Focusing our desires on a better homeland
by David Sellnow
Recently, I was asked to speak at the annual commemorative service for a church cemetery. The church, dating back to the 1880s, remains as a historic building, next to the cemetery. The congregation and a neighboring congregation merged their ministries in the 1940s.
I’ll share here a version of the message from that day.
Scripture readings:
There is a provision in Minnesota state law that says: “When a person dies … [and] it is determined that the person did not leave sufficient means to defray the necessary expenses of a funeral and final disposition, nor any spouse of sufficient ability to procure the burial, the county board shall pay for cremation of the person’s remains” (Minnesota Statute 261.035).
In my current employment, with a county human services agency, one of my responsibilities is helping people with those sorts of requests. Sometimes, a father or brother has been estranged from their children and family for years. But at the time of their death, it falls to family to deal with final arrangements. Sometimes, a mother or grandmother has been in nursing home care and has depleted all her own resources and has been on public assistance. She’d not set up any pre-paid burial plans. When her time comes and she passes, the county needs to assist. There have been cases where a neighbor or friend was the only close contact for a person at the time of their death. There have been times when the medical examiner’s office reached out to county workers because there were no family members coming to claim the body of the deceased.
As a society, we pay respects to all who have died in our communities. We show our respect to life itself by the way we treat people in the time of death.
As people of faith, in the church, we have even more reason to show respect to those who have died, knowing that “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord” (Revelation 14:13). We have the utmost regard for our forebears who have walked in faith before us and have gone on to be with the Lord. We are deeply grateful for the faith of our fathers and mothers, our grandfathers and grandmothers, who passed down to us the hope of life that maintains us in Christ—in this world and the next. We remember the faithful lives of those who came before us, and we carry on their tradition of faith still today.
Our earliest ancestors in faith prioritized having a place to bury their dead in respect and remembrance. We are heirs of the faith held by Abraham and Sarah. Trusting in the promises of the LORD God, they had relocated across the Middle East to the region of Canaan. They lived as nomads on the land. They had flocks and herds and traded with the local peoples. Throughout their lives, though, they never really owned any piece of the land as their own property. When Sarah died, nothing was more important to Abraham at that point than securing a plot of ground to be used as a family burial site. He spoke with the Hittite people, among whom he was living, asking to buy the cave of Machpelah and the field surrounding it. Ephron, the owner, offered to give the field and cave to Abraham, whom the Hittites regarded highly as a guest in their territory. Abraham insisted on paying in silver the full price the property was worth (cf. Genesis 23). It was important to him for that place to be seen as entirely their own—their family’s resting place. And so it was. Sarah was buried there. When he died, Abraham also was buried in that cave. His son and daughter-in-law, Isaac and Rebecca, were buried there also. Their son, the patriarch Jacob (also known as Israel), was buried there along with his wife Leah. (Cf. Genesis 49:31, 50:13.) [Jacob’s wife Rachel, who had died during childbirth (the birth of her second son, Benjamin), was buried near where they were traveling when that had happened, between Bethel and Bethlehem.] (Cf. Genesis 35:16-20.)
We have inherited the faith of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their families. We may own homes and land on this earth, but our deepest deepest hopes are not rooted in anything of this earth. Like our predecessors in faith, we look forward “to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10). Like the ancient patriarchs, our own parents and grandparents and great grandparents who now rest in the ground of this earth died in faith without having received the fulfillment of God’s eternal promises. “But from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.” They weren’t thinking just of a homeland on this earth. They desired “a better homeland …a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:13,16).
We have that same desire ourselves. Our faith home is a heavenly home. Our deepest hopes are not of the stuff of this earth. We know that the things of this earth are not permanent—even the churches we establish and build. We’d like to think they will stand the test of time, but things change. A church building that was a treasure in its time now stands as a memory of what it once was. The faith history of a congregation may go through many ups and downs, mergers and changes over the years—but the faith remains the same. We walk in that same faith still.
Across the country, changes keep occurring for churches. One mainline denomination, for example, has 2400 fewer active congregations today than were active 26 years ago. A survey of three dozen Protestant church groups, done every five years, showed that in 2019 there were 1500 more churches that closed than new churches that were started. In 2024, there were 200 more closures than new openings.
Yet the promises of God, on which we base our faith, have not diminished, and our hope is not diminished. We endure in hope as did our ancestors in the faith, even when it appears to us that things are shrinking and our future is uncertain. In the years when the northern kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrian Empire and the southern kingdom of Judah was threatened by those same powerful forces, Isaiah spoke words of reassurance to God’s people. The LORD held out hope for them. Even through times of exile and uncertainty, he would bear and carry and save them, even to their old age (Isaiah 46:4).
We stand today upon the shoulders of the people of God who came before us, and experience the path of faith in ways similar to their path. The temple that the people of Israel built in Jerusalem did not last forever. It was destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again. Today, there is nothing left of that temple but a wall or remembrance and prayer. Many of the churches built across the centuries since then, in places around the world, did not endure. The landscapes of our lives on this earth change—where we live, how we live, where we worship. But we are reminded by our Savior, Jesus—the anchor of our hope—that our faith and worship ultimately are not about where we are or in what building we gather. As Jesus said, it is not about whether we worship in some particular place, at some specific location or temple or building. “True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth,” Jesus said, for “God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:23,24).
We will continue to believe and pray, to serve one another and our neighbors, to worship in spirit and truth. This is the heritage of faith and hope and love that our forefathers and foremothers in the faith have given us. This is the gospel, the mercy, the truth that we will talk about with our children and grandchildren in our homes and away from home, when we lie down and when we get up (cf. Deuteronomy 6:7), and whenever we share time together in whatever churches and gathering places we find as homes for faith today.
It doesn’t happen often that a president is inaugurated on the day dedicated to honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. The only two previous occasions were 1997 and 2013. The next time the inauguration and King’s birthday observance coincide will be 2053. 
Let’s move away from “glass half full” and “glass half empty” estimations of whether it’s a time for optimism or pessimism. As God’s people in this world, we are called to make the most of all our time, even when the times may be hard or evil (cf. Ephesians 5:16). In any and every circumstance, we will devote ourselves to hope and the common good in relation with our fellow human beings. Our “vocation knows no boundaries,” as Jodock and Nelsen remind us. “A sense of vocation involves the realization that, as a human being, I am not an isolated unit but am nested in a larger community and that my highest moral responsibility is so to act in all areas of my life as to benefit that community and the individuals in it” (p.105).
At Epiphany, we remember and ponder the journey of the Magi, “wise men from the East” who “came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage’” (Matthew 2:1-2).