Rev. Rachel Lewis Cooley
“Yearning for Home”
Eternal Hope United Church of Christ, Fort Walton Beach, FL
February 13, 2022
Jeremiah 17:5-10
5Thus says the Lord:
Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals
and make mere flesh their strength,
whose hearts turn away from the Lord.
6 They shall be like a shrub in the desert
and shall not see when relief comes.
They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness,
in an uninhabited salt land.
7 Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,
whose trust is the Lord.
8 They shall be like a tree planted by water,
sending out its roots by the stream.
It shall not fear when heat comes,
and its leaves shall stay green;
in the year of drought it is not anxious,
and it does not cease to bear fruit.
9 The heart is devious above all else;
it is perverse—
who can understand it?
10 I the Lord test the mind
and search the heart,
to give to all according to their ways,
according to the fruit of their doings.
Psalm 1
1 Happy are those
who do not follow the advice of the wicked
or take the path that sinners tread
or sit in the seat of scoffers,
2 but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law they meditate day and night.
3 They are like trees
planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.
4 The wicked are not so
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous,
6 for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
Oh God, Creator of the earth and it’s processes, giver of life and hope,
Gather us in your Spirit, help us to come with open-heartedness: with creativity to imagine life rooted and grounded in You, free from the anxiety and at home in your grace which we drink in from your ever-flowing stream. We would grow from drinking you in. Nurture us here, abide with us now, just as we are, that we may go forth in your Spirit, content in your peace, trusting in your mercy and justice. Amen.
To be rooted and grounded in God is to be free from the anxiety of conventional wisdom.
We do have choices— to be rooted means to consistently and consciously tune in to God: spiritual practice. God will keep finding us. We will not remain in exile — searching for what feels like home.
We do this together.
Subverting conventional wisdom means God is not a lawgiver and judge, but like the sun which shines on each of us— “sinners and saints” What does this mean about the wicked? They may seem to prosper, but they're not happy or even content. While we may wish they would get punished, we have to fully refute the conventional wisdom story, and trust instead in God’s presence and journeying with God/abiding in God's Spirit. How do we let ourselves die to anxiety producing conventional wisdom— let it too blow away in the wind— to instead be resurrected as a tree come back to life? And nourishing its neighbors.
Jeremiah writes from a time of exile. The Israelites were conquered by the kingdom of Babylon, and deported to Babylon—modem day Iraq—in 587 BCE. This was a disaster for the Israelites as they believed the temple in Jerusalem was the actual house of God — as in their God resided there and not elsewhere. The weren't allowed to return home... to where their God lived, until 537 BCE after Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon. This 50 year period — known as the Babylonian captivity or just “Exile” is a longing to return home — to go home to Zion, to their temple where they believed God lived. How could they ever connect to God now? And where WAS Gad, and how did God let this happen? Were they being punished for turning from God? Yet they'd had such blessings before, and they sought to be faithful though they knew they were imperfect. Would God bring this exile upon them??
Many of us may feel like we’re in exile today. How are we to trust in God or even feel God’s presence when we are so distressed by hurt and fear in the world— seeing images in both the news and fictional television— of violence and suffering, climate change disasters and threats of war, and refugees fleeing both. When we see black men and women murdered by police, and those pushed to poverty by greed, those living on the streets in our midst. We feel like we can’t trust those things we used to trust, including the church and the government. And I’m not saying we should.
And then on tv and in media, glorification of the wealthy, advertisements begging us to consume more and more, make ourselves thinner, more made up, more attractive. More cool, more living like how the people live in what I like to call commercial land. Commercial land is filled with the conventional wisdom we talked about last week. With all this to distract us, how are we to own our own journeys, warts and all? We almost never feel okay, just as we are, in this world. We are never quite good enough. We struggle to come home even to ourselves, numbing our emotions instead, hiding ourselves from our neighbors. When we armor up and hide ourselves, it becomes harder and harder to show ourselves even to God. we feel separated from what feels like home, like we're exiled from our home, where God is.
Why can’t we go home, I say, shaking my fist to the sky! to each other and to creation? Yall don’t know how often I imagine myself a homo sapien in our evolutionary past— a hunter gatherer. While I’m sure I probably idealize this life, we used to live together! In villages— doing the days tasks of surviving off the land together, raising the children together, caring for each other all together, sharing the resources of the earth together. All the time, more than once a day, I imagine going back to this life. this feels like what going home would be, to me. Returning from exile, back to God, back to creation, back to each other.
The truth is, there is no going back to this. And, by the way, it surely wasn’t as great as I think it was. Tribes competed, humans were threatened by lions and tigers and bears oh my! And there was probably little patience for anything considered weakness.
And yet, God was there, and God is here. God was not only in Jerusalem in the temple while the Israelites were in Babylon, God was with them, and they could feel it when they reached out for God, when they opened their hearts to God’s Spirit.
The people of God have a choice, Jeremiah and the Psalmist say. To remember God, to put down roots in faith, to commit to growth in God's love by reaching again and again for the needed nurture of God. To remember that God is there, even when our emotions cause us to fly this way and that, when distractions become intense.
