Close to Home: Yearning
Luke 21:25-36
I Thessalonians 3:9-13
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
November 28, 2021
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntjwM40FNnA
There’s a Welsh word that does not translate well into English. The word is hiraeth. It means a spiritual longing for a home which maybe never was, a kind of nostalgia for ancient places to which we cannot return. Welsh writer Val Bethell says hiraeth is “the link with the long-forgotten past, the language of the soul, the call from the inner self. . . . it speaks from the rocks, from the earth, from the trees and in the waves. It is always there.” [1]
Some consider Wales to be the first colony of Great Britain. It became a subject state in 1282. By the mid 1800’s, Wales had been an integral part of the empire for centuries, but poverty and unrest led to riots in Wales and fear of sedition on the part of British officials. The result was a dismantling of Welsh identity by the British and a steady flow of emigrants out of Wales. They went to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, among other places. And they took their longing for home with them. Some point to hiraeth as an explanation for the fact that 40% of the Welsh emigrants returned between 1870 and 1914.[2]
Pamela Petro, an American writer, says that hiraeth is a protest. It is homesickness brought on because home isn’t the place it should have been. . . . To feel hiraeth is to feel a deep incompleteness and recognize it as familiar.” [3]
I suspect that even if we are not of Welsh descent, even if we never heard this word hiraeth until a few minutes ago, most of us still have a sense of this yearning. We long for things to be other than they are, for an end to violence, for a dismantling of racism and sexism and many other ‘isms. As our young people said, “we hope for a world where all are fed, a world with contagious laughter, a world with tall trees and clean flowing water, a world where all people feel at home.”[4] We yearn for things to be right and just and good. Advent begins again, which makes us think of Christmas and we long for the peace on earth proclaimed by the angels.
Perhaps hiraeth is like the God-shaped hole in every person described by Blaise Pascal. Or the yearning that Saint Augustine summed up "You have made us for yourself O Lord & our heart is restless until it rests in you."
Advent begins, as it usually does with a scripture passage of such frightening images and impending doom that it can only be describing the end of the world as we know it. The bad news is so horrible, in Luke 21, that it cannot be sustained. Something must be dying or falling or ending. In part of this chapter, Jesus describes the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple which was very much the end of life as it had been in first century Palestine.
Baptist scholar Alan Culpepper says that Biblical forecasts of destruction, suffering, and the loss of human life have only one purpose: to call God’s people to repentance.[5] Repentance, we remember, does not mean just feeling sorry about things we’ve done. It means changing our behavior.
In the midst of the cataclysm that Jesus describes, he says “when these things happen, your redemption is drawing near.” Isn’t that a strange thing?
Jesus tells his followers to keep their heads up in the midst of the pandemonium and upheaval which is coming, to watch for the signs that the kingdom of God is near. Many of us are just trying to survive the recent upheaval in our lives. We may tell ourselves that we’ll figure out a better way to do life later. Once everything is stable and routine again, then we’ll take stock and make necessary changes. But that’s probably not true. Repentance, or change, is more likely to happen when we are in a place of less stability. When things are unpredictable and fluid, that is probably the moment when we are most motivated to make lasting change.
Stanford historian Walter Scheidel claims that the most dramatic and violent ruptures in recorded history were also the times of great levelling of social and economic inequality. He says that things like war and the plague undermined confidence in religious and secular authorities which encouraged common people to question existing hierarchies and explore alternatives. It often happened that, for a while, the rich became less rich and the poor less poor. Those changes came at great cost to be sure – one third of the people in Europe and the Middle East lost their lives to the Black Death of bubonic plague.[6]
I want to be careful not to minimize the suffering that accompanies such change. And yet, I wonder if we can hear Jesus’ parable about the fig tree. When it sprouts leaves, the summer is coming. And so, we are to keep alert to what is happening, to watch for signs of hope. I wonder if we can find it hopeful that so many people are quitting their jobs or that the world-wide supply chain has slowed down. Can we see the potential for good change there? What if we applauded people who refuse to work for not-enough pay or those who need to change to a more meaningful vocation. What if we appreciated that a wait for material goods might reduce our need for instant gratification? What if we saw the stresses and strains in our schools and hospitals as a sign that those systems are on the verge of real change?
