Anonymous Asks (422)

“Where would you call ‘home’?”

Many of the Bible’s great men were strangers, living in places they didn’t truly belong.

Abraham is a fine example, among the earliest. God promised him the land in which he sojourned, but Abraham never possessed that territory during his own lifetime. He lived in tents among people he did not know and with whom he had little in common.

When his wife died, he described himself to the Hittites as a “sojourner and foreigner among you”. He had to solicit a place to bury his dear Sarah because he possessed no real estate of his own.

A Perceptive Personal Question

This week, an old friend touched base by email. “Where would you call ‘home’?” he inquired. It was a perceptive personal question from someone who knows me well, and I didn’t have to think hard in replying that I don’t feel like I really have a home on earth. I never have.

I don’t live in a tent like Abraham, but I do rent, as I have done most of my life since leaving my parents’ home. A brief flirtation with ownership in the nineties ended with a great heaving sigh of relief. It absolutely wasn’t for me. No mortgage or deed ever gave me assurance of possession or permanence. Paper title to a piece of property felt like a black hole of endless obligation, an undesirable duty to something newly erected that had nowhere to go but down. Nor, for that matter, did any of the six places I have rented in the last four decades feel like home, including one in which I spent twenty-five years. I was always very conscious that no matter how I dressed up these apartments with stuff and clutter, they really belonged to someone else. Even hanging a picture on a wall still feels to me like a laborious and pointless exercise because I know at some point in the not-too-distant future either I or someone else will be obliged to take it down. Moreover, I remain uncomfortably aware that even the people who own those properties will not own them forever. Regardless of the reason or the timeframe, someone else’s name will eventually be on title.

I’m not saying that’s either a normal or even a spiritual attitude. It’s just me, and I’m okay with it. My siblings all own their homes, though I’ve never thought to ask them how they feel about it. I probably should. It might be amusing to find them as unattached to their properties as I was to mine, which I suspect may be the case.

Sojourners and Exiles

The apostle Peter called the people to whom he wrote his first epistle “sojourners and exiles”. His audience was Jews and Israelites dispersed throughout the Gentile nations of the first century, much as Abraham lived among the Canaanites. These folks really were sojourners and exiles, not just people who felt like they didn’t fit in.

Yet there is a sense in which not just people of Hebrew extraction but all men and women of faith are strangers and exiles, even if they are not as perpetually aware of it as I am. Hebrews 11 chronicles the faith of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Jacob, after which the writer adds this comment:

“These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone 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 for them a city.”

Yes indeed. Not only is such disconnection a worthy sentiment, it’s a Christian sentiment, and one of which the Lord approves.

Can’t Feel At Home

Yesterday, I drove home from a week with family on an island in the north. To my surprise, blasting out of my car’s CD player came familiar words my mother used to sing to me as a child:

“This world is not my home. I’m only passing by.
My treasures and my hopes are all stored up on high.”

Then came this great chorus:

“O Lord, you know I have no friend like you.
If heaven’s not my home, O Lord what will I do?
The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.”

Appropriately, nobody knows who wrote the song. It has various titles depending on where you find it: “Can’t Feel At Home”, “This World Is Not My Home” or “I Can’t Feel At Home Any More”. Even the lyrics bob and weave chimerically from recording to recording. “Angels” becomes “loved ones”, “passing through” replaces “passing by” and “Beulah land” morphs into “glory land”. You get the sense that thousands of people have sung it over the last century, and most of them vocalized it a bit differently because the version they sang was uniquely theirs.

An Open Door

The five verses and memorable chorus appeared for the first time anonymously in a 1919 hymnal, their only attribution the words “Selected by evangelist Bertha Davis”. The copyright was never renewed. The version I was enjoying in the car was a recently rediscovered studio outtake from one of my favorite bands back in the eighties, and it sounds more like a drunken reel than a hymn, accompanied by bass, drums, fiddle, sax and electric piano sawing, blowing and pounding away ecstatically.

That clamorous interpretation seems somehow more appropriate than the dirge-like delivery I’ve heard in churches or the countrified harmonic twang of the Carter Family. A Christian sense of belonging elsewhere, somewhere we have never been, is a sentiment to celebrate, not to mourn. We are not acknowledging a loss but anticipating great gain. At its best, our disconnection from the affairs and trappings of this world is a manifestation of our natural desire for something more real, more permanent, and more properly our own. As Hebrews says, “They desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” That’s it exactly.

If we do not have a home here, we will surely have one arriving shortly. Our Lord Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us, and we await his return to usher us into the only home that matters.