There was a time when the Church used to preach and sing about Heaven. A quick perusal of any good hymnal will yield a whole category of songs about heaven and glory. I remember singing "When We All Get to Heaven" in Church. It just seems that people used to be more aware of the brevity and frailty of life on earth. People seem to live today without giving a thought to the day of death, not to mention what comes after. The Church once had the perspective of life described in John Bunyan’s classic "The Pilgrim's Progress" – that we are just passing through this world on our way to the Celestial City.
Something has radically changed in the Church. The focus is now on THIS life and everything associated with being successful here and now. People want to know who to marry, what career to enter, how to save and invest for retirement, and raising a family. If all this can be accomplished while still having a little Christianity that is ok. But to most people in this generation Heaven seems like an irrelevant subject. The point is to make it in the world now and worry about Heaven later. Many would even say that "you don't want to be so heavenly-minded that you are of no earthly good." And, "why are we thinking so much about heaven when there is so much work to do here in this world?" So if you think too much about heaven you are made to feel guilty for being irrelevant and overly spiritual.
In neglecting Heaven in its preaching and worship, the Church has not only ignored the Scriptures and the Gospel, it has also passed over one of the deepest and most profound aspect of the human condition: the longing for home.
Both of the passages we are considering include descriptions of exile, captivity, and homelessness, as well as promises from God about coming home, and having a city and a country of our own. God's promises about Heaven are not just pie in the sky, but address the deepest longings of the human heart.
The passage from Jeremiah includes promises about Israel's return from Babylonian captivity and restoration to the Promised Land. But as you read the context you begin to understand that God is not just addressing Israel alone but is speaking from a much larger context.
The Babylonian Exile must be seen in the larger context of the Bible as a kind of picture of the human condition. This condition is something that even thoughtful pagan people have observed and identified as alienation. This alienation is a sense that the world in which we live is not our true home and cannot really support the deepest desires of our hearts. There are things that our hearts need that this world, at least in its present state, cannot support or provide for us. Let's say you were able to get on a spaceship and go to Mars. Your ship lands and you step out into the Martian atmosphere. And your lungs immediately begin to experience alienation. That is because your lungs were made to breathe in Earth's atmosphere. But Mars has only a fraction of the oxygen in its atmosphere that the Earth has. And you would also experience another kind of alienation: loneliness. There's nobody home! But you were made to live in community with other humans.
But the Earth is our home and there is oxygen to breathe and people all around us, right? So where is the alienation?
You have to dig a little deeper, but the alienation is there. Since we started with an illustration from the natural world, let's stay with that theme. Is our earthly environment in the natural world really home to us? Annie Dillard is one of those thoughtful pagans I mentioned, though she at one time claimed to be a Roman Catholic. She was one of those East Coast intellectuals from the 1960s who thought she would learn about God by being close to Nature. There are still a lot of these misguided people today, people who are very close to being Pantheists and worshiping the creation rather than the Creator which is a very old and not a new sin.
At any rate, Annie Dillard observed nature and wrote her observations in a Pulitzer Prize winning book called "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." But what she observed about nature is somewhat disturbing. She writes that "the universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives."
What is she saying about the natural world? Is it our home? Not really. You could make the case that the natural world is trying to kill us! Anyone who really does try to live that close to nature finds out very quickly that it does not love us at all. Dillard was actually observing what the Bible teaches us. Solomon called it vanity. Paul called it the bondage of corruption. We could also call it alienation. Human beings are alienated from the environment or the natural world.
Let's hear from another thoughtful pagan: a philosopher named Albert Camus. He has a very famous quote that also has in it the simple wisdom of observation, something very much akin to Solomon's kind of wisdom in Ecclesiastes. "Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."
What is he saying about life? Isn't beauty one of the best things about life? Who doesn't love the beauty of a sunset over the Pacific, a newborn baby, a symphony by Bach, a sonnet by Shakespeare? But beauty is unbearable, says Camus, and he is right. He is right because we have a natural inclination to want to keep these beautiful things forever, and we can't keep them. Take for example what many people would say is the most beautiful thing in the world: love. Do we get to keep love? We don't. We can't keep love because at some point in every marriage, even a Christian marriage, one of you is going to have to look at the other one in a coffin. No matter what beautiful thing we find in this life, eventually we are going to lose to death. We desperately want to hang onto these beautiful things, we want them to last forever, but they don't. Even the best things of life slip through our fingers like sand through an hourglass. This alienation could drive us to despair.
But actually behind this desire to hold on to beautiful things forever, or to be in harmony with the natural world, is something that is good because it is something that comes from God. Many of the deepest desires of the human heart, if followed far enough, would lead us to God. Now that might sound heretical.
