The Way Home
2nd Sunday after Christmas
January 3, 2010
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Now after the wise men had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and
said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I
tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” Then Joseph got up,
took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the
death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet,
“Out of Egypt I have called my son.”
When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt
and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those
who were seeking the child's life are dead.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his
mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over
Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a
dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called
Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He will
be called a Nazorean.”1
It’s a long way home for Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
Picture two peasants and a newborn baby who set out from home trying to do
only what the law ordered. Now they’re a hundred miles from home, broke, on foot,
and suddenly find that they’re the object of a murderous government manhunt.
They have to flee the country and they’ve scarcely ever been away from their
home village. Years later, when it’s safe for them to return, their fear of a new king
means that their settling in Nazareth still doesn’t get them back to the home they
originally set out from.
This wandering sets the pattern for Jesus' life. During his ministry, Jesus would
tell his disciples, “foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man
has nowhere to lay his head.”2 His instructions to these same disciples about their own
ministry—to take no purse, no bag, no sandals and to live off of the charity of
strangers—looks like a command to virtually rootless wandering.3
Neither Jesus nor his disciples seem at home in the world.
The wandering of the Son of God heightens our feeling for other words we hear
this morning—the psalmist’s poetic rendering of the joys of finding home:
“How dear to me are your dwellings, O Lord of hosts!” he writes. “The sparrow
has found her a house, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young…Happy
are they who dwell in your house!”4
1
Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23
Matthew 8:20
3
Luke 10:3-12
4
Psalm 84:1-3
2
1
We connect with the joy of getting home after a long time on the road—that
feeling of being back where it’s warm, safe and, above all, ours. The psalmist tells us that
finding our home in God is even better—like a bird settling down into a cozy nest on top
of warm eggs.
But Jesus is the discordant note. The homeless odyssey of the Son of God says
that the home of God might not be around here. “Our heart is restless,” St. Augustine
writes, “until it finds its rest in you [God].”
I suppose that means there’s good news and bad news.
The bad news is that life is about being restless, unsettled, never really finding
“home.”
The good news is that this is Jesus, after all, and we will be able to find our home
in God if we travel with him.
At home with God—but not in the world. How does that work?
Recently, I had occasion to reread a novel written by Yann Martel, a novel so
good that it won the Booker Prize, Britain’s highest award for a new book. It’s named
The Life of Pi, and tells the story of Pi Patel, a 14 year old youth from India.
Pi and his family are making their way across the Pacific Ocean on a cargo ship.
The ship carries, among other things, his father’s zoo animals. Dad is a zookeeper who
has fallen on hard times in India, and is trying to relocate to the Americas.
The ship unexpectedly blows up and sinks in short order. Pi finds himself in a
lifeboat with a tiger from the zoo. He has some survival equipment packed into the
lifeboat, the tiger, himself, and that’s it. Everything else is gone.
That’s about as homeless and exposed to danger as you can get. It’s Jesus, Mary
and Joseph times a hundred. Herod isn’t off in Jerusalem—he’s armed and dangerous,
and right there in the lifeboat with them.
And it’s our lives as well. Our world is a little bigger than a lifeboat, but if
heaven is our home and destination, we might as well be in a lifeboat in the middle of
the Pacific Ocean. Your tiger might be getting fired or divorced, rejected or defeated.
Your tiger might be more internal, something like guilt, rage or despair. Your tiger
might be stalking you from Yemen or Wall Street. In the end, your tiger is death and
there’s no escaping him.
The bottom line is that you’re in a lifeboat with a tiger and you’re going to have
to deal with it.
So what can we learn from a 14 year Indian boy named Pi Patel?
Pi survived because he accepted that he and the tiger were bound together like
an electron and a proton. They were each part of the other. For him, this was made
easier because he knew the tiger from his dad’s zoo. He knew tiger psychology and he
knew this tiger.
