that sandbagging, and in the really big one in 1997, they ended up having the entire lower level of their house flooded out as it overcame the sandbag dyke, despite two or three pumps running. They have now put in a dyke with their neighbors so they only have to sandbag in the largest of floods. It was restored very soon after that and now is very nice, but there was a feeling for them, what will happen to my home. Where is my place of safety?

            I remember hearing from people in New Orleans when I was there in 2009 for the National Youth Gathering as we drove past destroyed homes, still in shambles even though it was 4 years later at that point, the flooding ruining their homes to the point where they didn’t have the money to rebuild. I talked to people in Detroit in 2015 for another National Youth Gathering as they lived in a neighborhood devastated not by flooding but by financial recession, lost jobs and destroyed property value. Even if they wanted to move, they couldn’t sell their house for anything to be able to buy a new one elsewhere.

            And now I watch as so many houses were destroyed in parts of Texas, particularly in Houston, from Hurricane Harvey, and we wait to see what damage has taken place in Florida from Irma. I see the stories of the fires in Montana, Oregon, California, and Idaho, and elsewhere in the west, as homes and land is destroyed there.

            Homes are so powerful for us, whether you rent or own, having a place to call your own is a seeming need. We refer to those who don’t in general terms, homeless. There aren’t many other categories that we define people by as much as that. We don’t really even talk about joblessness in the same way. Having a home is an important thing. In hierarchy of needs, having lodging or shelter is one of the prime, basic needs. Homes are our places of safety.

            In our lesson from Exodus, we see this. The Hebrew people don’t gather together in a common worship space or central synagogue, it’s doubtful they had them, but they gather in their homes. When they take the blood of the sacrificial lamb they mark the door posts and lintel, the bar that goes across the frame of the door. They then eat and wait as the angel of death passes over them during the tenth plague.

            Their homes are literally places of safety for them, that blood saves them from death. But, something else is happening too. That dinner in their home is to save them from death, but also prepare them to leave their homes, to go to a place they do not know. They eat holding their staffs, wearing their sandals, loins girded, which means to bunch your robe up just right so your legs are free so you can run if needed, and eat fast. They eat, safe in their homes, knowing that in the morning they must leave them. They must flee from, abandon their homes.

            I’ve never had to abandon a home, I’ve moved and left places I called home, but never in a hurry or in a disaster. I can’t imagine what they go through.

            But, in Exodus, in all of God’s work to us, we know that we always have a place. God promises the Israelites a land of milk and honey, a new home for them. And we read in John, chapter 14, that Jesus goes to prepare a place for us, a home for us.

            Part of why we give to relief in disasters is so that people can have a home again, it’s why people journey to help rebuild in places after disasters. And it’s all done safe in the promise that Christ provides a final home for us.

            This week, give thanks for your home, give to help others rebuild theirs lost to flood, wind, fire or financial disaster, and pray and give thanks that Christ prepares a place for us.

Amen.