Sermon for Sunday - April 20, 2014: Going Home

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”  -- William Faulkner

“Home is the nicest word there is.”  -- Laura Ingalls Wilder

What makes a home?  When I grew up it was "My Three Sons,"  "Leave it to Beaver," "Father Knows Best," and "Lassie."  It was small town America where you grew up, worked, and retired.  A place where you knew everybody your entire life and you married the girl next door.  But, that was television, and this is reality.

Home is where your heart is.  Home is where you hang your hat.  You know who believes that?  People on the move, is who.  People going places, people who have forgotten what a home is, and people like me who never really forgot, but just didn't know how to get back.  It has taken me my entire life to find out how.

I was born in 1953 at Keesler Air Force Base Hospital, Biloxi, Mississippi.  I'm a native son of the South, or I was, for about a year.  Compton, Buena Park, Long Beach, Pacific Grove, Salinas, Victorville, and Sacramento wraps up my California history.  After a couple of tours overseas, I came to Washington State; Spokane and Olympia.  A couple of years in Mexico for some well-deserved attitude adjustment, then back to Olympia.  Is it any wonder I didn't want to drag my family all over the world.  I made a decision for my kids that they should have some stability, right or wrong it turns out they really didn't.  The marriage failed and my family was torn apart.

The Vietnam era draft put a voluntary end to my piece of the "Great American Dream."  I put several more nails in the coffin but, I would not trade a day of it.  I love my country.

What makes a home?  I think its roots, a place in the sun, and lifelong neighbors and friends.  A house you bought for $20,000 that in now worth $350,000.  It's a house with a white picket fence that you've painted every few years for the past fifty years.  The wood in it can't rot because it's hermetically sealed in paint!

What makes a home is something that has eluded me.  I have kids, grand kids, a failed marriage and the way to beat "you can never go home."  June of this year I am going home.  Granted its a few miles west of Keesler, but it's closer to the beach.  And, I will be there with my parents.  I will have come full circle.  This time I will have the honor of assisting them as they grow older, as they did for me when I was young.  I have never understood the term, "giddy with anticipation."  What I know of the south I have learned from my visits.  What I am beginning to realize is that this is where I have always belonged.  I am an example of my favorite saying, "American by birth, Southern by the grace of God."  I understand it now.

“Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away.  Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul - but so have we.  You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them - but it has been this way with all men.  You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth.  And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us - we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”  -- Thomas Wolfe, "You Can't Go Home Again" 

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"There is a popular slogan in the South today: AMERICAN BY BIRTH, SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF GOD. You'll see it on bumper stickers, car tags, T-shirts, baseball caps, and just about anything that lends itself to printing. It tells something about us- how we feel, how we think, how we perceive ourselves. Southerners, who enjoy a reputation for being the most patriotic people in America, consider their southern status as something special, something above and beyond the good fortune of being American. It's the icing on the cake. 

Yes, there is something about the South. Oh, yes, just say it: "The South". The words hang heavy with dewdrops, honeysuckle, and magnolia blossoms. Steamboat 'round the bend. Fields of snowy white cotton. Southern belles. Smiling faces. Laughter on the levee. It's a storied land of romance and chivalry, fabled in legend and song and unlike anything known upon this continent. When you speak of the north, the east, and the west, you are speaking of a direction; but, when you speak of the South, you are speaking of a country, a time, a place. The Old South. Margaret Mitchell told us it was "gone with the wind" and to "look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered". But we refused to let go of it, and today it lives not only in books, but in our souls as well." -- Michael Andrew Grissom