My parents moved into the house in which I grew up when I was 6 months old, 1966. My brother and I sold that same house about a year after my mother’s death in 2010. For a large part of my life, even when I had my own home, and my own children, there was something to the understanding about going home-home. I remember distinctly the first time that I went away for a trip from my townhouse in Charlottesville, VA and returned and it finally felt like home, whereas all the other times, even coming home from class, it felt like a lodging. I’m sure you can relate. I remember once seeing a painting on a planter’s pot, “Home is where you hang your heart.” That rings true.
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann called the words of prophecy from the passage we just heard from Isaiah, “home coming passages.” The passage uses the power of memory—specifically looking back through the immediate situation of exile to recall the mighty deeds of God in history of God’s people—in order to stir up a belief in the power of God at work in the future. And it’s funny, isn’t it, that in the passage there is specific instruction to the contrary, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.” And of course, the new thing that God is going to do, will of course be new (I mean, God just said so—“I am about to do a new thing.. I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” ). However, we can only understand the new thing in terms of the familiar. And in fact, the familiar, what is home, is our gauge of how we know something comes from God, in that it feels God-like.
When we look at the world today, the sun still rises and sets, the Pacific Northwest is still rainy, the birds still sing, although some are confused with the climate and have odd migration patterns now. The bees are present, but way underrepresented. And we know the ice sheets are melting. The war in the Ukraine is heart-breaking and hard to witness, to bear, but it is not nearly as hard for us as for the people in the midst of it. I find the amount of misinformation that seems to propagate to be sickening. How can we try to make the world better and more loving when things seem so very topsy-turvy? And it’s not just the outer world beyond this island, I know the narratives of many of you, and there is some real and painful stuff that you all are going through. It may not be wartime or climate change impacting the world, but that doesn’t make it any of the things less painful or difficult… close loved ones die, people have troubled relationships, children get estranged, children move out, children move in, some people will struggle with the rising cost of the taxes on the island, and we all get ill and eventually die, .. these are all very real things.
And yet, God is faithful. Imagine empty dry creek beds as we see in the psalm; it is God who restores the watercourses of the Negev. God is forever calling us to Godself to refresh us with the new thing that God is doing.
God is faithful; we hear this in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Even as Paul bears the burden that he was the one oppressing those who followed Christ, he expounds upon the workings of Christ in his life, the very new thing that God is doing. Philippians is not a rejection of the Jewish faith so much as an expansion to fulfill the Gospel.
And remember that the phrase “Faith in Jesus” can be translated, and some argue SHOULD be translated as the “Faith OF Jesus Christ.” In other words, this is not on you and how much faith you have, whether you are a believer or seeker, or what have you, this is about what Jesus did, does and continues to do in our lives. We have righteousness before God because of Jesus, and not because of anything else. We are made worthy, this new thing because of Jesus. Even when we do not feel worthy at all.
And this new thing that God has made in Jesus Christ, this is transformative. And at first it may shock us, and we start thinking… perhaps Judas is right, I mean, why wasn’t the nard sold to give money to the poor?
But this Gospel passage nicely bookends the passage from Isaiah, God “will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.….so that they might declare [God’s] praise.”
And in the Gospel passage, Jesus understands the necessity we have to give thanks and worship. That sometimes we don’t sell nard to feed the poor. Sometimes we take a breather and rejoice in the Lord Jesus Christ. We worship so that we can go back to the poor, back out into our very broken world and make things better, so we can go into our interior worlds and make things better, all guided by the one who is LOVE, love without misinformation, who is the new and best thing. Whose love is our story and our destiny. Whose love is our home, and our rest. “Our hearts are restless, Lord,” said Augustine, “until they rest in you.” May God be with us in our struggles; do a new thing in our lives; show us his love; and take us home.
-Sarah Colvin
Isaiah 43:16-21
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8
Psalm 126