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The Fifth Sunday of Easter Friends, one of the remarkable miracles of living on Cape Cod occurred again these past few days. The ospreys have returned. Flying some 1200-1500 miles from their southern winter roosts, these magnificent creatures have come back, many of them to the very nests where they were spawned. Ospreys do this because they follow their most basic natural impulse, that is, their homing instinct. Like all of organic life, programmed into their dna is this raw, innate drive to return to a home that is familiar, that is nurturing, and that is sustaining. So driven is the osprey that even at the point of their near extinction in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when the pervasive use of DDT caused their eggs to malform and shatter, still they returned to their nests in search of their home, even though their efforts at the time seemed hopeless. This homing instinct is something we intimately share with the rest of the animal kingdom. It animates our purposes, it guides our dreams. We need a home, we want a home, we create a home, we cannot live fully or happily without a home. “What is more agreeable than one’s home?”, the great Roman statesman Cicero wrote nearly 2100 year ago. And this great truth was not lost on our own ancestors of faith, in Israel and in the early church. The word for house in Hebrew is one of the most common we find in the Old Testament. And in Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, there are 17 different words for home, and an abundance of varied references to home in all of its manifestations. Two of these words are used today in our Gospel. Jesus says to his disciples: “In my father’s oikia, or house/inhabited edifice are many mones, or dwellings/abodes.” Jesus, himself, in his brief public ministry had spoken about his own search for a home when he said: “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” In our Gospel, he is telling his followers that in the realm of God, it is a house that God indwells, and in this house, there are many dwellings places, homes as it were, that Jesus himself is preparing for all who seek to abide with him. This passage from the 14th Chapter of John is one we traditionally reserve for our burial services, and its focus is normally seen as directed toward the life beyond this one. But today, I wonder if we can view it differently, as applying to this world, and to this deep desire for home that exists in each of our hearts. I wonder if we can read it in the light of the words in the prayer Jesus taught us to pray: Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done. Over 100 times in the Gospels Jesus speaks of this Kingdom. But rather than pointing to a kingdom far off and beyond this life, the message of Jesus is that the Kingdom of God is available to each of us, and this Kingdom appears wherever what is up there comes down here. I wonder about all of this as a consequence of our recent trip to Louisiana. That Jesus would choose the word house to describe God’s kingdom, and that he chose to identify his mission as going to prepare a home for us resonates very deeply for those of us who have just returned from our mission trip. Habitat for Humanity is an organization whose express purpose is to build this Kingdom of God on earth, and our weeklong project of building a house with Habitat gave us all a taste of what Kingdom building is all about. It is hard to imagine what the people of the Gulf Coast have suffered until you have been there. Imagine winds so strong and a twenty-eight foot storm surge coming off Cape Cod Bay, devastating everything in its wake. Imagine waking up tomorrow and seeing as we did whole neighborhoods demolished, or finding St. Mary’s in the condition of the Parish of St. Mary of Lourdes in Slidell , completely eviscerated, completely uninhabitable. Imagine burying thousands of our loved ones, our friends and neighbors, as the citizens of the Ninth Ward of New Orleans were forced to do in the carnage of the storm. Imagine having a twenty fold increase in homelessness, with hundreds forced to live in tents under interstate bridges. Imagine having suffered all this, and coming to realize that much of this disaster was man-made, and didn’t have to happen. Imagine, then, what it might mean to have thousands of volunteers from all over the country take buses and vans and planes to come and help you rebuild the homes you have lost, the churches and schools that were swept away. Imagine the feelings of gratitude, and humility, and love this might engender in you. Imagine the hope that would stir in your hearts. Imagine all of this, the compassion, the sweat equity, the foundation and framing, the roofing and siding, the tears and the laughter, imagine all of this as a picture of the Kingdom of God, of what is up there coming down here. Then, after all this, asking yourself this question: “What would this earth look like if God’s Kingdom were really present among us?” Friends, what if every human being were valued in the same every human being is valued by God? What if the 3.5 homeless men, women, and children in our country, or the 500 million homeless people throughout the world had reason to hope that just as Jesus is preparing a home for us, we are preparing a home for them? What if we came to believe and affirm and bring to fruition this vision of Jesus that in God’s house there are many dwelling places, that in God’s house there is room for every one, that in God’s house no one is abandoned, no one is turned away, no one is an outcast, no one is an orphan, no one is a throwaway? Would not our spirits then soar like the osprey? Would we not then finally, at long last see this as the way, the truth, and the life that is the God-given destiny of our species? Would we not then finally, and at long last, with Jesus, find our way home, both in this life and the life to come?
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