DON’T LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL

 

Second Sunday in Lent

March 8, 2009

Genesis 19:12-26 (selected)

Psalm 139:1-2, 7-10

Matthew 8:18-22   

 

Do any of you look back to the past with some longing?  Back to a time when moving around was a joy, not a chore?  Back to a time when reading or hearing the news was not an exercise in despair?  Back to a time when some of our dreams were still possibilities?   Back to a time when we could protect our children from the world by taking them in our arms?  Back to a time before our hearts were broken by grief or disappointment or betrayal?    Back to the old neighbourhood, the old home, the old friends, the old church, the old ways?

 

I know I miss the old things.  When I moved to Toronto from ManitobaI missed many things about my life there, the big sky, the wonderful people, my lovely 4-bedroom manse with its big back yard and raspberry bushes by the house.  When we moved here from 129 St. Clair I missed my office with its lovely wood panelling and the way the light came through the leaded glass windows late in the afternoon.  I miss friends and places and ways I’ve had to leave behind in my many moves throughout my life.  And I’ve often looked back at them with a sigh, wishing, wishing.  Wondering what God had in mind for all the new journeys.  Sometimes understanding, even discerning, God’s call is difficult. 

 

And I realize that I’m Lot’s wife.  Poor old nameless dear.  Pulled from her home by her husband who seemed reluctant himself to obey the instructions of the two angels sent from God.  Lot hesitated, even after being warned about the firestorm about to descend on Sodom.  And then he negotiated the direction of travel, saying that he wanted to go to the city of Zoar, rather than to the hills.  Lot’s wife probably wondered what on earth she was doing in her night-clothes wandering in the countryside outside of the city where she had friends and a fulfilled life.

 

She probably wasn’t being defiant or disobedient to God when she turned to look back, reluctant to leave behind what was familiar and beloved.  If God was indeed speaking through the men who were urging her reluctant husband to flee, then she would flee.  But one couldn’t expect her to be happy about it.  And what was going to happen to the friends she had left in the city?  Were they going to die?  If only things had been different.  And she stopped and turned around for one last look at the life behind.  And the fire and salt storm caught up to her and she died.

 

There’s a theory that the legend of Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt was meant to explain the salt deposits near the Dead Sea—the possible site of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Or to say that one should obey God to the letter—which Lot, himself, didn’t do.  But I think there is a deeper meaning than either of those.  When Lot’s wife looked back, she became frozen in that posture—frozen in the past, petrified by perhaps fear (where are we going?), perhaps anger (why is God asking this?), perhaps resentment (why do I have to be dragged from my home when I don’t want to go?).  And she was unable to move on, away from the danger, and so she died.  Looking back can keep us from moving forward, can kill us.

 

The past has a tremendous pull on us.  Wherever we’ve found home, whatever we’ve treasured as familiar, calls us back.  Michael Buble sings it in haunting tones: “Another aeroplane, another sunny place, I’m lucky, I know, but I wanna go home.  I’ve got to go home.”   The Beach Boys sang it years ago, “I feel so broke up, I wanna go home.”  Simon and Garfunkle lamented that “every stranger’s face I see, reminds me that I long to be, homeward bound.” But, as the title to Thomas Wolfe’s famous novel tells us, You Can’t Go Home Again.  Things change, time passes, you are different.  And home moves.

 

Matt Bai, writing in the New York Times about the inauguration of President Barack Obama, says that Obama has been compared many times to great presidential figures in America’s past—John Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln—partly because of his ground-breaking candidacy which brought with it such hope as has not been seen in American politics for some time.  But also because America is a country obsessed these days with retracing its tracks.  Bai says, “The danger in so relentlessly referencing historical markers, however, is that they can trick us into looking backward over our shoulders when we ought to be focussed on the unpredictable path ahead.”

 

Last week we began our Lenten journey with Jesus in the wilderness.  We set out on a pilgrimage to become more who we are as God’s called people.  And “home is where one starts from” says T.S. Eliot in his poem, “East Coker.”  Home is where we start from, it is not where we stay. 