A tree near a stream is a powerful metaphor for desert dwelling peoples—and for us today. A tree by a stream does not appear fully formed and all at once. Life and growth is not even easy for the tree! Yet the tree trusts it can grow and find God. The seed bursts forth in the dark! It’s first sprout finds itself in the hard ground, yet there are nutrients enough there for it to burst, so it might as well keep going. Reaching, extending up, up, up! All is dark here, yet it reaches, it grows, believing that it will find what it needs, growing, reaching, extending some more until suddenly! It bursts forth. Into the sunlight! It grows some more, and it gets stronger and stronger through days in the sun and days in the rain, soaking up moisture and heat. Sometimes it is too hot or too cold. It’s thirst is unbearable, sometimes. Yet as it was growing upward, it also roots down, into the ground where more moisture can be found, but not without searching. Not without time spent growing and reaching and piercing the hard soil, always trusting there will be moisture somewhere. It has found moisture before, and it will find it again.
You have found moisture before, you have found God before, and you will find God again. You can insist, like the seed, that there is life and light up above the surface, to be found even in the heat, or the cold. But our roots take time to grow— time, time, time to turn to God again and again.
I don't know about you all, but I seem to believe that intensity, rather than consistency, is the way to live, the way to experience God. | heard Brené Brown and author James Clearly talking about how fired up we all tend to get about new growth we want to take on. Like with New Year's resolutions, we think everything can change overnight for us. Like we will *suddenly* be new people who can go to the gym for hours, 5 days a week, when we haven't been going at all. Actually, though, James Cleary writes in his book Atomic Habits what we already know: that we will not really do this and that we might actually want to start just by putting on our gym shoes, driving to the gym, and spending five minutes there. Seriously. Do this for a while, and you're “casting votes,” he says, “for the kind of person you are’ in this case, the kind of person who goes to the gym.” Then, once the habit is a bit formed, you can start improving upon it. You cannot improve a habit that is not there yet— hence why the intense, impassioned New Years resolution often does not work. We have to admit to ourselves how we really are, as humans, and take our growth step by step. The seed is not the tree: but with each small choice made to reach, to turn the sunlight into energy, to take in the moisture raining down— eventually, over time, it will become the tree.
So you don’t have to start big, or in any particular way, when you turn back to God. You can start with a moment when you've got one, to say “hey, God, what's up? I know you're here. I’m opening to you.” Centering prayer is an ancient Christian spiritual practice where one simply repeats a phrase about opening to God, and each time your thoughts wander and you realize it, you simply repeat it again. In doing so, you insist that God is there, even when it feels like you are separated from your home and in exile. The invitation to grow in God is always there, but it takes time, years, to grow in faith. Yet the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, and the next step, and the next, and we trust that each step is good and right, and growing our roots into God’s deep well.
I also believe that even when we forget, even when we don't make the choice to turn back to God, even when we get caught up in the ways of the world, God will find us. Somehow, some way. God will continue to reach out even when we don't.
God is there in those moments when it seems so incredibly obvious God is—like when we see something astoundingly beautiful in creation, or receive such love and comfort from a friend or family member or stranger that we are sure God is within them. And we need these moments, we can tell these stories, these moments can change our lives. They are touchpoints.
But the thing that seems harder to believe, yet is, | believe, true, is that God is there even in the ordinary moments, the incredibly difficult ones, and the ones where it seems God could surely not be. | see that in events structured around money and advertising, God’s goodness gets through just a little bit. God’s goodness can shine through even in what seems like the most unlikely places to me. Even when I’m grumpy about the super bowl and its commercialism, it's competitiveness, the journey and determination of a player will surprise me, I'll hear God in it. You don’t have to feel about the super bowl like I do. But it might be helpful for you to name the places where you think God surely couldn't be, and you see glimpses of God shining through anyway.
And once we name those external places where God surely couldn’t be, but shines through a bit anyway, surely we have to admit that even when we feel exiled, even when we feel unworthy, God shines through us anyway. Even when we feel not good enough, there is some good fruit that we can offer. Because we are rooted and grounded in the love of God.
Often we want things to happen the way we want them. We want them on our timeline. We want to write the story, and control, control, control. Surrendering to trust, and to knowing we are enough and God will keep showing up is so tough. Yet like the seed, we keep growing, and we find God as water buried deep within the hard, dry, desert ground. Who knew we could find water there?? The seed didn’t know, yet it kept reaching, opening. We don’t know, yet we keep reaching, opening for God.
I read recently in this beautiful book about another thing the seed or the tree might find as its roots grow. It may find another living thing, another sapling or tree. And it will communicate with it. It will share resources— through the roots!— with the other tree it finds because it trusts that it’s stronger when it connects, when it opens itself to live in community. This is scientifically true, y'all, and | had no idea. And yet as soon as I heard it, I knew it was true, deep down in my bones. Because I know that I am stronger when I connect, I am stronger when I open myself to live in community. I’ve lived in a lot of places, and every root system I’ve connected to— has nourished me. and I’ve nourished it. Just as trees are stronger and less likely to lose a limb or get electrocuted in a storm when they live together in a forest, I am more resilient when I live together with others. Just as trees can work together to cool the temperature in a forest, making the environment more comfortable for themselves and for all the other plants and animals and more that flourish in forests, we can work together to create a home that is cool and comfortable, hospitable and welcoming for all other people and creation to flourish! When we are rooted and grounded in the love of God, all things are possible. God will show up. All beings in creation, including you, are meant to flourish— are invited by God and by me and others here and around the world— to flourish. To share in flourishing with all God’s creatures. With each other and with God, we are strong. We can come home. May it be so. I trust that it will be so.
Amen