Tell the right story

And it will tell you

This week, I’m using what I have (after meeting three other deadlines), and I’m sharing with you part of a talk I was slated to give last year but didn’t, after a snowstorm cancelled the event. The talk was on the subject of my second book, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home, and in this particular section, it reasons how the gospel makes sense of our longing for home.

---

You long for home. I long for home. The Bible tells us exactly why.

It was the theologian Craig Bartholomew who introduced me to the biblical story of home, this drama in three acts. In his book, Where Mortals Dwell, he argues that in doing the work of biblical theology, we might think beyond the typical movements of creation, fall, and redemption. We could substitute these words and transpose the entire story as a story of place. We could talk of creation as implacement; of the fall as displacement, of redemption as reimplacement.

But if I were to challenge Bartholomew, I think place is a rather abstract category. It lacks the affective dimensions of home. So taking his cues, I’ve preferred to look at the biblical story as a story of home: of home as gift; of home as loss; of home as return. That’s a pattern we see in our most ancient literature (The Odyssey) and our most contemporary novels (Marilynne Robinson).

The opening chapters of Genesis teach us that home was humanity’s first gift. And this of course makes God the first homemaker. I might even say it like this: in Genesis 1, God acts a lot like an expectant mother. He’s nesting. Preparing for the arrival of his children. And let me tell you why I read it this way:

If we were to look closely back at Genesis 1, when God gives form and shape to the world, we notice that there is one day of six where God does not call his work good.

On day one, the light is good.

On day three, the dry land is good.

On day four, the sun, moon and stars are all good.

On day five, the birds and the fish: they’re good, too.

On day six, Adam and Eve are very good.

But what about day two? What about the sky? Why isn’t it good in the same way as the light or the dry land or the animals?

John Sailhamer, an Old Testament scholar, insists that when God calls his work good, he doesn’t mean “good” in the most generic sense of that word. He doesn’t simply mean beautiful and ordered. He means, habitable. Good means homelike. Sailhamer argues this, that what’s happening between days 1 and 6 is that the world is being readied for God’s children. Creation is a home. God is a homemaker. The world is good insofar as it can be inhabited. The Genesis accounts of creation record the flurry of domestic activity God takes up for the sake of love and welcome. What matters is that the air is breathable and the soil tillable and the plants a sustaining source of life for the human beings made in God’s image. Here is a place where all our deepest longings our met: we have a place to which we belong; we have human community on which we can depend; we have meaningful work, and we walk humbly with our God.

Home was God’s first gift to humanity. And guess what: it wasn’t just a home. It was a temple. John Walton, the author of The Lost World of Genesis 1, tells us that what is significant about God’s rest in Genesis 2:2 is that ancient deities only took their rest when they were seated in their temples. God’s rest indicates that his creation, while humanity’s home, is also his temple. The dwelling of God is with the dwelling of humanity. God is rightfully worshipped. Humans are rightfully submissive. The Trinitarian God has opened the circle of his own self-giving love and welcomed us in.

Notice how different this story is from ancient creation myths like the Enuma Elish (e-NOO-ma e-LEESH), where humans work for the gods so that the gods can rest. Our story of home is rooted in divine love, in divine work for the people God has made. Scholars David and Margaret Leeming put it like this, that “God creates a paradise specifically for man, has a relationship with him, and treats him as a kind of god.”

Why do we long for home? Why is it such a universal experience—across time and culture, across language and ethnicity? Why are our best movies, our best novels about home? It’s because we used to have a home, a place where all our deepest longings were satisfied. Our longings for rootedness. Our longings for connection. Our longings for cultivation. And most importantly, our longings for a relationship with God, our Creator.

All these longings were satisfied in the garden. But then what happened? A tornado struck, and the house landed far away from Kansas. And the garden is encoded in our memory as the shalom we know we’ve lost. In C.S. Lewis’s language, the garden is the straight line by which we know the crookedness of home today. Our places suffer. Our relationships fracture. Our work is toilsome and alienating. We are estranged from our own bodies and we are far from God.

Adam and Eve are given every tree in the garden to enjoy; only one is forbidden. But this is the tree from which they eat and the sentence for their crime is exile. It’s really no mistake that so much of the Genesis narrative reads like a travelogue, that even Abraham, great man of faith, admits that God has made him a wanderer. He will have the promise of God only when he leaves his country, his kindred, his father’s house and travels to the land that God will show him.

