the pitt - part ten: my home is where my heart is

I mentioned this before, but recent conversations have re-stirred it.  I know some people have this feeling or concept or warm-fuzzy about their home...these fond memories that have left a lasting yet ethereal impression. My wife has these kinds of memories and deep-seated feelings... for home.  For some people it is either the one they inhabit now or a distant memory of years gone by somewhere else.  I don't have that...and I can't remember ever really having it.  I can only remember ever being on a journey to somewhere else...with others...(admission: not always in a healthy way...). 

I was reminded of this aspect of myself during a sacred conversation with a new friend while I was at the Vineyard National Missions Conference in Colorado Springs last week.  I was explaining how my wife has a keen sense of place and "home", while I didn't really, and my friend Evan pointed something out that he was hearing from me.  He said: "Perhaps, like me, it's not the place but the way you live that is home."  It immediately resonated, as we began sharing details of our rhythm of life.  That's what makes anyplace home and no place home for me: it's not about place, but about a way of living.

 

I want to return to that soon and talk about rhythm of life and communal spiritual direction; but as I was on the plane home from Colorado ruminating on this precious conversation, it struck me how it dove-tailed with some thoughts on cultivating a faith community and my recent reading through 1 Peter about being 'resident aliens'.  In the here-and-now, especially in the 'global north/west', we do not imagine nor consider ourselves - as followers of Jesus - as being 'in exile'...but we are. It's a a very subversive, purpose-filled kind-of-exile, but exile it is...calling us to live as sojourners and strangers...calling us to never quite 'arriving'...

All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a country of their own. And indeed if they had been thinking of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them.

Hebrews 11:13-16

...yeah, it can be frustrating in the here-and-now. We will never quite arrive in this 'now-and-not-yet' age.  Yet, like Simeon and Anna, we wait for another divine 'arrival'...another Advent; Jesus is coming again, and he's bringing heaven with Him. 

In fact, to let the big secret out: He has 'arrived' early (surprise!)

...and He brought the taste of heaven with Him

...and He has been spreading the subversive rule of His Kingdom among people in the here-and-now...

Of course, 'the revolution will not be televised'; but there will come a day when it goes public in a cosmic-kind of way...big time:

wait for it: ...like lightning from the east so shines in the west...you won't miss the next Big Arrival!

And yet for now, its a little more humble...a little more subversive...yet still spectacular in deeply moving ways.  And that's the vision I take hold of vis-à-vis cultivating a faith community in Pittsburgh:  But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare (Jeremiah 29).

In the here-and-now I feel like He wants us to follow Him...'out there' into our world/our society/our culture/our coffee shop/our gas station/our living room...and live there - in exile; and make it better...make it better by doing our best CSI-impression and looking for His fingerprints and those relationally-ripe moments of breakthrough, then engaging the world as subversive Kingdom radicals...for its welfare...which is our welfare as well.  And anyway, isn't home where my heart is? I hold to what Jesus promises us in John 14, if we love Him and follow His Way, the heavenly Father will love us, and they will come make their home with us.

And that brings it full-circle, doesn't it?  Can you see the turn there in John 14? Their home is with us...that says to me - if their home is where their heart is - their heart is with us...and God yearns just as much as we do for expressions of redemption...so anyone can taste and see He's really good. 

So while we continue to seek to pull the 'now-and-not-yet' future into our present in the 'here-and-now', there is, as the provocative John Howard Yoder put it, "something about this Jewish vision of the dignity and ministry of the scattered people of God which might be echoed or replicated..." 

[to be continued...]