THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

The Homecoming

December 22, 1996

John M. Buchanan

I cannot claim that I have found the home I long for every day of
my life, not by a long shot, but I believe that in my heart I have
found, and have maybe always known, the way that leads to it. I
believe the home we long for and belong to is finally where Christ
is. I believe that home is Christ’s kingdom, which exists both
within us and among us as we wind our prodigal ways through the
world in search of it.

Frederick Buechner
The Longing for Home

OURT
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CHURCH

A LIGHT IN THE CITY
126 East Chestnut Street Chicago, II 60611-2094
Phone: (312) 787-4570
John M. Buchanan, Pastor

THE HOMECOMING
December 22, 1996
Fourth Presbyterian Church
John M. Buchanan, Pastor
Scripture
“All went to their own towns...”
Luke 2:3

One of my fondest Christmas memories is of this day, or close to it, 1959. It was the day after the
last final test of my first quarter at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and Sue and
I, with a new 6-week-old baby, packed up our aging Ford with the gifts we had purchased at
Carson Pirie Scott, feeling more urbane and sophisticated than we ever had before, or have since,
for that matter, and headed for home. My memory includes driving in the pre-dawn darkness up
over the Skyway, east to Pennsylvania, seeing stars and singing “We Three Kings of Orient Are —
Star of Wonder, Star of Light, Westward Leading.” I changed it to “Eastward Leading” and
thought I was very clever. We drove all day — and what a homecoming it was!

Until this year, 37 years later, I have not come home for Christmas. Because I am a minister and
have my hands full at Christmas, parents, children, grandchildren have come to where I was living.
But this year, we have been traveling, representing the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and on
December 19, after visiting the Presbyterian Churches in Honolulu, and preaching at the Marine
Base at Keneohe and spending time with our Presbyterian army, navy and marine chaplains, we
went to the airport and headed, eagerly and gratefully, home for Christmas.

On Tuesday, we were on our way to lunch with Presbyterian leaders in Honolulu. On the -
expressway, our driver, Peter Tschou, pointed out the Punchbowl, an ancient volcanic crater that
had been a burial place and was now the United States Military Cemetery, the Arlington of the
Pacific. “Would you like to see it?” he asked.

I said we would like to see it and we drove up the hill and onto the well-kept grounds, looked at
the memorial statue and the neat, orderly graves of U.S. veterans of World War II, Korea, Viet
Nam and other conflicts. Ernie Pyle’s grave is there as well as the Hawaiian member of the
Challenger crew. ~

As we were driving out of the grounds, past the little office where the records were kept, I asked
Peter if he minded if we stopped just for a minute. I had an uncle who was killed in WWIL, a
Marine, on Saipan. I didn’t know where he was buried. I always assumed it was where he died,
on that tiny South Pacific island. I entered the little office, found the book with the computer
printouts of Ls, Ms, and Ns, quickly flipped to McC — McCormick. There it was. John C.
McCormick, Pennsylvania, USMC, WWII, Section C, Grave 0061.

I was stunned. He was my mother’s brother, the youngest of a big family of seven children — all
of whom are gone now and only two of whom had children. There are no more McConrmicks.
He was the baby of the family, everybody’s favorite. Jack, they called him, John Calvin
McCormick, named by my grandparents for John Calvin, the founder of their Presbyterian faith.

When I was born, my parents named me for him — John McCormick. He enlisted after Pearl
Harbor. The last time we saw him was Christmas, on furlough before he shipped out to the
Pacific.

I can remember him. I was in kindergarten at the time. And I can remember him and my mother,
his older sister, walking through the snow to pick me up at Mrs. Jones’ school. He was in his
olive drab uniform.

He died on June 22, 1944.
I found his grave, located on the first row, beside the main roadway.

John C. McCormick, USMC
Pennsylvania

August 4, 1920 - June 22, 1944
Saipan

I am the only one to have seen his grave. Neither of his parents, none of his brothers and sisters
ever traveled to Hawaii. But I found him. One week before Christmas, 1996 and ina strange
way, it was for me, a homecoming.

Are you going home for Christmas this year? Or have you come home? Highways and airports
are crowded with travelers. More people travel during the last ten days of December than at any
other time and most of them are going home. Preachers learn over the years, that the Sunday
nearest to Christmas, while often good in terms of attendance, is an unusual Sunday. Many of the
regular attendees are absent — gone home. In their places are others, from other places, people
who have come home.

Garrison Keilor did a monologue about it one time and included it in his book, Leaving Home.
He calls it Exiles and tells about how they all return to Lake Wobegone for Christmas . . .

Over at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, mass is full of exiles, lapsed
Catholics who are too busy or indolent for church but come for Christmas to hear
the music, see the candles, smell the incense and feel hopeful.

Dozens of exiles are back, including some whom their families weren’t expecting

because they said they weren’t coming, couldn’t come, were sorry, but it was just
out of the question. But Christmas exerts powerful forces. We turn a corner in a
crowded shopping mall and a few bars of a tune turn a switch on in our heads and
gates open and tons of water thunder through Hoover Dam, the big turbines spin,
electricity flows and we get in our car and go back, like salmon. [p. 181-182]

What is it about Christmas that turns us — physically, and if not physically, certainly emotionally
and spiritually, toward home? “I’ll be home for Christmas,” the sentimental seasonal favorite puts
it, “if only in my dreams,” “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to

know,” Bing Crosby crooned for homesick GI’s during WWII and Nat King Cole , and now
Natalie Cole, still transports us with “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” even if we don’t have a
fireplace and never in our lives personally roasted a chestnut. Is it merely sentiment?