 

But we cannot move forward on our pilgrimage if we keep looking backwards.  This doesn’t mean that we don’t learn from the past, that we don’t take what is good with us, that we don’t remember what we’ve experienced and how it has shaped us.  We are meant to do all these things.  But it does mean that we cannot keep hoping to repeat the past, to hold on to what is no longer relevant or appropriate or faithful or even possible, on the road which we travel as pilgrims.  We cannot move ahead by looking only through the rear-view mirror.

Jesus knew this.  When approached by would-be disciples, Jesus told them exactly how following him had to be.  They had to be prepared to let go of what was and what represented security to them.  They had to be willing to leave it all behind, to accept that nothing should be more important than the travelling. 

 

That’s hard for us to accept.  It seems to be saying that we have to give up everything we hold dear, everything that gives us security and continuity.  But that’s only because we find our security, our continuity in other things than following, other things than God.  No, says Jesus.  Find your security in God and follow me wherever God calls us. 

 

In his book, The Way Is Made by Walking, about travelling the Camino pilgrimage in northern Spain, Arthur Paul Boers says,

 

“Augustine famously prayed, ‘You made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.’  If so, human nature means that we are always yearning wanderers…and pilgrimage is an inevitable consequence.  We need constantly to look for—and stay on the move for—God.  This search keeps us unsettled.  Deity is not easily tied down.  Faithful people are repeatedly and providentially called to go elsewhere, be displaced and meet—even be—strangers, all in order to encounter our Creator more fully.

 

But this is frightening for us.  We don’t want to leave the past behind.  We don’t want to be homeless.  We don’t want to set out into the unknown with only God and fellow pilgrims.  And then we look at the psalm we read today, Psalm 139.  In it we are reminded that the speaker is completely surrounded by God and held in God’s firm grasp no matter where the psalmist should travel.  God is one who not only “guides”, but also “holds fast.”  The word that is translated “guide” means to lead safely in order to protect and bring to well-being.  And to “hold fast” means to hold in order to keep from falling or straying into danger or being made vulnerable. 

 

Thus, in every and all places, the inescapable God is protective, and therefore the speaker is safe.  The speaker cannot get beyond God’s protective presence.  This psalm is an amazing statement of the power and confidence that come in a God-centred life.  The God who is inescapable becomes a profound source of strength and well-being.

 

Because the truth is, with God, we may be houseless, but we are never homeless.  As Catherine of Siena said “all the way to heaven is heaven.”  Even when we have left places and people and situations behind that we considered our heaven on earth, we have not, because we carry our heaven, our protection, our home, with us when we walk with God.

 

Both congregations are holding their Annual Meetings today—we look back at what we’ve done and who we’ve been.  But we are not intended to keep looking back—we’re intended to learn from the past and then go into the future.  We turn around and keep going, not standing still either admiring or regretting or longing for the past, not walking backwards, keeping our eyes on what was, but walking forward, keeping our eyes on what can be—and on the One who can help us to make it be.

 

Rabbi Dow Marmur, in the 2000 Larkin-Stuart Lectures at TrinityCollege, entitled Faith in the New Millenium, holds the position that journeying, moving, leaving things or ideas behind, is a necessity of faith.  Faith as trusting, yielding to the will of God means that we must be on the road, be underway, be pilgrims, walk in the wilderness.  He says:

 

“Happiness is founded on trust in the future, not on evidence in the present.  Beneath our desperate need for certainty lies something much deeper, and that is our need for the world to be unpredictable, surprising, alive.” (pp.11-15)

 

He goes on to say that we live in times of unconscious conformism, passivity disguised as helplessness, narcissistic self-absorption and, possibly most treacherous for our future as people of faith, the craving for certainty, for security.  We need to be on the way, not settled down, in order to be God’s people.  We need to live on a conscious journey from certainty to truth, from security to trust.  That is the only way we will find hope.  God is on that road, not in a luxury hotel.  The wilderness is not a place of loss but a place of discovery, as Ian said last week.  We have not lost our homes, whether literal or emotional and spiritual, when we venture from them.  We take what we have been at home and, by travelling, we make much more for ourselves, for others, and for God.

 

Listen again to the words of the hymn about the Exodus that we sang last week:

 

“When we murmur on the mountains for the old Egyptian plains,

when we miss our ancient bondage and the hope, the promise wanes,

then the rock shall yield its water, and the manna fall by night

and, with visions of the future, we shall march toward the light.”