Scripture reading II Corinthians 6

What makes a house a home?

Context for this message is a congregation which includes several young families. This is intended to give a glimpse into the plan of God for families.

If you go online to the Grand Rapids Association of Realtors real estate site, you will find that there are no houses for sale. That’s correct. There are no houses for sale. No, there are homes for sale.  One of the things I have learned over the last few years is that one does not refer to a building as a house in the hearing of a client. It is only to be referred to as a home. I find that interesting.  

What makes a house a home? There are any number of clever sayings that define home for us.

 Robert Frost says, Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

 A national museum of the home says that a home is where your heart is.  Of course, that defines things just fine, right?

Better Homes and Gardens, a magazine that has been around for a long time, has many, many photos of better homes. What is better about them? The way they are decorated. They look like no one lives there. So they’re implication is that for a better home than you have ever had, you just need a great decorator and the cash to buy all the neat stuff.

Rachel Ray, the TV chef, says, that Good food and a warm kitchen are what make a house a home.

 I have often wondered why it is that the place one begins and ends in a softball or baseball game is home plate. Every time someone goes up to bat, the point is to leave home and then to return home after you make your way around the various points that the rules say you have to go to. You have to make a journey from home, to get back to home. If you simply stay at home and do not attempt the journey, you are called out and then you cannot even stay at home. You have to leave. It’s all very philosophical, you see.

 So what is it about home that so intrigues us? As one person put it, a home without people is just a building with a dog. It’s the people who make us feel like a place is home. It is who we are privileged to live with there that makes a house a home.

It is where one belongs. It is where one can live without pretense. It is where we are who we are for better or for worse. 

What I think is so great about the idea of home is that God is the one who first created the idea of home. He is the one who created the family and gave Adam and Eve a place to be at home.

Ever since the fall, we have been on that journey like a baseball game. We know we are not at home in this world. We long for a place we can feel at home again. At home with our Father.  We are moving from that home which was a garden to a city where a garden is central to what the city is all about. We are heading for home in glory.

But in the meantime, we are given the opportunity to taste a little bit of that heavenly home in our own homes. The problem is that our homes are in this broken world. We live with sin affecting all we are and do. Our hearts are hard toward most of the people in the world. We don’t want our privacy invaded by people we feel uncomfortable with.

But God knows we need some coaching for building this thing called a home. So as we read the Scriptures, we discover that there are several places where, embedded in the train of thoughts are some great bits of advice on being a home with a solid family as God intended us to experience.

So, in the Scripture we read today, we have Paul telling the Corinthians about how difficult of a time he has had in being an apostle. It has not been a cushy life. No, it has been rather difficult. But the Corinthians were thinking of Paul as kind of a strange man who they no longer had to pay any attention to.

 Which reminds me of another cynical definition of home:  Home is where you can say anything you want because no one is paying any attention to you anyway.

That was how it was getting for Paul with his church in Corinth. So he says, I speak as a father to his children. Notice that. I speak as father to his children. How is that? He says, We have spoken freely and we have opened wide our hearts to you. He says, I speak as to my children, make it fair by opening your hearts to us.

That is how a house becomes a home. When the people in the house can speak freely with each other and open their hearts to one another. That means that when I am at home, I can just be myself.  I do not have to put on any pretenses. My heart is open when I am with my family. That is how we can be loving to one another:  Speaking freely and openly to each other.  And having the other pay attention and then we ourselves are willing to speak freely and open our hearts to the others as well.

 Until you can know that you can speak freely, you have people in a house. You do not have a home.  So, what makes a house a home? The residents there can speak freely and openly to each other.

Paul goes on, do not be yoked together with unbelievers. What we have often taken that to say is something negative about how we are to relate to others in the world around us. When Van Raalte  brought the first Dutch settlers over to the Holland area in the 1840’s, he made it clear that what they were doing was establishing a city that would be set apart from  the world around them.

The colony would be free from being yoked unequally with unbelievers.  What that part of our heritage has done is to make those of us who are the spiritual heirs of that original group suspicious of being integrated into the communities in which we live. We are to be separate from them as much as possible.

But I want to look at this differently. I see this as actually calling us to be yoked with others who are pulling in the same direction as we are. Too often our homes are not places where we are all pulling together for the common good. We are not integrating into the surrounding society, but we sure aren’t integrating with each other either. You find homes where the husband and wife simply find themselves pulling in differing ways. Not that they are opposite ways, they just are not going in the same direction.

But we need to learn to be yoked together so that in our homes we learn how to be matched up with the person who is our partner.  A yoke was used to bring a pair of animals together to provide much more power than one could by itself.

So, I hear Paul calling us in our families to be yoked together so that we will do so much more than we ever could by ourselves

. Then he says, We are the temple of the living God. That is a communal thing. In Corinth, a breathtaking sight was the temple of Apollo that everyone passed on the way to the marketplace. You were to stop there and be cleansed before you could enter the marketplace. Each citizen knew that the temple had many pillars, it had many stones all fit together and taken as a whole, those stones were the temple of Apollo.

Paul says to the church, when we are all taken together we are the temple of the living God. That is a communal thing. Each of us is the place where God’s holy Spirit lives in this world. But it is when we are all together, all linked together, all yoked together  that we become the temple of the living God.

 Just think of what that means for your families. And your homes. You are together  the temple of the living God.  What makes a house a home? When the people who live there are fit together in such a way that they demonstrate what it is to be the temple of the living God.

So what makes a house a home: It is a place where the residents are all working together to be open to each other. It is a place where we are yoked so we can harness the power that God gives us to move in the same direction. It is a place where God lives among the living stones who are his temple. That is what makes a house a home.