I think not. I think there is something about Christmas and our going home that reveals an
important truth about us.

Wallace Stegner, distinguished American author, wrote a short story, Finding the Place: A
Migrant Childhood, in which he describes his life as the son of a father who was a gambler and a
drifter, footloose, never settling down in one place for long, and how in college he began to
experience of all things, “homesickness - exacerbated by the fact that there wasn’t much of a
home to be sick for.” [Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p. 18]

Frederick Buechner titled his new book, The Longing for Home. The word “Home,” Buechner
Says, “ summons up a place where you feel, or did feel once, uniquely at home, which is to say a
place where you feel you belong and which in some sense belongs to you..” [p. 7]

Episcopal priest, Barbara Brown Taylor, on the same topic, writes powerfully, “What a strong
hunger the human heart has for home, not just a building but a place to belong, a place to be from
and a place to go to. A safe place where one is known and a safe place from which to know the
world: a nest, a family, a stable fortress in a vast and often frightening universe.” [The Preaching
Life, p. 156]

We know the power of that, do we not? Even without the benefit of psychology and sociology,
we know how important it is to have a place to belong, a place where you are welcome and safe,
a place where the lights are on waiting for you, a place where people know your name. In Brazil,
where the gap between the rich and the poor is enormous, and where in many places there are
simply no social services, parents sometimes simply abandon their children and they become what
we have come to know as street children, living on the street, begging and stealing what they can,
sleeping in doorways, rummaging through garbage. In some communities in Brazil it has been
long rumored that street children are simply rounded up and eliminated, “disappeared,” they call
it.

For many, the only thing resembling home is a church-sponsored shelter — some overnight, mostly
simply a day shelter where there is a bow! of soup and a friendly face. In Fortaleza, a tropical
port city of more than a million, we visited a small Presbyterian Church on the edge of an
enormous slum. I was overwhelmed at the number of children on the street, playing in trash-
strewn lots, falling down buildings. It was the end of the day. As we left the little church
building, a mission worker and several volunteers were arriving to make soup and outside a huge
crowd assembled — the children, waiting for soup, each holding a bowl, cup, empty tin can.

Home doesn’t exist for the underclass our system has created right here — not far from the
Magnificent Mile. Home ~ non-existent for the children of America who will begin soon to
personally pay the price for the election victories won by politicians this fall promising welfare
reform.

If you are blessed this morning, you can recall and do recall that home where you were known
and safe and loved If you are blessed you had a home like that to remember and in your heart of
hearts, you long for it still and at Christmas you return to it, if not actually, then in memory or in
the customs of that home which you carefully, almost reverently observe: the special way you
decorate the tree, place the star, arrange the nativity.

It is a religious rite, after all. It is a longing for home and it is very deep within us. No less an
authority than Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “The human spirit is incapable of ridding itself of its sense
of homelessness. The essential homelessness of the human spirit is the ground of all religion.”
[Douglas John Hall, Professing the Faith, p. 207]

The Bible suggests that homesickness is not merely a sentimental phenomenon. It is our
condition. The story of Israel begins with a search for home ... “A wandering Aramean was my
father...” [Deut. 26:5] words recited annually by the Jewish people to remind them that wherever
they are they are not forgotten by God, that God is their true home. _

When they were in actual exile in the sixth century BCE, their poets and prophets wrote
beautifully about home and homesickness, “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Make
straight in the desert a highway” — you’re going home. [Isaiah 40:1]

New Testament the theme is continued. The writer of Hebrews, “These all died in faith, not
having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar. People who
speak thus are seeking a homeland.” [Heb. 11:13-14]

In his fine new book, The Good Book, Peter Gomes, preacher to the University at Harvard, lists
the five questions modern college students are asking. One of them is “Am I on my own?”
Gomes says, “Students in their private confessions of soul, while they are anxious and fearful and
full of the insecurities of youth, speak more often of loneliness than of anything else.”

What they are all writing and talking about — theologian, author, ancient prophet, modern
preacher, and what we all experience at this time of year, is what God had in mind. We are, ina
very real sense, lost until we find God, or are found by God: lost not in the sense of being
damned, but lost in the sense of not having that place where we are known and welcomed and at
home. What this season does to us is, I believe, exactly what God had in mind in the improbable
birth in Bethlehem, namely makes us homesick, turns us toward home, reminds us that until we
find our ultimate home we are, in a very real sense, lost, and separated and empty.

Taylor calls it “God’s tug at our hearts” -- the homing instinct God has created in us, and asks,
“Have you felt it? The sense that there is a place you belong that you have gotten separated from,
a place that misses you as much as you miss it and that is calling you to return only you do not
know where or how to get there. All you know is that you are not there yet, and that your life
will not be complete until your are.” [p. 158]

The way home is the road to Bethlehem. Your home — the place where you are known and
welcomed, the home where you are loved and ultimately safe from all harm ~ is where Jesus

Christ is. And among all the things that happen to us during these busy, frantic days, this we all
share. The road opens up suddenly and we start down it once again to Bethlehem, to welcome a
child, to stand in quiet awe before the holiness of love, to wonder .... A Homecoming.

Are you going this Christmas?
Dear God, we thank you for the homes to which we return in this season. We thank you

that in Bethlehem, in the presence of your love incarnate, we know ourselves to be home,
forever, safe, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.