Almost a quarter century ago, the Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann wrote this “Our society is marked by a deep dislocation that touches every aspect of our lives. The old certitudes seem less certain; the old privileges are under powerful challenge; the old dominations are increasingly ineffective and fragile; the established governmental, educational, judicial and medical institutions seem less and less able to deliver what we need and have come to expect; the old social fabrics are fraying under the assault of selfishness, fear, anger and greed. There seems no going back to our former world, since the circumstances making that world sustainable have changed. Because the church has been intimately connected with the old patterns of certitude, privilege and domination, it shares a common jeopardy with other old institutions. Church members are confused about authority, bewildered about mission, worried about finances, contentious about norms and ethics, and anxious about the church’s survival. Our numbed and bewildered society lacks ways of thinking and speaking that can help us find remedies—that can enable us to go deep into the crisis and so avoid denial, and to imagine a better future and so avoid despair.”
Well, that seems to be even more true now as when he wrote it, but there’s a more important part. Brueggemann goes on “when the church is faithful to its own past life with God, it has ways of speaking, knowing and imagining that can successfully address our cultural malaise. When it remembers its ancient miracles, has the courage to speak in its own cadences, and re-engages old seasons of hurt, the church possesses the rhetorical and testimonial antidotes to denial and despair.”[7]
And so, we are here, on the first Sunday of Advent, the church’s new year, invited to begin again, to light the Advent candles, to play the familiar music, to remember again our story, to know and to proclaim that God has come very near in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, to imagine that God is still speaking, still moving, still loving us.
Kate DiCamillo writes award-winning books. They’re sold for children, but really they speak to people of any age. Two of best-known books are Because of Winn-Dixie and The Tale of Desperaux. A few weeks ago she shared a memory. She said,
This morning I woke up thinking about a fifth-grade boy who came through a signing line at a bookstore in North Carolina. I signed his copy of Despereaux and he said,
“My teacher said fifth grade is the year of asking questions.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. He took out a notebook.
“Every day we’re supposed to ask someone different a good question and listen really good and then write down the answer when they’re done talking.”
“Oh,” I said, “I get it. I’m someone different. Okay, what’s your question?”
“My question is how do you get all that hope into your stories?”
“That’s not a good question,” I said. “That’s a great question. Let me think. Um. I guess that writing the story is an act of hope, and so even when I don’t feel hopeful, writing the story can lead me to hope. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah,” he said. He looked me in the eye. “It’s kind of a long answer. But I can write it all out. Thanks.”
He picked up his copy of Despereaux, and walked away—writing in his notebook.
“This was years ago.” Kate said.
“Why did I wake up this morning and think of this child?
Maybe because this is a time to start asking good questions, a time to write down the answers, a time to listen to each other really well.
I’m going to get myself a little spiral bound notebook.
I’m going to listen and hope.”[8]
In her answer to that fifth-grade boy, Kate DiCamillo said, “Writing the story is an act of hope. Even when I don’t feel hopeful, writing the story can lead me to hope.”
So beloved ones, I suggest that telling our story, the story that God is writing with us, is an act of hope. Beginning the year again, entering into Advent with faith and courage, is an act that may lead us to hope even when we don’t feel hopeful. Maybe this is a time to watch for the signs around us, to ask good questions, to listen to each other really well. May we listen and hope.
[1] https://innerwoven.me/2015/06/07/hiraeth-making-peace-with-longing/
[2] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210214-the-welsh-word-you-cant-translate
[3] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/09/18/dreaming-in-welsh/
[4] These words are from a litany for Advent 1 by Rev. Sarah (Are) Speed | A Sanctified Art LLC | sanctifiedart.org.”
[5] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), pp 405.
[6] https://news.stanford.edu/2020/04/30/pandemics-catalyze-social-economic-change/
[7] https://www.religion-online.org/article/conversations-among-exiles/
[8] https://www.facebook.com/139485862734035/photos/a.156440727705215/4039256512756931/