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| stained glass windows at St. James Episcopal Church, San Francisco |
“Comfort, O
comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her
that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received
from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. A voice cries out: “In the
wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway
for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain shall be made
low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places plain. Then the
glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for
the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” (Isaiah 40:1-5)
Isaiah
speaks these words of comfort to a people suffering in exile in Babylon,
longing to return home to Israel. They were bereft of hope, their Temple in ruins,
certain that God was punishing them for their sins, when along comes the
prophet to proclaim forgiveness and a vision of homecoming. This is good news
indeed! Then, in 539 the Persian King, Cyrus, conquered Babylon and a year
later declared that the exiled Jews were free to return home and rebuild their
Temple.
Baruch appropriated
this vision of homecoming more than three hundred years later, after the return
of the exiles to Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple. Even when we are “home”
we can feel alienated and unsafe. Israel
was home again, but now under the rule of a Syrian king, Antiochus, who
profaned the Temple and executed Jews who refused to forsake their religion. When home becomes an occupied territory, when
one’s culture and identity is being suppressed, it doesn’t feel much like home
anymore.
Thus, the
promise of homecoming must be renewed: “Take off the garment of your sorrow and
affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory of God . .
. For God will lead Israel with joy, in the light of his glory, with the mercy
and justice that come from him.” (Baruch 5:1, 9) This promise was fulfilled, in part, by the
Maccabean revolt against Syria that restored the Temple and re-established
Judean independence.
Then, along
came the Roman Empire. Judea and all of Palestine became an occupied territory
again, leading to further revolts in opposition to Roman oppression. Some two
hundred years after Baruch’s writing the Temple was destroyed again; Jerusalem
became a wasteland. Many Jews went into exile again, fleeing their homeland.
Not long
afterward, Luke’s Gospel appeared conveying the message of yet another prophet,
John the Baptizer, who once again appropriates Isaiah’s promise of homecoming
for his own time and place. John gathered a new community that was preparing
for the renewal of Israel. God would once again make a way for the return of
the exiles, a true homecoming in which all flesh shall see the salvation of
God.
Do you see a
pattern here? Exile and return, occupation and liberation, alienation and
homecoming: this seems to be the way of the world. It isn’t merely a long ago
and far away story. It is our story. It is the story of millions of refugees
around the world: Palestinians, Sudanese, Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghanis,
fleeing occupied territories they long to reclaim as home. It is the story of
brave U.S. servicemen and women serving abroad in a tragic exile not of their
own choosing. It is past time for them to come home. It is the story of Central Americans fleeing
across our borders, many of them children, hoping to build a new home here free
from destitution and violence.
It is the
story of people living with disabilities, struggling to feel at home again in
their own bodies. It is the story of people
caring for loved ones with dementia: exiled to a forgetfulness that can leave
them feeling lost, while their loved ones grieve the sense of home they once
shared. For many of our neighbors, exile
and the fear of exile has to do with rising housing costs and the threat of
eviction. Their sense of “home” in San
Francisco feels tenuous at best. “Home”
can also be a relationship that is no longer viable, with divorce feeling like
a kind of exile from what was at least familiar, even if it wasn’t always
happy.
We are all
characters in the story of exile and return. Sometimes the home for which we
long is a place on a map; sometimes we find ourselves exiled from the landscape
of our own heart. Too often, we live in exile from both. We long to come home to
our people, to our family, to our self. Even more, we long to come home to God,
in whom we find our true and lasting rest.
Thus, we
find ourselves here again in the season of Advent, listening to the voice of
one crying in the wilderness: “O God, make a way for us to come home again. Let
us, all of us, see your salvation. We’re tired of wrapping ourselves in
threadbare garments of sorrow and affliction. Dress us instead in the beauty of
your presence, in the warmth of your peace and justice, in the splendor of your
compassion and forgiveness. Please, please, dear God, bring us home again.”
This Advent Season,
I invite you to reflect on your own experience of exile and return. In what
sense are you grieving a lost sense of “home?”
What does “homecoming” look like for you? How can we find our home in God together at
St. James?
