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Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C
18 May 2025

Acts 11:1-18
Psalm 148
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35

My mother-in-law was born in England and came to Canada shortly after having graduated as a nurse. When a few years ago I took her and my father-in-law for appointments to St Paul’s I would drop them at the Comox Street entrance which I then learned was the entrance she used when she worked at St Paul’s during her early years in Canada.
A few years before she had told me about the first time she had gone back to England. This was twenty years after she had first immigrated. She said that the England she visited wasn’t the England she had left. That observation stuck with me, perhaps because of my own experience of being an immigrant. A lot has happened in the last 33 years. A lot has happened in Germany, and a lot has happened in Canada. And I too have changed.
That may explain some of the nostalgia people feel for the old country. It is often a vision of something that never was, or not like that, or certainly for something that will never be again in the same way, for the world changes and we change.

The other thing I have observed is that people who immigrated after WW II often did not come because they wanted to, and if they landed in Winnipeg in the middle of winter they may have regretted having come. I spoke to at least one person for whom that was the case. But they came on a one-way ticket and could not return to the homeland they had left behind, not only because of a one-way ticket but also because borders had shifted and often their old home, if it was still standing, was now under Soviet rule.
So if you came because you had to, you will cultivate a different sort of memory of the old country and a different kind of nostalgia than if you chose to come. In the case of my former compatriots this may explain the love of oom-pah music and of lederhosen.

This expresses a certain homelessness, even when one has a home, a family, a new community, and in worldly terms has been successful.

There is another thing I have noticed, at least for me. While my command of the English language is certainly sufficient, while my family, my church, my work are all here, there is a piece of me that will always remain German, though I am not sure that it is an ethnic thing. It is that our early socialization is deeply formative and therefore will always remain part of our history and therefore part of us, regardless of whether we were born here or elsewhere. For you it might be the Prairies. At the same time, I have lived in Canada for 33 years and if I were to go live in Germany I would not only miss my church and my friends, but my memories of the last 33 years would have little overlap or convergence with the memories of any new German friends or neighbours I may have. It is a little like when Jackie and I were first married and one of my German fellow students detected that my German was accented from speaking English at home, even though German is my mother-tongue. He asked where I was from. When I named my home town, he said, “But where are you really from?”
The immigration debate south of the border has reminded me of the status of the children of the so-called guest workers who were brought to Germany during the post-war economic boom. Though born in Germany, they were not granted citizenship. But they knew the land of their citizenship only from summer visits with grandma and grandpa. It was not their home, and so, in a way, they were homeless.

What I have just described is not a literal homelessness but a kind of homelessness just the same because home is about belonging. The question of belonging is posed differently when one retires. For many years our identity was defined by our work, and now that we have retired, where do we belong, where do we gain a sense of accomplishment and recognition?
The same happens when the children move out, a spouse leaves us, or a spouse dies.
For many years my mother tried to coax me to move back to Germany. The bait she used was that Germany is beautiful and that I must miss it. She appealed to what I knew and appreciated, but I also know that there is beauty in any place on God’s good earth. I answered her that my wife and my children established my sense of home, and if they were in, say Thailand, then Thailand would be home to me.

Home is about belonging.¹ And belonging is certainly to a place, but even more than place, it is about belonging with others. John Swinton, who last week spoke at both Regent College and at the Vancouver School of Theology, has a wonderful definition of belonging. He says that in order to belong, one has to be missed.² He says this in the context of the conversation about mental illness and dementia but I believe it applies broadly. And Swinton says, that there is a big difference between inclusion and belonging.
You know, we all want to be inclusive, we all say that everyone is welcome. But do we miss people when they are not here, do we miss the gifts they bring because we actually recognize their presence as a gift, and do we miss them even when being with them may require more work than being with my bestie?

When my father was dying our eldest was six. When I had gone to see him for the third time in eight months and called home, our eldest said to me, “You know, you know, the most important thing is to be with God.” Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth century bishop, said that “we consider becoming God’s friend the only thing worthy of honour and desire. This, as I have said, is the perfection of life.”³

The story of the eating of the forbidden fruit in Genesis three and the following expulsion from the garden is a story that tells us why our hearts are restless until they rest in God. We were made for God and in this sense God is our home. And having had to leave the garden we long to return as we long for union with God.

But there is another way of understanding home. It requires a shift in perspective. This time home is not our home but we become home to God. We read in John’s Gospel that God came and lived among us (John 14), and in our reading from Revelation we learned not only that death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, because God is making all things new. (21:5) Though note, that the text does not say that God will make new things, this world is not disposable despite of what the tech billionaires think. The text says that God will make all things new.
Yet the thing that is of importance to us today is this: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God.” We are God’s home. Humanity is God’s home. God misses us at least as much as we miss God.
And to all who feel homeless because they live between two cultures, who fear no one misses them, have lost people or communities of belonging, this is good news for not only do they belong to God but God belongs to them. God wants to make God’s home with them. God wants to make God’s home with us. In the words of Gregory of Nyssa, such gift of being the home of God is the perfection of life.

Amen.