“You shall hallow the fiftieth year, and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your family.” (Leviticus 25: 10)
The vestry of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Eagle Rock where I was Rector would gather for a weekend retreat shortly after their election at the parish’s Annual Meeting. We used the occasion to share our faith stories so we could see each other through that prism during the year. It was a perspective shift that helped us communicate better especially when confronted with difficult issues as a vestry.
What always caught my attention, particularly when people spoke about their coming to St. Barnabas’ or their decision to stay, was how many cited the sense of “coming home” in that process. It could have been the company of the people, or their sense of being enveloped by the liturgy or worship. But “coming home” was a common experience.
The late Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold offered “an Invitation to Jubilee” in a small book entitled “Going Home”. For him the invitation to return home was about our discovery or rediscovery of our place at the center of God’s love. He cited Jesus’ experience at his baptism where the voice from heaven declared that “This is my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”. Bishop Griswold calls us all back home to know the delight of that assurance. “Does God delight in you? Have you ever dared to ask the question? Do you let God delight in you?”, he asks.
He points out that doing God’s will is not so much a matter of “do this or do that”. Rather it is “a matter of divine affection and delight”. He likens it to parents of grown children and asks what our will for them is. It is not that “they perfectly obey your every thought and command. Your will for them is your desire for their flourishing, their happiness. And you agonize when they seem to be going in a wrong direction and you rejoice with them when things go well. This is your will for your children: their deepest well-being. And this is God’s fundamental will for us.” (Griswold, Going Home, p 15-16)
In her treatment of the same concept of returning home, Maria Harris in “Proclaim Jubilee” reflects on the images of those in political exile or prison coming home like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, or the children of Israel returning from exile in Babylon in the Old Testament. Above all, she adds, home is a place that offers a rhythm of ritual – mostly provided by the female presence in the family and community. “A woman or man engaging regularly in the rhythmic patterns of homemaking finds that she or he shapes the rhythms of those actions and is, in turn, shaped by them, an outcome common to most rituals”. (Harris, p 59). With Bishop Griswold, she also sees home-coming as a returning to oneself.
When we consider the communal aspect of “returning home”, the Jubilee of coming home to others, we may find some elements that prove extremely relevant to today. For, Harris says, that “first, it is a going home to our traditions, our ancestors, the people who have made us, us, even as it did for the first jubilarians….Traditions refuse to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about”, she writes, “Coming home to our tradition anchors us in history, for despite the adult ability to “see through” the flaws, mistakes, even the stupidity of our forebears, a tradition we can go home to is also an opportunity to “see through” in another sense. A tradition is a lens that enables us to perceive reality by drawing on the gifts our predecessors have entrusted to us” (Harris, p. 60)
It may seem to be a logical leap, but I remember times when I would take services in nursing homes. Often the residents would sit passively throughout the worship until we recite the Lord’s Prayer. Suddenly everyone joins in. This is an example of returning home that incorporates in one gesture the rhythm of ritual and the importance of tradition and the ability to return to oneself.
Harris further invites us to consider the coming home of sons to fathers, and daughters to mothers. She notes that growing up is marked by our leaving home to make our own homes. And Jubilee is about returning to it. “It offers us a chance to address unfinished family business and is not unrelated, I suspect, to the personal work that follows on the forty-ninth and fiftieth years of our own lives”. (Harris p. 61)
In the times we are living in today, what significance does the call to return home carry for you? What is involved in coming home for you? And would you be someone who joins those who find in Church and its community a jubilee of homecoming? Dare you embrace the reality that God delights in you, and come home to it?
— Bishop Alan
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