"Home: Two Perspectives"
A Sermon Preached by The
Rev. Thomas C. Leinbach
March 9, 2008 - Harwich, Massachusetts

Preaching Text: "Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.'" (John 11:25-26)

Some years ago I received an excited call from a friend. "Did you get the invitation?" he asked. I had.

"So are you going?" he asked again. I was pretty sure I wasn't.

The invitation, you see, was to the 10-year reunion of my high school class, the first we'd ever held.

As far as I was concerned, high school was mostly over and done with. But my friend was undeterred. He thought it would be great to see all our old friends and re-experience the "good ole' days" up close and personal.

Then again, he had loved his high school days more than most, back when he was a popular star athlete and class officer. He idolized those days and viewed them wistfully as some sort of golden age. My own impressions of that same time were more modest, you might say. As far as I was concerned, living ten years hence suited me just fine.

But he was persistent and pressed me on it until my resistance waned. Eventually I gave in and agreed to go.

At first it was fun. We gathered in a large room with name tags displaying our senior year picture. It was like being in a room full of ghosts. You knew these people, sort of, but not really. I especially enjoyed talking with classmates I'd never known all that well back then. As I said, it was fun.

But then we sat down for dinner, and the old cliques reassembled. People sat only with those they already knew, which turned out to be a lot less fun, somehow.

All in all, by the end of the evening, I found myself pleasantly surprised. While some aspects of the evening definitely were lacking, others I genuinely enjoyed. On the whole, I ended up having a lot more fun than I ever thought I would.

My friend, on the other hand, was bitterly disappointed. He thought the gathering was going to be something akin to heaven on earth, that it would match or exceed his overly-idealized expectations. With far more realistic hopes, I ended up enjoying myself, while he went away disappointed and crestfallen, even.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation of a different sort. It was with one of our members, who happens to be 102 years-old! Among the various things we talked about, we got on the subject of computers somehow. I think I told her the church has a website and that my sermons are posted on it.

She then expressed her frustration with not knowing anything about computers, a skill, it must be said, often missing among those born before WWII. I assured her that, in general, they're a lot more trouble than they're worth. Having to learn all about e-mail, browsers, operating systems, not to mention viruses, spyware, etc, etc, is, I helpfully concluded, a daunting challenge for even the most motivated among us.

But she would have none of it. She lamented not being able to "keep up," as she put it. She felt she was missing something!

I mention these two stories to highlight how vastly different two people can approach life. On the one hand, my high school friend was caught in a time warp. He was living in the past. He was, as Kierkegaard once put it, "fighting for what is vanished." His life energy was focused on reclaiming and reliving something that already was gone, irrevocably. In speaking to the 102 year-old woman, on the other hand, I sensed a person living for today, in the here-and-now. It isn't that she has forgotten the past - she hasn't. But she chooses to "keep up," to live in the "now."

The simple fact is that we don't stay in one place throughout our life; instead we pass through time. Not to do so is to end up "fixated" on a given past. One thing I did notice at my ten year high school reunion was how some people, my friend included, had stopped growing, had stayed put, psychologically doomed to relive an era that, because it was gone, could not ever be recaptured. To live that way could produce only futility, frustration and unhappiness.

At root, we all understand that life does not stand still, but moves through time, that we and the world around us never stay the same. Similarly, we understand that vitality comes from life lived in the here-and-now, in anticipation of what comes next.

Theologically speaking, we are but "strangers in a strange land." We are sojourners passing through time, working out our salvation moment-to-moment, day-to-day.

And at no point is that journey complete, which underscores this simple fact: that our true spiritual "home" is not here, amid the ever-changing flux and flow of created time, but in heaven, that eternal realm beyond this one, from which we came and to which we one day shall return.

Our true home, in other words, is found not in some idyllic past, frozen in time, but amidst the implicit urgings of the here-and-now, ever-pointing toward that eternal future beyond time, and the fulfillment of all earthly striving.

This morning we heard once again John's account of Lazarus rising from the dead. In the trajectory of John's thinking, Lazarus anticipates Jesus' own impending death and resurrection. In this we are reminded that life on this plane of existence is finite, temporary and that it one day shall end. It reminds us that this world is not, ultimately, our true home.

Yet the resurrection also reminds us that this life is meaningful, and that our time here on earth matters, greatly. As sojourners on our way - as strangers in a strange land - we travel through a world pregnant with meaning, even if temporary and ever-changing, with our every striving pointing toward our true destination, our true home beyond time and place.

Of course, materialists will deny the afterlife and argue that only in accepting mortality will we find peace with our circumstances. Christianity, on the other hand, with the resurrection at its core, resists this claim, seeing danger and confusion in assuming earthly life to be all there is.

In his ancient classic, City of God, Augustine argues that there are two cities, one earthly and the other heavenly. Taking his cue from Jesus' parable about the wheat and the tares, he maintains that within the earthly realm, the "City of Man," there are weeds (brokenness and imperfection), mixed together with seeds of goodness and godliness. Only when the City of God is revealed fully at the harvest will we know in purity and truth. In the meantime, we live within the imperfections of time.

Knowing this, we Christians approach life differently. Like the materialist, we live with seriousness of purpose. Yet, unlike the materialist, we know that earthly life is not all there is, that there is a heavenly realm that is somehow more true, somehow more real. Thus, we never confuse the two and never seek to collapse the one into the other.

Reinhold Niebuhr years ago pointed out that the realm of God always stands over-and-against our human best. God's perfect justice, for instance, always exceeds the best human justice. The most we can hope for, he said, was approximate justice, never perfect justice.

This means that we must never, like the materialist, grow complacent with things as they are. Instead, Christians should strive for ever-greater justice, since God's absolute justice always supersedes our own. The world's notions of peace, as well, are never identical to God's, which are holy and faultless.

In The New York Times this past week, David Brooks referred to a picture of himself in his high school yearbook, one where he is wearing a political button that read: "Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton."

The joke is a complicated one. "Immanentize," you see, refers to God's presence in and through earthly time, while the "Eschaton," its opposite, refers to "the end of the age," beyond time.

To "immanentize the Eschaton," then, is to collapse heaven into earth, to artificially force Augustine's two cities into one. The problem, the button implies, is that we then confuse our earthly best with God's best. And in the process falsely assume this world to be all there is, our only home. Rejecting heaven, we then miss the eternal life promised to us, in and through the resurrection.

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ confirms that our true home is not here, but in heaven, and that the purpose of earthly life is to move through time in pursuit of heavenly things. We are not to grow complacent, making our home here too comfortable. Instead, we are to stretch forth as we pass through time in pursuit of the highest things of God, which will be revealed to us fully only beyond time.

My high school friend seemed to have forgotten this basic truth, while our 102 year-old member seems to have gotten it straight. We live in time, fully in the here-and-now, which carries us forth, in preparation of that which shall be revealed beyond time, even heaven, our only true home.

Amen.