Zephaniah 3:14-20 Philippians 4:4-7
I recently wrote on my Facebook page this phrase: “Home is…” and asked whoever wanted to finish the sentence. I was curious to see what kind of responses I would receive. I received some well-known sayings such as, “Home is where the heart is.” and “Home is where you hang your hat.” “Home is the sailor, home from sea.” I also received, “Home is where I am welcomed, loved and accepted as I am.” “Home is where people go when they are tired of being nice.” According to the writer and poet Robert Frost, “Home is where you go and they have to take you.” The one that caught my attention was, “Home is where your story begins.”
Home is where your story begins. And that is where the prophet Zephaniah begins sharing his story, from his hometown, in the midst of the great corruption and injustice in Judah. We are in the 7th century B.C. around 630 B.C. The northern kingdom has fallen to the Assyrians. Judah has evolved into a decadent society, politically subservient and religiously corrupt. The people had turned away from God. The ancient faith of Judah was in serious danger of extinction. This is the context of Zephaniah’s ministry.
The essential message Zephaniah brings is about judgment and hope. God’s chosen people constantly abandoned their privileged relationship with God, like the Prodigal Son, as if they took God for granted, an example of the saying, “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone”. But now and then a passage crops up in which a restored relationship is celebrated between God and God’s people.
The nostalgia of home is very popular this time of year. Songs of the season such as “I’ll be home for Christmas” illustrate this. There are also all those Hallmark Christmas movies that the Hallmark Channel has shown non-stop since Thanksgiving. The plot of many of them, if not all of them, is about a son or daughter who hasn’t been home for Christmas in years for various reasons, mainly to just avoid their family. But the main character finally returns home to a perfectly decorated, well-to-do home in the suburbs and through a series of events comes to appreciate this home of his childhood realizing that all his fruitless searches in life led him astray. This was what he had been longing for all along.
Pastor, author and teacher Frederick Buechner, in his book, “The Longing for Home”, says home is “a very special place with very special attributes which make it clearly distinguishable from all other places.”[1] The word home conjures up complex feelings about a place you feel, or did feel once, uniquely at home.[2] It’s a place where you feel you belong and which to some degree belongs to you; a place where you spend the rest of your days searching, even if you are not aware you are searching or longing for home.
What does home look like to you? What does home mean?
Zephaniah offers us many different descriptions of what home is. Home is a place where you are “safe from enemies”(Zeph.3:15) It’s a place of peace, security and safety. It’s a retreat from the craziness of the world.
Home is a place where you are in the presence of loved ones, (Zeph.3:15) those you truly care about you, who love you for who you are, who rejoice over you, a place filled with joy and singing. There is no better feeling in the world than when I get home at the end of the day and I hear two voices scream from across the room, “Daddy’s home. Daddy’s home” as Michael and Marissa latch on to my legs. You know you are in the presence of those who love you.
Home is also a place where we live without fear (Zeph.3:15). It’s a place where we can be ourselves. Spending countless summer days on the Jersey Shore was home to me my whole life, but perhaps yours is swimming and skiing on Lake Cherokee or whole days swimming at the Meadowbrook Pool, or even time spent in a special place called Port Aransas. These may not be our physical homes, but they are still places where we can sit back, put our feet up, and let our hair down.
When we have a guest at our home we will say, “Come on in. Make yourself at home”. Home is for joyous celebrations of life’s milestones and we grow and learn and flourish as children of God.
Zephaniah reminds the Hebrews that in the midst of their joyful celebrations, God is rejoicing and exulting over them: as a father holding a homecoming party for the son who was lost but now is found (Luke 15:11-32), a shepherd exuberantly calling out to friends and neighbors that the sheep lost from the flock has been recovered (Luke 15:3-7). In heavens the morning stars sing together again to laud this new creation (Job 38:7, Luke 15:7,10), and a great multitude of the heavenly hosts sings, “Hallelujah” (Revelation 19:6-8), while the sea roars out its approval, the hills sing together for joy, and the trees of the field clap their hands. The Book of Zephaniah starts with judgment from God and ends with almost unimaginable joy.[3]
We find so much joy at home. It could be home the school or home as Grandma’s house or home the coffee shop. I think that’s why when our home is robbed we feel so violated, so exposed and so afraid. The place where we could live without fear gets spoiled.
And home is taking on a whole new meaning for families in Newtown, CT, in the wake of the horrific tragedy in that community on Friday. The shock and horror of this evil act will be felt for generations to come. Homes and families are destroyed; the serenity of a quiet community torn apart by the murdering of innocent children and adults. The home these people once knew no longer exists.
The Good News is that the season of Advent, this time of waiting and preparing for promised Messiah, is the time when we are reminded that even though horrible things are happening in the world, even though people continue to destroy one another, even though wars among nations and religions rage on, even though twenty small children and six adults were murdered in a quiet elementary school in Connecticut, we are reminded, first and foremost, that God is with us. Emmanuel: God is with us. God celebrates with us and cries with us. God stands by us in times of grief and sorrow. God is with us.
When we confess Jesus as Lord, by the grace of God, we have it in us to be Christ to other people. We all have the life-giving, life-saving and healing power to be Christ to others, and sometimes to ourselves. I believe, as Frederick Buechner does, that it is when this power is alive in me and through me that I come closest to being truly home. I cannot claim I have found the home I long for every day of my life, not by a long shot, but I believe in my heart I have found, and maybe had always known, the way that leads to it. I believe the home we long for and belong to is finally where Christ is. I believe our home is Christ’s kingdom, which exists both within us and among us as we journey through the world in search of it.[4]
Home is where the Lord is. When we are with God, we are truly home.
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