There’s No Place Like Home, by Rev. Dr. Jay Marshall Groat, August 25, 2024, at Mount Vernon, Ohio, based on Psalm 84:1-4

There’s no place like home. I think most people when they hear that probably think of Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” Click your heels three times, I think, and say, “There’s no place like home.” I love the song; I love the concept of even a sparrow has a home. When you get to preach sermons, you get to think about these things all week, and I’ve been thinking about home and the various ways to look at that. Of course, there are very smart people, scholars who devote themselves to studying things like this. Let me read this one paragraph, in the area known as environmental psychology. Environmental psychologists study and write about the concept of home.

Quote – “Environmental psychology: Research on person-environment relationships. Can include the study of spaces where people dwell. Environmental psychologists have documented the qualities to which homes expose people, like noise levels, toxins, emotional climates, crowding or its absence, and their impact on all aspects of experience, from personal, emotional, biological, cognitive, behavioral, to the social. People also known as organizational psychologists often use or adapt these methods and the literature to maximize an organization’s goals. Another branch of psychology, architectural psychology, focuses on the impact of design to amplify positive or minimize the negative impact. Applications range from single-person dwellings to community institutions from a treehouse to a hospital.”

Let’s spend a lot of time this morning talking about the active study of homes, shall we? I’m inviting us to wonder about this. And is it possible through gifts like the psalmist’s that we expand our understanding of home so that it transcends our world?

I want to read this to you. From scholarly to the – I don’t know how you classify Khalil Gibran, but I think he’s a prophet and a poet. From his book “The Prophet,” Gibran has a short chapter on what he calls houses. He’s calling us to transcend, to expand on our concept of what it means to be at home. It’s three pages, I’m not going to read three pages.

“Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow. Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments. But these things are not yet to be. And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors? Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power? Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind? Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain? Tell me, have you these in your houses? Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?”

And lastly this – “But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed. Your house shall not be an anchor but a mast.” Gibran is calling for us to transcend our understanding of what it means to be at home. And Bosho introduces the concept of seeing everyone in our lives as a journey, and the journey itself is our home.

Just to make things even more confusing, after 35-plus years of ministry, from very early on I’ve done my best, if anybody wants me I’m available. Ministers are on call, in theory, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we’re on call. And I’m not bragging, I’m just saying that’s what we sign up for, even when we go on vacation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on vacation and I’ve gotten a call. It’s usually about somebody who’s died. And I’m sorry they died and I’m happy to get the call, it’s just part of the deal. What I identified very early on in my ministry is my home, my stucco and brick façade home. I don’t go out and visit with my neighbors much because that’s what I do for a living. I find myself at home, and I find myself celebrating the solitude.

We’ve taken a quick look at the scholarly and academic understanding of the concept of home, and we’ve taken a look at a prophet and poet’s take on the transcendent nature and understanding of home. I would like you to go home at some point today and take a look at your house. Take a look at your stuff; be aware of it. And I will also tell you that so far in my life I have been homeless, for one day. I know a little bit of what it’s like to be homeless and to even be rejected for one day. Here’s how it happened.

It was 1983, that’s how long ago it was. Vicki and I were married for a year, and our best friends were Bruce and Peg. Bruce was an outdoorsman. I was not. Bruce talked me into going hiking with our backpacks in the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania for a week. We had 60 pounds on our backs, and we had Bruce and Peg’s dog, a black Labrador named Ollie. The three of us arrived, Vicki and Peg drove us over to the beginning of the trail in the national forest. Remember now, this is 1983, no cell phones, and we left our wallets in our cars with our wives because we weren’t going to need any money, we were going to be in the woods for a week. So we had no money, no credit cards, no means of communication, and we set out.

Now remember, this is about home. We were on the trail about an hour, maybe it was two hours, and we were walking and it started to rain, not a thunderstorm, just a steady rain. And it kept raining, and it kept raining. And it came time for us to put up our one tent, a small tent that held Jay, Bruce and Ollie. You’d have to pay me a lot of money to do this today, I mean a lot of money. So we set up our tent, we managed to have our dinner, I don’t think I slept much. That was day one. It rained all night. We got up the next day, and it rained all day. Not a storm. It rained all day. And we set up camp that night, same thing. Day three came, it was still raining. He and I were both mission staff at Mount Union University, so we had given up seven days of our vacation for this, and now we’re in the middle of day three. And I remember thinking to myself, “Where do I want to go?” I want to go home. I’m not enjoying this, but I was feeling peer pressure, you know? Finally, Bruce, the great outdoorsman, said, “You know what? Let’s bail.” I said hallelujah.

It was still raining. Bruce was the brains behind the project, so he got out a topography map and figured out where the closest Pennsylvania state route was. It was a good couple-hour walk. We made a plan, and our plan was to find this highway and hitchhike to the closest town and call our wives and say come and save us, find a phone somewhere. Finally, we found the highway, it’s still raining, we smell bad. I forgot to mention that Ollie – you know, they had dog backpacks. Ollie carried her own food on her back. So, we’re hitchhiking, it’s raining, Bruce is six foot four, I’m not, and there’s Ollie. We’re out there hitchhiking, these two soaked, stinky backpackers and a dog. Are you going to pick us up?

We’re hitchhiking, no one picks us up. I remember all of it. Here’s the part about homelessness, just for a day. We were walking along, we were out in farmland, and I looked over and saw people at a farmhouse, two or three of them sitting on their front porch. So, I said to Bruce, “You wait here, I’ll leave my pack here, and I’m going to walk up to that house and I’m just going to explain our situation. I’m just going to say, ‘Can I use your phone? I’ll call collect.’” Remember calling collect? I started walking onto this long driveway and the people on the front porch saw me coming, and they went in the house. (Knocks on lectern). I wasn’t angry, but I had this urge to shout something to them. I didn’t, but I had this urge to shout something like this, “You don’t know me, but I’m a really nice guy. I’m safe.” I really fantasized about saying this. Nobody came to the door.

So, we proceeded to hitchhike again, and finally this really scary looking guy in an old, beat-up van – we think it was his work van, we weren’t sure – he stopped. Bruce got in, Ollie got in, and I remember saying to myself, “I can’t believe I’m getting into this van.” That’s how desperate we were. He drives us to the closest town, Kane, Pennsylvania. Anybody ever been to Kane, Pennsylvania? I looked it up yesterday, population about 3,000, that’s about right. They had three little motels in their small downtown. We went to motel No. 1.

Now remember, let’s go home today and look at our homes, and then let’s look at the rest of the world, and think and dream about, with Gibran, about transcending our sense of where we are at home in this world. We went to the first motel. We told the proprietor our story, that we don’t have any money, that we’re going to spend one night, and call our wives and they’ll come get us tomorrow. And he said no. We went to the second motel, told that person the same story, can we spend the night? No. Why does this happen? It almost always happens in threes. Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days; Jesus was in the tomb for three days. We went to the third motel, we told them the story – we don’t have any money, we’ve got a dog. Can we spend the night? Our wives will come pick us up tomorrow and we’ll pay you, and he said yes. How’s that work? Some people are no people, some people are yes.

We got in the room and I said to Bruce, “You better shower first, because when I get in that shower I may never come out.” I don’t know how long I was in there but it was a long time. The next day Vicki and Peg came and picked us up. We paid the proprietor, and where did we go? We went home. Even a sparrow has a home. And there’s no place like home. And I thank the psalmist, and I thank Gibran, and I thank the living spirit of Christ calling us to transcend what it means to be at home. We are at home in the journey. Amen?