The challenge that we seem to have, and it’s visible all around us, is the challenge of homelessness—homelessness in this particular area of the city, but even beyond. I was watching a program just the other day where people who are working people are living in their cars or even in their RVs in parking lots by the highways. You know, those carpooling parking lots where you’re supposed to park your car and then go with someone else. Lack of affordability is leading people to be homeless.
This is a very sad reality because it touches even our spiritual lives. There’s a spiritual homelessness also that exists as a plague in this world, with so many people not knowing where they belong, asking “Where’s my home?” and being perpetual pilgrims, if you will. I remember many times people would ask me, “Are you going home for Christmas? Are you going home for Thanksgiving?” And then you ask yourself, well, where is my home? What is my home? What constitutes that place that I can call home? Not only physically, but spiritually—primarily spiritually. Where is my source of belonging?
In the Gospel of St. John from which we hear today, a specific reading was chosen for the theme of this Sunday when we pray in a particular way around the issue of the National Indigenous Day of Prayer. So many people are displaced physically from their homes, from their families, and spiritually from the sense of meaning and purpose. Where do we belong? Who are we as a people? God enters into this kind of a reality of homelessness, both physical and spiritual, that we all experience in different ways. In the first chapter of the gospel of St. John, it says, “and the Word was made flesh and made his dwelling among us.” In other words, another translation could say God made his home among us. God’s response to our homelessness—our spiritual sense of not knowing where our home is—is that God makes his home with us. God comes to be with us in the person of Jesus Christ.
So perhaps the question that we should be asking is not where or what is my home, but who is my home? Who is my home? Because it is in the “who,” in the relational reality of me connecting with God, connecting with Jesus, connecting with my family, connecting with my community. It is in those relational realities that we find a sense of belonging. So often it is said that a house doesn’t become a home automatically. What makes it a home is relationships: people I choose to be with, and not only to be with, but to really engage with, to suffer with, to love with, to have a common sense of belonging and purpose.
One of the YouTube channels that I like to follow is about a homeless man by choice who travels all around North America and Mexico on his motorcycle. He doesn’t have any possessions other than his motorcycle and a tent. And whenever he sets up his tent, he says, “Now I’m going home.” He calls a tent his home. And people will ask him, “Well, why do you do that?” And he says, “Because I have chosen to live with a sense of purpose that works for me. Possessions didn’t work for me. Having a house, having a business, having multiple cars didn’t work for me. I needed to find a purpose, a meaning in this life that would allow me to have a sense of a home.” So now his tent is his home. And it’s really refreshing to listen to this individual who has found meaning and purpose not in things, but in relationships. He’s been doing this now for 25 years.
I find it fascinating that so often we try to resolve the issues of our heart with materialistic solutions. If only we had more—and then you plug in whatever you want: more stuff, more friends, more money, more cars, whatever. But ultimately, the ultimate desire of a human heart responds to that need by coming to make a dwelling among us. God in the flesh among us on this National Indigenous Day of Prayer.
Sometimes it’s hard for us to know how to lean into these kinds of painful things that have happened in the past and perhaps are still happening today. But the key to this is the phrase “day of prayer.” Many people, many groups, have experienced a kind of homelessness, and we have not helped because perhaps we have entered with the message of Jesus but without a kind of respect. It’s not by changing someone else’s culture or way of life or way of being to fit our own that leads to meaning, purpose, and community, but simply by introducing them to the God who made his dwelling among us. Not discarding who we are, how we live, or what we love, but simply entering into it and saying, “May I have my dwelling among you. May I share in the life you already have.”
Our call in life is to continually repent of that “no” that we have said in different ways in our lives, and to say, “Jesus, you are invited to be part of my life. You are welcomed in my family, in my community, in my place that I call home.” As a church, we are first and foremost called to allow Christ to make his home in our midst. That’s it. And the only way for us to do that is to do what St. Paul speaks of in the second reading today to the Philippians. He says simply: rejoice in the Lord always. Don’t get discouraged. Be gentle. Be kind. Be loving, and live according to the faith that I have shown you. To allow God to make his dwelling among us is to know where we belong, but more importantly, who we belong to. In God we find ourselves, and that is what it means to be at home.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Father Wojtek Kuzma