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You talked about Douglas Coupland's book, Girlfriend in a Coma. And this woman comes out of a coma, having been in a coma since '79. And when she's asked about her impressions of the '90s she says, "A lack. A lack of convictions, of beliefs, of wisdom, or even of good old badness. No sorrow, no nothing. The people I knew when I came back, they only, well, existed. It was so sad." Talk about how that is a reflection of this kind of soul-weariness that comes with the nomadic soul.

A nomad is wandering not just geographically. They're wandering about from identity to identity. They're wandering about from value system to value system in search. And the old term for it is "lost," lost trying to figure out what is a right, what is a wrong, what is bad, what is good. It's even hard to say that something is bad anymore. That starts to shave away at the soul after awhile.

People who are wandering into our parish here, they're just lost. And they're trying one more thing. But every time they try one more thing that doesn't quite work they get all the more confused. And they're bumping into this church that's full of traditions and this old text that we read from. And it's so novel to them that you would allow an old ancient text to read the story of your life. Or even in our church they think it's weird that we say "creed" which is even more bizarre today, that you would allow someone who wrote something 1,700 years ago to tell you what you believe.

We don't believe in creeds today, we believe in vision statements. But that's why people are getting lost out there. Because there is a severing from a tradition that has always given people their identity and their mission. Richard Ford, another typical postmodern novelist has said in one of his novels, "All we want is to get to the place where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life." I think that is very much the typical agenda today.

Spend a minute talking about the importance of the incarnation, and the fact that finding home is not about going back to the past or recapturing something, it really is about understanding who God is and where God dwells.

One of the things which fundamentally shifts from the Old to the New Testament is this loss of the geographic understanding of holiness. In the Old Testament, there was a holy land made holy because it had a holy city in the middle of it. And the city was holy because it had a holy temple in the middle of it. And the temple was holy because it had a holy of holies in the middle of it. With the coming of Christ, that shifts dramatically because he says you can tear this temple down and in three days it will be risen again. Of course he's identifying himself now as the new holy meeting place between humanity and God. At his death, the temple veil was ripped from top to bottom and the holiness runs out of the holy of holies throughout the whole earth.

If it's anything, it's a little bit more like the tabernacle which is being carried on the backs of the people as they go throughout the world. And wherever two or three are gathered in the name of Christ, he says, he'll be there in their midst. The church's ministry these days is not to try to get people nailed down again. I think that the goal of the church is to turn the meandering nomad into a pilgrim. Pilgrims are people who travel with purpose.

What are the blessings of this sort of home? How are they secured? How do we find home?

We recognize what God is doing to us. The real home that we have really is with Father, Son and Spirit. That's what we were created for. I sometimes cringe when I hear people talk about "church home." Well, as someone who spends an unforgivable amount of his time hanging around Christians, let me tell you, if church is the home that we're looking for we're in bigger trouble than we know. Church is not home. Church is the place where the longing for home is rightly directed.

Frequently the church is the problem because the church is just peddling more products in people's efforts to construct themselves, and that's not really the church's role.

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April (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48