UrbanLife: You can't go home again

The first picture from the first day on my new job is this picture, taken at the end of the day at Lakewood's historic Dixie House where Troy and I had dinner with the Rev. and Mrs. Wally and Stell Chappell. Wally is pastor emeritus at First Church and a member with me in the Wesley Study Group. It is only fitting that this picture be today's blog photo as I remember the letter Wally sent to me last September offering his condolences on the death of my maternal grandmother, Mrs. Rachel Dawson Self.

In his letter, Wally included a quote from Thomas Wolfe's, You Can't Go Home Again, part of which speaks to what I felt today at First Church. The quote:
"Dear Fox, old friend, thus we have come to the end of the road that we were
to go together. My tale is finished--and so farewell....Something has spoken to
me in the night....saying: 'To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to
lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for
greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth....--a
wind is rising, and the rivers flow."

Everything in life is change, and we are all giving up something to take on something else. (Trade-offs, anyone?) Sometimes our transits are large, life-and-death transits and others are small, like new job transits. What we all want is for our transits, big and small, to be losing something incredible, only to gain something even more amazing. This is what we crave--deepening of internal spirit and broadening of external reality.

At First Church today, as I worshiped with my new colleagues, met my new church family, and just tried to find my way around the building, I realized that I had found a greater knowing, a greater life, a greater loving, and in my own little corner of the world, a new home. God's great gift to me this morning was in the sermon, given by Dr. John Fiedler. If he only used Greek words, that would have been enough. (A little spanokopita??)

But he did something else: he let God speak through him.

For those of you who listened to my Lent sermons in 2006, you remember how I fixated on the Palm Sunday scriptures and you got four weeks on Jesus' entry into Jerusalem and what that means. It was not until Lent 2007 that I figured out what that was all about, how it was my soul working out the tension that up until Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, you could be a by-stander, off to the side of the road, peaking over the tops of others' heads, and still follow Jesus. But once you get to Jerusalem, things change. You have to stick closer to Jesus, lest the crowd press in and separate you from him. Once you get to Jerusalem, you have to really want to absorb his message of complete life transformation, of giving before receiving, and of letting go of shoring up your own life at the expense of someone else. Once you get to Jerusalem, you have to decide: am I in control, or, am I ready to let God be in control? In Lent 2007, I felt like 31 years standing at the city gates trying to decide whether or not I want to follow him into the city was long enough. And I'm not sure exactly all it will mean, but in this year's Palm Procession, I followed him into the city. Surrender.

So get this, here is how God spoke through Dr. Fiedler. His sermon today was on Jesus' life and teaching in the city AFTER Jesus enters Jerusalem, leading up to the confrontation with the powers that be that ultimately brought him to his death and to his LIFE.

You can't go home again and I can't go home again. But you, and I, we can trust that for every leaving, there is a greater knowing, a greater life, a greater loving...and even as great as this beginning is, one day it too will be an ending and there will be something even greater, until that day when you, and I, until we find that land more kind than home.