The patriarchs and the matriarchs are a displaced people, just like us. Israel is a displaced people, just like us. Don’t ask me where home is. I have no idea where to call home. I was born in Elkhart, Indiana, but when I graduated from high school, I had lived in four states, six cities. After living 11 years in Toronto, I now have too citizenships. Where is home? I have no idea beyond the address I put on my tax forms. I have even less of an idea because my father died when I was 18, my brother committed suicide when I was 23, and a year and a half ago, I left the home we made in Toronto and moved back to the States to care for my mother who is declining with Alzheimer’s. This is the mother who no longer remembers the name of my father and my brother.

Where is home? Where is that place in the world I can return where I’m remembered and recognized, received and welcomed in? You can see how loss, how suffering, has shaped my answer to that question. You can see why I’ve got to find another story by which to narrate my deepest longings. Because as Lewis would say, I have only one of three options: the fool’s way, which is to keep believing that this world, with all of its displacement and death, can deliver on my hopes; the disillusioned but sensible way, which is to give up believing all together, to call this hope for home a fool’s good; or the Christian way, which affirms that we are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. I could believe that the story of home, its gift, its loss and the promise of our return, that it comes true with the advent of Jesus Christ.

And even if your story isn’t one like mine, even if you’ve lived in the same house all your life, even if you’ve never attended a single funeral, home doesn’t stay put in this world. This is part of the cursedness of this line we call earthly, temporal, home. It’s fragile, ephemeral. By the end of the book of Genesis, we know that God’s promise of home is not yet realized in Abraham’s family. Abraham died with only a field and cave to his name. Jacob was buried in Egypt. Joseph was buried in Egypt. This is the final sentence of the book, as it to put it in bold type: “So Joseph died, being 110 years old. They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.” Home as loss. Home as displacement. Home as homelessness. Home as perpetual longing.

Where’s this story headed? This is a troubling ending—though of course it’s only a temporary one. Exodus, the very next book of the Bible, recounts God’s deliverance of Abraham’s family, now a small nation, from Egyptian slavery. At the end of the book of Exodus, the cloud of God’s glory covers the tabernacle, and we are meant to understand that this is a recapitulation of the creation story, that the dwelling of God is with men and women again. But of course this only lasts so long. Because God’s people doubt God’s promise to give them the land of Canaan—and the bulk of the Pentateuch records the 40 wandering, wilderness years of God’s people. In fact, the end of the Old Testament is situated in exile.

What you may not have ever understood about the Bible is how Christians rearranged the books of the Jewish Bible, which we call the Old Testament. In the Jewish Bible, 2 Chronicles is the final book. It ends with the hopeful decree of King Cyrus of Persia, who declares that God has charged him with the building of a House for God in Jerusalem. Any Jewish person wanting to take part in that project is welcome to join. It’s a theme of return, a recapitulation of the creation vision. God’s Temple will be reestablished. God’s people will be welcomed home. And this is of course a Jewish story, one that would exclude most of us here.

Christians decided to reorder the Jewish Scriptures, to let them point in their hopes to the story of Jesus, not with 2 Chronicles and the demise of the monarchy and the decree of King Cyrus. Rather, they allowed Malachi the final word—and the promise of a new Elijah who would turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers.” The imagery was of a “sun of righteousness” that “rises with healing in its wings.”

And this is the transition sentence to the four gospels of Jesus Christ. It is far more effective than the transition sentence I wrote for that devotional years ago, the one with the typo. It opens into the four stories that bear witness to the third act in this drama: home as return. Home made possible again because the glory of God descends into the Temple that is the Body of Jesus Christ, who comes with grace and truth. He fulfills the pronouncements of the prophets: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news . . .the year of the Lord’s favor.” As Jesus moves the Gospels and moves towards the cross, he is the sun of righteousness that rises with healing in his wings. He’s healing home on every front: healing bodies, healing relationships, healing the human heart from its own preference for self-rule.

On the night he is betrayed, he enjoys utter calm. He is headed toward the greatest suffering, death by crucifixion for the sins of the world, and his willing obedience is possible because of the story he inhabits, the story he knows. “Now before the Feast of the Passover,” John tells us, “when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” Jesus tells his disciples that for a moment, it will seem that the story has been lost, every hope of home abandoned. Comfort, comfort, my people. “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” A home never to be lost. A desire never to be disappointed.

This is the story—Jesus Christ, dead and buried and returning— that has given Christians comfort and hope, meaning and purpose in every century and every season of trial and tribulation. It’s the story that made for the endurance of the persecuted Christians addressed in the book of Hebrews: “You joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.” A home never to be lost. A desire never to be disappointed.

Do you want to cultivate fortitude in your faith?

Tell the right story—and it will tell you.