Sermon | The Rev. Peter Sipple | May 18, 2025
SERMON – Easter V – 5/18/25
The Rev. Peter Sipple
In his little book Making all things new: An Invitation to the Spiritual Life, Henri Nouwen wrote that “Jesus responds to the condition of being filled yet unfulfilled, very busy yet unconnected, all over the place yet never at home. He wants to bring us to the place where we belong. But his call to live a spiritual life can only be heard when we are willing honestly to confess our own homeless and worrying existence and recognize its fragmenting effect on our daily lives. Only then can a desire for our true home develop.”
Our true home...what is it? Where is it? Are we there now? Do we even know, or know how to find out? Many of us spend large portions of our lives running around, trying this path to success and happiness, then that one, thinking we have the answer over here only to be told it’s over there. The media bombard us with messages assuring us that this product or that service will brighten up our lives, pep us up or calm us down, make us happy and fulfilled. Yet so often we’re disillusioned in our discovery that this new acquisition or that new experience didn’t make much difference to our condition; we still feel as if we haven’t yet found home.
Perhaps it is the resulting loss and loneliness that lead us to create a sense of home by surrounding ourselves with matter and things. We may have convinced ourselves that we are home so long as we have enough to assure our personal comfort and satisfaction. And indeed our bodies may be comfortable—but our spirits? That may be another matter. In the early part of the 19th century William Wordsworth included these lines in one of his best-known sonnets: Getting and spending we lay waste our powers/Little we see in nature that is ours. In Wordsworth’s day, the effects of the Industrial Revolution were already being felt; commerce was depersonalizing human life and distracting people from the natural world around them—their original and spiritual home. In our own day, social scientists conclude that many Americans are pulled away both from the natural world and from one another. We hear and read about the apparent deterioration of this country’s core values, or at least of those values and attitudes that we want to believe Americans stand for. The important study known as Habits of the Heart carried out by Robert Bellah and his colleagues concluded that people drawn from throughout our society have great difficulty identifying the goals of a morally good life. For most of us, the authors wrote, “it is easier to think about how to get what we want than to know what exactly we should want.”
The search for home—the desire to know what we should want—is an ancient quest. Perhaps the search always has been and will be an inevitable aspect of being human. The ancient prophets, Jeremiah and others, told of Israel’s returning home to be at one with God through the creation of a new covenant. It will be new and different, God assured the Israelites, because it will exist in human hearts, in the very nature of the human condition. We might say that it will become second nature with us, a habit of the heart. In fact, Jeremiah’s God says just that: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” What a longing we can sense in Jeremiah for this beautiful mutually loving relationship that is surely home for the Prophet—where we belong. It is the rediscovery of Eden, the way God meant it to be in the beginning.
Sadly, however, this covenant relationship between God and God’s people proved fragile and ephemeral. Perhaps, after all, it was a Utopian idea. We weren’t ready to create that home with God. But wait, God must have decided; I am going to try once more to bring the human heart back home, to center it in my laws again. But this time I will love the people personally; I will touch the human heart and re-extend the invitation to return home. Here is Jesus speaking in John’s Gospel: Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. And in today’s passage from John, Jesus assures us that everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. Jesus draws on an ancient description of the relationship to say that those who love me and keep my commandments will be vested in me and I in them. And to make sure that this relationship, this new home for the heart, is ongoing and forever, God will send an Advocate, God’s Holy Spirit, to remind us of what has been taught. For Jesus knows only too well that the heart has a tendency to forget and to wander, to move to a home that appears more temptingly large and classy, where the house rules aren’t quite as strict, where the landlord overlooks our foibles and our neighbors keep to themselves. But God calls us back, forgives us, and re-enters our hearts—the sequence that we celebrate in the Eucharist. As we continue the quest for our spiritual home, the Holy Spirit may be a kind of divine real estate agent who reminds us about what counts most in a residence: that our hearts will be glad, nourished by the continued assurance that God lightens burdens and lifts sagging spirits.
Frederick Buechner in his book A Room Called Remember illumines this paradox rather beautifully when he writes: “We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old. I know no more now than I ever did about the far side of death as the last letting-go of all, but I begin to know that I do not need to know and that I do not need to be afraid of not knowing. God knows. That’s all that matters. Out of Nothing God creates Something. Out of the End God creates the Beginning. Out of self-ness we grow, by God’s grace, toward selflessness, and out of that final selflessness, which is the loss of self altogether...what new marvels God will bring to pass next!”
Jesus has told and shown us that we do after all possess the capacity to let God rule our hearts, and that in doing so we experience life most abundantly. In accepting God’s simple gifts—the commandments of old and the rule of love—in accepting these and acknowledging them to be enough, far more than enough for us to live on, we enrich our lives immeasurably. And we know ourselves to be in the place where we belong, the place we call home. AMEN