A Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Today I’m going to preach from John. But I’m going to start outside the gospel text, and even outside the lectionary for this Sunday. I’m going to start in Exodus, chapter 3, with Moses, who encounters a burning bush. From the burning bush the Lord speaks to Moses, reveals the divine Name
(Yahweh), commissions Moses to be the liberator of his people.

Last week I had a conversation with our brother-in-Christ and fellow parishioner Charlie Bryan. Charlie had a distinguished career as a public historian, a life-long learner and student of history, and an educator. Charlie told me that history can be written as a series of pivotal moments, decisive moments, which turned the course of history. These historic pivots are true of countries and of individuals, of leaders and followers. There are pivotal moments and pivotal leaders.

(By the way, I’d say that Dr. Charles Bryan is such a pivotal leader, who as head of the Viriginia Historical Society helped to transform it from a society of antiquarians and a modest museum into a public-facing, civically engaged institution for preserving and educating people about Viriginia’s history, centered around the Viriginia Museum of History Culture on Arthur Ashe Boulevard, of which my wife and I are proud to be members.)

Exodus chapter 3 is a pivot point in the Bible, because it sets in motion the great narrative of the liberation of the Hebrews, God’s covenanting with the Israelites and giving them the law, their journey to the promised land, their divine mission to the world as a light to the nations of the earth, and so much more.

But I bring up the burning bush and Moses’ meeting God not only for how this story figures in the larger history narrated through the books of the Bible, but because that met a need for Moses the man, a very personal need, felt by every human being, across ages and cultures—a need for a home.

Let’s remember that Moses was homeless. Let’s recall that the Hebrews were an immigrant people, resident aliens in Egypt, laboring at the bottom of Egyptian society for those at the pinnacle of the pyramid, pharaoh and his court. Moses was raised as an Egyptian, but he never really was one of them, and he was not accepted by his kinsfolk the Hebrews (he looked too Egyptian to them).

When we meet Moses in Exodus chapter 3, he is a man without a country, man without a home. He encounters the burning bush in the wilderness and meets God!

In that personal pivotal moment Moses not only knows who God is, he knows who he is. Moses falls flat on his face, prostrated before the Lord, his sandals removed from his feet. He is on holy ground—he is home!

A feeling of being at home is the most basic of human needs. We all need a home; part of our life’s work is to find a home; it is one of life’s great purposes to make a home in this world for ourselves and for others (that larger sense of home we call community).

What is a home? It is not just a place or a building (a house or apartment). Home is a place in the heart. Home is where we feel belonging, we feel seen and accepted, we feel safe and secure.

Last summer my wife and I moved from our native New Jersey to answer God’s call to us to come to Viriginia. I had lived most of my 61 years in New Jersey, which I called home. We moved to Richmond in June, and then we took two weeks of vacation back in New Jersey at the fabulous Jersey Shore, as we have done for more than 25 years.

Something strange happened toward the end of those weeks of vacation: I felt homesick. I was homesick for Richmond … for our new house on the Northside, for the routines we were creating, for our new friends, for the James, for summer seersucker, for ham biscuits and pimiento cheese, for ministry in the Diocese of Viriginia, for all the adventures which lie ahead of us, new territory to explore and experience.

I was homesick for the place where God had called me and met me, where today I feel God’s presence and purpose for my life.

Now on to the Gospel According to John, the last of a long series of Sundays centered in chapter 6 of John, the bread of life discourse, that extended reflection on Jesus’ saying, “I am the Bread of Life … Whoever eats me will live because of me.”

Jesus has fed the multitude in the wilderness, recalling the miraculous story of Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness: the Hebrews were far from Egypt on a journey to a homeland, which the Lord had promised to them. When their food ran out, they looked back to Egypt, back to being resident aliens, back to servitude, back to the fleshpots of Egypt. But the Lord fed them, raining down manna, the heavenly bread, each morning. God fed Moses and the Israelites.

Jesus also feeds his neighbors in need, the large multitude who have followed into the wilderness. He multiplies loaves and fishes and feeds the 5,000. The miracle they experience when he takes and blesses bread moves them to ask: So, who is Jesus? Is he another Moses? No, Jesus is Lord, Jesus is the Holy One who gives everlasting life to all who believe.

If eating and drinking Jesus’ body and blood sounds too weird or confusing, too hard to believe—then Jesus offers his disciples another way to receive his grace, truth, and light.

Jesus says abide in me. Which we may translate as “Dwell with me. Make me your spiritual home.” Dwelling with the Word of God, sharing the sacrament of the Lord’s table, helping someone else to live and love like Jesus, serving our neighbors’ needs, working for justice and peace— these are ways we make our home with Jesus, ways of abiding in him, how we wait patiently and persevere steadfastly as his disciples.

How about you today? Do you have a spiritual home?

God can meet us anywhere (even in the seemingly godforsaken space of the wilderness God met Moses). For Christians their spiritual home is their church, the community of faith that nurtures our faith; a place where we may feel we belong, where we are seen and accepted; a place where we may make a contribution, where we may welcome others and help them to make this place their home, too.

When we are hungry, with a holy hunger for God, to grow in faith, the decision to turn to God and get involved in the life and ministry of the parish church proves to be pivotal, life-changing, transformational.

How about you? What today speaks to your heart? What have you heard or experienced or felt that says you have found a spiritual home here? Perhaps you are feeling a deep desire to help others to find a spiritual home so that they might growth in faith?

Jesus calls to us—speaks a living word to us today—that we might feel his presence and feel at home in him. When we are in Christ and with Christ we have found our spiritual home, the fulfillment of our heart’s desire.

I don’t know anything more I might share as wisdom except to point to Jesus. I’ll go back in the gospel passage to the disciples’ determination to stay close to Jesus, to stick with him through thick and thin, to follow him all the way, and even to the cross:

Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Thanks be to God! Amen.

The Rev. Gregory Bezilla