Have you noticed that the holiday season is filled with a curious mixture of longings? On the calendar of the Christian year, this is the beginning of Advent, a time of longing for the coming of the Lord, a time of waiting and expecting, yearning and hoping. With ancient Israel, we long for the coming of Messiah who will set his people free. Even though we know he has already come, we symbolically wait for his coming as though it had not happened, so as to relive the drama of that blessed birth. We also wait in Advent for his second coming, for that time when he will finally bring to this earth the peace of which the angels sang at his first coming. And we also long for the coming of the Christ into our own lives and hearts in this season. In the midst of all the festivities of Advent and Christmas, we hope that we will have some new experience with Christ—that he will be born in us, as the carol O Little Town of Bethlehem puts it. If ever we want a personal experience of Jesus Christ, this is the time. What could be better than to be spiritually reborn as we celebrate his physical birth?
But mixed in with that spiritual longing, there is a deep emotional longing, the longing to go home for the holidays. If we ever want to be at home with those we love, this is the time. Every year AAA reports that 40 to 50 million people travel long distances to be home for the holidays. Like salmon swimming upstream to their ancestral spawning beds, people will do almost anything to get home. The Steve Martin movie “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles“ gave classic comedic expression to that. Martin plays a businessman who is heading home for the holidays, when a gigantic snow storm shuts down all transportation. He tries to catch a plane, but they are all grounded. He races to the train station, but the trains aren’t running. He rents a car, sharing it with the immense and uncouth John Candy. After many harrowing and hilarious experiences, during which Martin nearly loses him mind, he finally arrives at his front door in the back of a freight truck crammed with all the members of a polka band. Our longing to get home for the holidays has given many of us memorable experiences. I can remember nightmare trips in my college days from Grand Rapids, Michigan to Denver, Colorado, careening through Great Plains blizzards in dark December nights with 6 exhausted kids packed into an old car we hoped would make it. We had to get home for the holidays. Our homing instinct is a powerful thing.
But for many of us, the trip home is a disappointment. When we get there, we remember that home wasn’t all that great. That never happened to me as a college student, but it happened to some of my friends. Home never was that homey, and it was still the scene of strain and pain. And they weren’t there very long before they wished they could leave. Or when we get there for our holiday gatherings, we discover what Thomas Wolfe meant when he wrote his famous book back in the 1930’s. “You can’t go home again.“ Things have changed so much in the time we’ve been gone, or we have changed so much, that it isn’t really home anymore. And yet, we long for the home that used to be or never was, especially at the holidays.
I am convinced that the deep spiritual longing of Advent and the deep emotional longing of the holidays are intimately related. Indeed our yearning for the warmth and intimacy of home is at heart our longing for reunion with our God, a longing for the home we’ve lost in our sinful wandering. In Psalm 84, the Psalmist utters the unspoken longing of every human heart, “my flesh and my heart cry out for the living God.“ That is what we want. Deep down inside, so deep that sometimes we aren’t even aware that it’s God we long for, we cry out for the living God, for an experience of the living God. Indeed, at the center of all our spiritual and emotional and physical yearnings is the desire for God in all his personal fullness.
Sadly, most people aren’t aware of that, because their minds aren’t in touch with their hearts and souls. We’re like that wasp on which George Orwell played a cruel boyhood trick. In one of his essays George Orwell describes this trick and makes a devastating point. “The wasp was sucking jelly on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period—twenty years perhaps—during which he did not notice.“
Orwell is talking about a cultural shift in the western world there, but what he says has a very personal application. Many people have lost their soul, their spiritual desire for God, and they don’t notice. Their minds have been cut off from their heart of hearts. Life goes on, and they think that everything is perfectly normal. Until they have to fly, until they face ultimate issues, and then they know that something dreadful has happened. They have been cut off from the spiritual side of themselves, and all they feel is the longing for home, for intimacy, warmth, community, not the longing for God.
In fact, there was an article in the Atlantic Monthly a while back about the new religion that has arisen out of this loss of longing for God. It’s called apatheism. Jonathon Rauch writes, “Someone asked me about my religion. I was about to say, ’Atheist,’ but I stopped myself. ’I used to be an atheist,’ I said, ’and I still don’t believe in God, but the larger truth is that it has been years since I really cared one way or another. I’m an apatheist.’“ Apatheism is not caring about one’s own religion, and even less about other peoples. Rauch claims that even church goers often rank high on the apatheism scale. They go to church for a variety of reasons, but they just don’t care very much anymore. Their longing for God has gotten cut off, and they haven’t noticed yet.
Others of us do long for God, but we’ve lost our expectation, our hope. We’ve expected, and hoped, and trusted, and prayed in the past, but God has disappointed us. The great Jewish scholar Martin Buber tells this story. Rabbi Baruch’s grandson Yehiel was once playing hide—and—seek with another boy. He hid himself well and waited for his playmate to find him. When he had waited for a long time, he came out of hiding, but the other was nowhere to be found. Suddenly Yehiel realized that his friend had not looked for him from the very beginning. This made him cry, and he ran to his grandfather and complained of his faithless friend. Then tears brimmed in Rabbi Baruch’s eyes, too. And he said, “God says the same thing. ’I hide, but no one wants to seek me.’“
Some of us might want to reply to God that we have looked for him, and we haven’t found him. He seems to have hidden too well. We’ve found religion, or doctrine, or the form of worship, or some kind of faith. But we haven’t found God. And now we feel far from the God we believe in. We would love to be closer, but we don’t really think it will ever happen. We can sing “O for a closer walk with God,“ but all we feel is the distance expressed in the rest of that song. “Where is the blessedness I knew when first I sought the Lord? Where is the soul refreshing view of Jesus and his word? What peaceful hours I once enjoyed! How sweet their memory still! But they have left an aching void the world can never fill.“ So because we’ve been cut off from God by our disappointment and sorrow and anger, we may still long for God, but we try to fill the aching void with the warmth and intimacy of home and loved ones and friends.