So he wasted no time on self-pity or wondering why this terrible thing should
have happened to him. That’s the first step that so many of us miss. Instead, Pi went to
work on the tiger. He knew he had to feed the tiger, so he figured out how to fish. He
worked on the tiger’s dependency, since it had been a zoo animal accustomed to being
fed and cared for by a human zookeeper. He knew, too, that he had to play head games
with the tiger and establish his dominance, like a lion tamer.5
By doing these things he lived fully in the present moment. He was totally and
acutely conscious of every little thing that happened. He was so conscious of it, in fact,
5
Yann Martel, The Life of Pi, Harcourt, page 202-5
2
that we get the feeling that he drew wisdom and inspiration from beyond himself. Like
Joseph, he heard from angels.
So he worked very hard on his consciousness of God. He prayed at regular
intervals throughout the day. From time to time, like when lightning struck during a
terrible storm, he felt that he heard the voice of God. 6
One of his prayerful routines was a very telling litany. He worked in a focused,
intentional way to be conscious of things not only as they were, but of things as God’s.
He would review every single object in his world (of which there weren’t a lot), and say,
“This is God’s ark” (meaning the boat).
“This is God’s cat” (meaning the tiger).
“These are God’s wide acres” (the ocean).
“This is God’s ear” (the sky).7
When the world is God’s, it’s a different world from the rootless, hostile world
with tigers in it. When the world is God’s, we might not yet have reached home in
heaven, but we know that not even death can separate us from our final destination.
That gives us confidence to live even a dangerous life with energy, optimism and joy.
Thus, bound together with the tiger, the world and God, Pi survives. The reality
is that he and the tiger really need each other. The tiger needed him to provide food,
because the tiger could not have caught fish. But the tiger fed Pi as well—fed him what
every human being in the world needs and can’t catch for himself: meaning, purpose,
and knowledge of God sufficient to traverse the Pacific Ocean.
Without the tiger in the boat, we get the feeling that Pi would have despaired
and died in short order.8
All of that raises a question. Actually it raises a lot of questions, but I’ll just pick
one.
While it’s true that we are not at rest, at peace or at home in this life, how much
of our true discomfort with existence is caused not by the way things are, but by our
refusal to accept the way things are?
Our belief that God is somewhere else places God somewhere else. Our belief
that our happiness is somewhere else means we will not be happy here. The more that
we think we shouldn’t have to be in a lifeboat with a tiger, the less we can settle into our
world and be conscious of who we are and where we are. The less, then, we will hear
from angels or feel ourselves with God.
Unless we intentionally direct our minds toward God, we will often catch
ourselves running a litany that’s the opposite of Pi’s:
This is not God’s life or the life I want.
This is not the family I want.
This is not the job I want.
This is not the house or town or car I want.
This is not the body I want.
I am not who I want to be.
Maybe some of those words, or something like them, are down inside of you
somewhere. If you find them, think about how differently they impact you than Pi’s
litany. Pi found meaning and the ability to survive—he was more alive in that boat than
at any time in his life. By contrast, some days I wonder how any of us make it.
6
op. cit., page 233
op. cit., page 209
8
op. cit., page 162
7
3
Consider the familiar words of another psalmist: “Even though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you [God] are with me.”9
This valley of death is God’s valley.
This is God’s ark and God’s cat.
This is God’s house I live in, God’s job I work, God’s body that makes it all
possible.
I am God’s.
There is an embracing, accepting quality about the psalmist in the valley of
death, as there is about Pi. We are invited to make a different choice than wishing the
tiger away. We are invited to embrace our challenges with the full range of heart and
humanity we possess—to embrace the knowledge we actually possess of the tiger.
If you feed the tiger and care for it rather than despising and rejecting it, you
might well discover that the tiger will feed you what you and every human being needs:
purpose, meaning, and knowledge of God.
In other words, people, come to life.
Pi is a long way from shore and safety in the middle of the Pacific, but no further
than you or I from heaven. He spends a little time thinking about that, but mostly he
thinks about what it takes to be absolutely, utterly alive to the present moment. He has
to. He has no choice.
If you think about it, neither do we.
Like Joseph, we will die without the counsel of angels.
Like Pi, we too need the knowledge of God.
When we have these things, we will see that the hands of God are just beneath
us, just out of sight past the lower edge of the world, cupping us, welcoming us to settle
into them like a bird into her nest.
And we are home.
The Rev. David Hoster
[email protected]
Copyright  2010 by St. George’s Episcopal Church
9
Psalm 23:4
4