“Home, Sweet Home”
(All Saints’ Sunday)
Hebrews 11:1-2,8-10,13-16 (NLT)
By John Gill ~ November 3, 2024

A mother sent her daughter to camp for the first time. A few days later, she received the following postcard: “Dear Mommy, Having a wonderful time. I’m not homesick. The food is good. The camp is good. My counselor is good. Love, Annie. P.S. When you come to visit me – please take me home!”

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? - Homesick. And you don’t have to be a child away at camp to get homesick!

There is a certain quality about “home” that draws us like a magnet: Young people can’t wait to “fly the nest,” living on their own, or away at college, - yet they find their way home every chance they get (at least, so they can get mom to do their laundry!). Military men and women serving all around the world count the months and days – even the hours until they can go home. And whenever I visit in a nursing home, invariably, someone says to me, “I just want to go home!” Even when we are on vacation having the time of our lives, we STILL look forward to making that last turn into our driveway and being “home.” Yes, Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” spoke for all of us when she clicked her heals together and said, “There’s no place like home.”

What IS “home?” The dictionary has lots of definitions of the word “home,” but the best definition of home I think I have ever heard is that “Home is where you belong.”

Abraham was homesick. Sure, he was living in the land in which he was born and reared – a land he knew like the back of his hand. He was a successful and respected businessman. He was surrounded by the people he loved. But he was STILL “homesick.” Somehow, deep in his soul, he KNEW that he was not “at home” – he knew he didn’t fit in – that he didn’t really belong. God had placed within Abraham’s heart a restlessness, a longing for a place where he WOULD belong – a place to call “home.”

So he left everything he knew and followed God’s lead, searching for a homeland which God had promised to show him. And yet, even when he found it and pitched his tents in the Promised Land, he was STILL not “at home.” He was an alien, a foreigner, living in a strange new land that was already inhabited by others. Abraham had set out to find a place to call “home,” and STILL he was homeless – still his soul was restless – still he pined for a place to “belong” – still he was homesick.

Gypsy Smith once told about a wealthy English aristocrat who possessed fourteen houses, but had no “home.” That is exactly how Abraham felt. He had no place to call “home.”

You see, Abraham was looking for something more. The writer of Hebrews has it right: What Abraham desired was a spiritual home. Abraham came to see that the “country” he wanted so badly to find was not to be found on any map – but only in the heart. As the old saying goes: “Home is where the heart is.”

Abraham’s true home was not of this world. He sought a heavenly home – a home with God. He knew that we are only passing through this life, awaiting that “final” homecoming!

Let me give you an illustration of this: A traveling businessman who has a layover in an airport between flights doesn’t go into the men’s room, look around, frown at the décor, and begin redecorating! Why not? Because he doesn’t live there. He has a home in another place. When he is away from home, he will get by with only what he absolutely needs, saving his money so that he has enough to invest in furnishing his permanent home.

Now, if we know that is true for travelers, then why do you and I work so hard at trying to make our lives in this world more comfortable, as if this were our “home?” This is just the “airport,” and we are in transit. We should spend our energy on enhancing our eternal home, and not worry so much about the bare walls in the “airport restroom” we call “this life.” On this All Saint’s Sunday, we need to remind ourselves where our “home” really is – the place where we truly belong.

Abraham didn’t live in a time when he would have known the writings we now call the Old and New Testament, but he had already discovered for himself that those who belong to God are to live IN this world, but are not to be OF this world. Abraham knew instinctively that God has prepared a place for us to call “home” - a “city” – a “New Jerusalem” with foundations laid by God himself; - a “mansion” which has Christ as its chief cornerstone; - a “heavenly country” where we belong; - a “home” where our hearts can be content.

What Abraham only suspected, you and I as Christians know and experience.

As John Wesley, the founder of Methodist, once wrote: "I want to know one thing, the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore. God Himself has condescended to teach the way; for this end He came from heaven…”

That “heavenly home” that Abraham saw from a distance is ours for the asking, - and the key to the door of that home is Jesus Christ. Thanks to Christ’s atoning death on the cross and his victory over death on Easter, you and I are able to go “home” again. Our “passport” to that heavenly homeland is written with the blood of Jesus, and stamped with the cross. Because of what He did, we as Christians are citizens, NOT of this world, but citizens of heaven itself – in transit – just waiting for our homeward journey.

In the meantime, you and I wait like refugees in a foreign land, longing to go home.

That is why we celebrate this morning as we remember the saints . . . Yes, I said “celebrate!” Because those loved ones we have named today, and those we name in our hearts, have gone “home” to the place THEY “belong” – to that “heavenly homeland,” basking in the presence of God, Himself.

So today, we should not be sad. We should be envious! . . . envious that they are no longer “homesick” in this world, but are home – REALLY “home” – with God.

But you and I are still homesick, aren’t we? It’s just as the great Methodist hymn-writer, Charles Wesley, John Wesley’s brother, put it in one of his less familiar hymns:

How happy every child of grace, Who knows his sins forgiven! "This earth," he cries, is not my place, I seek my place in heaven: A country far from mortal sight, Which yet by faith I see, The land of rest, the saints’ delight, The heaven prepared for me."

Like that little girl at camp, we might sit down and write a letter to OUR heavenly Parent, - a letter that might go something like this: “Dear Daddy, I’m having a wonderful time in this life. Your blessings are good. Family and friends are good. Life is good. Love, Your Child. P.S. Please come and take me home!”

That’s because … “There’s just no place – quite like HOME!”

© 2024 by John B. Gill, III