Psalm 84 speaks directly to this strange mixture of longing that runs through our hearts, this longing for God and this longing for home, our longing for the Divine Person and our longing for a heavenly place. “My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord;“ says the Psalmist, “my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.“ Scholars speculate that this Psalm may have been written during the time when the Assyrian king, Sennacharib, was ravaging Judah. People were cut off from all their normal means of support—from homes, and family, and fields, and flocks, and, worst of all, from the Temple and God. What the writer longs for more than anything is the temple, the house of God. Swallows and sparrows make their home in that lovely place, and the Psalmist yearns to join them. “Blessed,“ he writes, “are those who dwell in your house.“
We can’t relate to that, because our church buildings don’t mean to us what the temple meant to the ancient Jews. We come to church to worship God, in hopes that we will meet him, have some personal experience with God. When they came to the temple, they knew they would meet God, because God lived in that temple. The cloud of his glory hovered over the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies. The temple was literally God’s home, and you knew that when you came there, you would have some personal experience of God as you worshipped him. The place of God and the person of God were intimately connected.
Now, of course, it’s different. The temple has been destroyed. God does not dwell in any one place. Rather he dwells in one person named Jesus Christ, who said, “One greater than the temple is here.“ Col. 1:19 says, “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Jesus.“ Now if you long to meet God, to have a personal experience with the Almighty, you can go to Jesus and through Jesus. In this season of Advent as we focus on the birth of Jesus, God’s message to us is simple, “You can go home again“ through Jesus Christ. In spite of our lack of longing for God, in spite of our disappointment with God, in spite of our sense of being cut off from God, we can go home again, because God has come to us in Jesus Christ. That is the wonder of the Christmas gospel. We don’t have to go to a place to satisfy our longing for God and home, because God himself has come to make his home in our hearts through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That’s the difference between the days of Psalm 84 and the New Testament.
And yet that connection between God’s person and God’s place persists in our hearts. That’s why I’m glad Jesus said, “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.“ I love the way one spiritual pilgrim expressed the continued centrality of the house of God. “I looked for God up on the mountain, and I found grandeur, but it was not God. I looked for God down by the shore, and I found relaxation, but it was not God. I looked for God on the golf course, and I found camaraderie, but it was not God. I looked for God in my family home, and I found love, but it was not God. I looked for God everywhere, and I found many wonderful things, but I could not find God. Then I went to church, and there I found God.“
Of course, even the most faithful churchgoer knows that just going to church will not satisfy our hearts longing for God. We must go to God’s house with the kind of yearning the Psalmist expresses. “My soul yearns, even faints for the courts of the Lord; my flesh and my heart cry out for the living God.“ How often haven’t we gone to church in a different spirit—angry, distracted, annoyed, curious, wanting to be entertained, hoping to sing a good song or two, resentful because our parents dragged us there, steaming from a fight with our spouse, exhausted from a late Saturday night party, sick from a bad cold, upset about something else going on in church. It’s no wonder! It’s no wonder our hearts longing isn’t satisfied by an encounter with the living God in Jesus Christ in church. If you want to find God, you must seek him, yearn for him, long for him, desire to meet him in Jesus.
That’s why we all must do what the Psalmist describes in verse 5. “Blessed are those whose strength is in you, who have set their hearts on pilgrimage.“ We must get up from wherever we are and make a pilgrimage to the heart of God. Jesus has come so that our longing for God and home can be satisfied, but to experience that satisfaction, we must do something, too. Like the prodigal son in the far country, we must get up, and go home. We must leave this place we’ve been for so long, wherever it’s been. Maybe it’s just a vague sense that we should have a closer walk with God. Maybe it’s a deep disappointment with God, an inability to trust him and hope for a better life. Maybe it’s full blown apatheism. Wherever you’ve been sitting, I invite you today to get up, and begin your pilgrimage back home.
But I want to be realistic about that pilgrimage. The plain truth is that your feet won’t begin to move, your journey back to the heart of God won’t begin until you do what the Psalmist says, and you “set your heart on pilgrimage.“ It begins in your heart, when you decide that you are going to focus on Jesus Christ who is the way back to God. The journey may lead through what the Psalmist calls “the Valley of Baca,“ a dry and disappointing place. But if you continue on, trusting in the God who is with you in Christ, God will refresh you with springs of mercy and pools of grace you never could have expected. With the powerful grace of Christ, you will go from strength to strength, until you appear before God and find yourself home at last.
I know, if you have been where you are for a long time, it is difficult to even think about things being different. It is hard to hope again. But it can be different. You can go home again. I know that, because the grace of God that sent Jesus into this world and up to the door of your heart—that amazing grace will lead you home. Set your heart on pilgrimage today and come home for the holidays.
Stan Mast
Stan Mast has been the Minister of Preaching at the LaGrave Avenue Christian Reformed Church in downtown Grand Rapids, MI for the last 18 years. He graduated from Calvin Theological Seminary in 1971 and has served four churches in the West and Midwest regions of the United States. He also served a 3 year stint as Coordinator of Field Education at Calvin Seminary. He has earned a BA degree from Calvin College and a Bachelor of Divinity and a Master of Theology from Calvin and a Doctor of Ministry from Denver Seminary. He is happily married to Sharon, a special education teacher, and they have two sons and four grandchildren. Stan is a voracious reader and works out regularly. He also calls himself a car nut and an “avid, but average” golfer.
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