The home that we’re looking for isn’t someplace far and away. It’s not up the highway or across the ocean. It’s not in the Norman Rockwell photos of beaming mother with her turkey. We may think of family and familiar places when we hear the word, but our home, our true home, is not there. Or rather it is there, but it’s here too – wherever here is for you.
It’s within us. It’s without us. It’s in Christ, with Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. It’s in the breaking of the bread, the sharing of the cup…our jubilee meal. It’s in the common meal: the pasta and red sauce shared in the college dining hall, the boxed macaroni and cheese in a first apartment, the roast chicken dinner after church on Sunday. It’s in our common life – hockey games and choir practice and carpool lanes. It’s in the way that God lives and breathes all over our communities – the neighbors reaching out in crisis, the little free libraries and the singing of the hammers at a Habitat site. In Christ, we are all at home wherever we are.
This message is excerpted from “Feeling homesick” by Susan K. Olson in the November/December 2023 Gather magazine. Today is the First Sunday after Christmas. Today we commemorate John, Apostle and Evangelist.
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