by Tim Baker.
What if God is home?
Not just in the sense that God provides a big spiritual home for all wandering souls…but also in the sense that God is at home. That this planet, the community, this house, this family that I call home is also, somehow, God’s home. Of course, God is sort of at home in all places at all times, but the last few weeks I haven’t been able to shake the notion and constant reminder that God is specifically at home, with us, here.
This Christmas season I had the privilege of hosting a series of videos as part of the Methodist Church’s Hush the Noise campaign, as part of my role at Twelvebaskets. On the final video, Jasmine Devadson and Inderjit Bhogal were discussing that famous passage from the beginning of John’s gospel and Inderjit drew us to this one vital word: ‘dwell’. The word became flesh and dwelt, dwells, is dwelling amongst us.
This word has continued to sit with me throughout the Christmas season, tickling and scratching away at me like a pine needle trapped in a festive jumper. God dwelling here. What I’m left, after all the scratching and as we head into what’s left of winter, spring and beyond, is this simple thought: what if God is at home?
Too often in Christian thought we paint pictures of God who is far away, God who is detached, God looking down on the chewed up tennis ball we call earth from some high celestial vantage point. Too often we paint Jesus’ incarnation, life, and ministry as a brief 33-year blip or anomaly in human history – that one bit of time where God cared, where God showed up, where God ‘visited’. But what if God wasn’t visiting at all – the divine was coming home. All things came into being through this ‘word’ and now, at Christmas, the word comes back to their own. And goes on and on doing so, over the course of human history, in every home and every heart.
Prepare a space for the Christ, we say, each Advent, but let it not be as if we are expecting a royal visitor and we must wear our finery and talk with accents not our own. Rather, let it me a homecoming, a welcoming back, a recognition that this has been God’s world all along, and we are simply here to hold the space, to take care of the resources, and to hang up a welcome banner!
And let it not be confined to Christmas either. God is always home, and always homecoming – have you noticed?
There is a delicious word that comes from roots in the Welsh language – hiraeth, meaning homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, the nostalgia and yearning for the lost places of your past. Perhaps this is what climate grief is, for God as well as for us? The pain in the heart of God is a yearning for a world where the divine and the mortal can live together, dwell in community, be at home.
Theology Everywhere 
What a beautiful post, and what a great way to start the week pondering God at home with us and in us, waking us to the possibility that the longing and yearning we sometimes feel is simply us being in tune with the God whose longing if for us. Thank you Tim.
P.S – the pine needle in a festive jumper made me smile!
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An excellent piece, Tim. Thank you. Blessings, – Geoff.Charlton.
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Last Sunday, as part of the Covenant service in my local Methodist church, we were asked to recite the Nicene Creed. That I could not do. There is so much in it that is rooted in a 4th century understanding of a small three-tier cosmos. So much of the modern language of the church still suggests that Heaven is just above the sky. I was told by a minister a couple of weeks ago that the account of the ascension in Acts 1 was “historical fact”.
When do we get most families into churches? – Christmas and baptisms. “Away in a manger” is probably the carol known by most people. It includes: “I love you Lord Jesus. Look down from the sky.” Once in royal contains “For that Child so dear and gentle Is our Lord in heaven above,” In our baptismal service, we have “He sits at God’s right hand and prays for us”. I always wonder when I hear those words what visiting families make of that and what picture it conjures up in their minds. It suggests to some that God the Father and Jesus are ruling the world from a Heaven just above the sky in a kind of celestial control room. It’s the stuff of medieval stained glass windows. It would seem that, when we come into church, we either switch off our knowledge that, even if we travelled at the speed of light, it would take almost 50 billion years to reach the edge of the known universe, or we stop using language to mean what it means in the everyday world.
Each year in Advent, much emphasis is placed on the return of Jesus, as it has been for the last 2,000 years. The obvious implication from this is that the church believes that Jesus is in a distant place right now. Is that really our Christian experience? Many ancient Greek plays concluded with a god descending onto the stage (deus ex machina) and solving the problems and punishing the villains and rewarding the heroes and heroines. Are we still stuck in that mindset?
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