The word "desire" brings negative associations to our minds, like something sensual and sinful. The word "lust" is always associated with sinful desires. But in the Bible the word that we translate "lust" is neither good nor bad by itself it is just a strong desire for something. It is the thing desired that makes the desire good or bad. Augustine said that sin is where we take a completely legitimate desire and we try to fulfill it without God. This desire that we have for an eternal home is a God-ordained desire.
But it is a desire that most people try to fulfill without going to God. So people go through life feeling this alienation and yet trying to ignore it by doing all the things that people do: eating and drinking, marriage, family, career, etc. Every heart is searching for its home, but like the Prodigal Son, getting farther and farther from the Father's House. But still we yearn. We pine. As C.S. Lewis said, "We remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy." This desire is from God.
To really understand the alienation we feel, as well as this longing for home, we must go back to the source of this condition. We must go back to Eden. In the Garden Man was at home. He walked with God. But the result of sin was man being cast out. Sin always casts you out. Sin alienates us. For example, if you lie to someone there is an almost immediate alienation from that person. You now have to be on your guard so that you maintain the lie and don't give yourself away. You can't really be yourself, or be open and vulnerable. If you lie to your spouse, now that is the beginning of the end of your marriage, at least of a happy marriage.
The story of the human race began with being cast out. Man lost his original home. And we can't get back, no matter how hard we try. Remember how God blocked the way to the Tree of Life with a flaming sword. Any access to the Tree of Life will be costly. Anyone passing that way must go under the Sword. So from the very beginning the story of humanity is of exile and homelessness. And so Milton wrote "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe, with loss of Eden, till one greater Man restore us, and regain the blissful seat." So begins the story of Redemption in Scripture.
There was a movie made in the mid-80s called "Trip to Bountiful" that was originally a TV play from the 1950s. It has recently been opened on Broadway just last month. At any rate, the film, set in the 1940s, tells the story of an elderly woman, Carrie Watts, who wants to return home to the small town where she grew up. Old Mrs. Watts is determined and sets out to catch a train, only to find that trains do not go to Bountiful anymore. She eventually boards a bus to a town near her childhood home. On the journey, she befriends a girl traveling alone and reminisces about her younger years and grieves for her lost relatives. The local sheriff, moved by her yearning to visit her girlhood home, offers to drive her out to what remains of Bountiful. The village is deserted, and the few remaining houses are derelict. Mrs. Watts is moved to tears as she surveys her father's land and the remains of the family home.
It is a known fact that our memories of the past, of things like home and childhood, are often much more positive as memories than the actual events.
This is what we call nostalgia or the good ole days. A preacher once said that "the good ole days were just basically old." But there is a deeper reason for this syndrome. There is a reason why people still want to go to places like Bountiful. We are trying to get back home. It is the collective memory of Eden. The strange thing is that the memories, while they evoke a longing, should not be mistaken for this longing itself, which is deeper still. If mistaken for the longing itself your memories of times gone by will deceive you and end up breaking your heart.
The 90th Psalm says "Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations." Isaac Watts, the great hymn writer, echoes the 90th Psalm in his great hymn: "O God our help in ages past, our hope for years to come; our shelter from the stormy blast and our eternal home." Ultimately, God Himself is our home and our hearts will be ever restless until we find rest in Him.
So if we are trying to get home, to get back to Paradise, to even get back to God, how can we get back? The answer is back there in Jeremiah 31, though it might surprise you. We will get back to home through the tears of Rachael. Rachael's tears are mentioned three times in the Bible. This is mentioned originally in Genesis when Rachael had great pain in delivery and she had a son, but her soul departed. She named the boy Ben-Oni, or "son of my sorrow." Jacob changed it to Benjamin or "Son of my right hand." The tears of Rachael are mentioned in Jeremiah 31 and then Jeremiah is quoted by the Gospel writer Matthew at the birth of Jesus, when the innocents in Bethlehem are slain. What does all this mean? Through pain and death Rachael brought her son into the world.
Jeremiah is referring to the weeping of the women of Judah during the captivity in Babylon as they saw their children die. In a similar way, the women of Bethlehem wept when Herod killed their children. We live in a world where mothers and children are often separated because of death. How can this world be home with mothers losing their children and children losing their mothers?
Matthew says "thus were fulfilled the words of the prophet Jeremiah," but he is not talking just about those mothers in Bethlehem. Matthew is talking about Jesus. Jesus fulfilled the words of Jeremiah. Jesus is the ultimate Rachael. Years after his birth Jesus stood looking over the city of Jerusalem. And he said "How I have longed to gather you together as a mother hen will gather her chicks." There is Jesus, weeping like a mother over the alienation of the people. Jesus is Rachel, who through sorrow, pain, and eventually death, came to give us new birth. Here is Jesus, the son of sorrow on the cross, who was cast out on Golgotha so we could come home forever. He became the son of the right hand at the resurrection and has overcome sin, death, and alienation to reconcile us to God and bring us home to stay.
But let's not get too far ahead. We are not home just yet. What until then? The New Testament speaks to believers as if we have already been reconciled to God through Christ and faith in the Gospel.
Reconciliation is the opposite of alienation. Like the Prodigal Son we have brought home to the loving arms of the Father. This has already happened. In fact, Paul speaks as if the whole world, creation itself, has already been reconciled to God through the death of Christ. So why are we still in a world like this?
Why are we still in a world where we die and have to be separated from loved ones, for example? The Christian life is lived by faith in the tension between the NOW and the not yet. We must live in this tension and learn to accept it. We have been reconciled, but we are not home quite yet. We have been born again, but still live in a fallen world where death reigns. So we are not home yet. With this in mind there are some things we should not do, and there are some things we should do.
First, there are some things you should NOT do. You should not settle down here. Don't allow yourself to become anchored in your affections to this present world. Don't love the World or anything in the World. There is a very logical reason for this admonition in the New Testament: "the World and its desires pass away." The temporal nature of everything around us should teach us not to love those things simply because our hearts will be broken and our hopes dashed if we do. So don't settle down. But, on the other hand, don't check out. Don't settle down, that is one extreme, but don't check out either, which is the other extreme reaction. Some people reason that all is hopeless because we die and that is it! This is the despair and hopelessness you can even read in Ecclesiastes and is all around us in this society. "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." That is the hopelessness of hedonism. Yet even Solomon knew that God holds us accountable. Death is not the end. It is appointed unto man once to die and after that the judgment. It DOES matter what you do in this world because God will hold you accountable for what you did and what you didn't do.
There are things God expects us to do with our time in the world, like letting our lights so shine before men that they may see and glorify God, and doing the good works that God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
But there are some things we should do. First, we should begin to live as strangers and aliens. Another term is as pilgrims, or someone who is away from home on a journey. We must learn from the Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They lived as strangers, dwelling in tents, even though they were promised ownership of the land of Canaan. They lived by faith as they sojourned, leaving us an example. The Christian life is a life of faith, trusting God in a land that is not our home. We also dwell in the tents of these mortal coils, awaiting our permanent dwellings in heaven. God loves pilgrims. If you are not at home in this world, and if you are looking for a home elsewhere, you are the kind of person God loves to call His own! In fact, He has prepared a home for you. Jesus said, "I go to prepare a place for you." And in the Father's House there are many rooms. There is a place for you there, though there is not a place for you here.
We have to learn from what it means to actually live as strangers in the world. Practically speaking this means we must accept certain realities, such as the fact that not everything is going to go our way. If we learn to accept these realities and still live by faith then we have learned a great life-lesson.
But even if you are a stranger in a land that is not your home, you can visit your true home. And you should do so regularly. How can we visit our true home? Well, you are already seated with Christ in heavenly places. You visit through prayer and when you worship with the Body of Christ.
Unfortunately, we can only visit and we do have to go back out into the world. Monday mornings still come. We look forward to that day when we will not have to leave. Until that time our visits into heavenly places, when the things of this world grow strangely dim, are preparing us for that day when we will be there with the Lord for good. Psalm 17 says "when I awake I shall be satisfied with your likeness." The Revelation says, "They shall see His face." When we awake from the curse of death, and we see the face of God, we will be home. And yet, even now, as Paul said, we are all beholding, with faces unveiled, the glory of the Lord.
Everyone enjoys visiting a beautiful park. But what if everyone decided to just live in the park? Literal homelessness is still a big issue in our country, and it is sad to see people who actually live in a park because they have no place else to go. But if we all decided to just live in the parks, what would happen to the condition of those parks? They would become places of squalor because parks are nice places to visit but these places are not designed to support the needs of our whole lives. There are things we need to live that are just not available in a park! Consider this parable. There are needs and desires in your heart, very deeply buried there, that nothing in this world can touch. This world cannot support the deepest needs of our hearts, and we should not try to make it do so. The results will be devastating. But if there is nothing in this world that can satisfy you . . . rejoice! That means you have been made for another world, and God is not ashamed to be called your God, because he has prepared a city for you! So travel light!
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