Proper 5

The research says that you will probably move within the next five years. Homeowners tend to stay put longer, averaging 8.2 years, while renters relocate every 2.1 years, says a Census Bureau report. Nationally, the median time people lived at one residence was 5.2 years, meaning half moved sooner than that, and half remained in their nests longer.

These statistics tell us what is going on, but they don’t tell us why. Why are all these people moving every 5.2 years? What are the underlying reasons? Are people being transferred to new locations by their employers? Are they upgrading their homes to larger or nicer ones? Are they just getting restless, and itching for a change of scenery?

I know one family in our neighborhood that has lived in four different homes in the last six years, all on Davis Islands.

In a sense, this is nothing new: Americans have been on the move for years. Walt Whitman wrote Song of the Open Road, Jack London penned The Road, and then in the late 1940s, Jack Kerouac took a roaring drive across America, and wrote the classic novel On the Road. The heroes of this book, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, “were intended as the automobile-age equivalents of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. ‘Beyond the glittery street was darkness, and beyond darkness, the West,’ Kerouac wrote. ‘I had to go’” (Douglas Brinkley, “In the Kerouac Archive,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1998, 50-51).

Kerouac’s love of the road has inspired a generation of nomads, sold millions of books, and graced advertisements for cars and clothing.

It seems clear that we, as a nation, are determined to be “on the road.” We’re so busy chasing our dreams that we’re sacrificing our “sense of place.” And what a loss this is, because without a place of belonging, we lack a certain centeredness.

Home is a concept that goes back to the dawn of humanity and may even predate religion. For millennia, it has given people a sense of peace, safety, stability and belonging. Is our urge to hop to new nests now destroying the concept of “home,” replacing it with the more sterile idea of “housing”? Are we failing to pass the old homestead from one generation to the next, and in the process failing to transmit other important qualities to our descendants? Is the breakdown of the postmodern family somehow related to our need to move? Is our wanderlust a cause or an effect of this problem?

As pleasing as it would be to connect all these various societal failures with the “motion sickness” caused by our hops to new spots, this is not quite fair. People have been on the road since the time of Abraham, and somehow the values of home and family have survived their peripatetic passions.

Moving – whether to a new neighborhood, new city, new state, new job – although it may involve trauma for kids and spouse, need not be a curse, but can be a blessing. What makes a transition good or bad is not when you hop, but how you hop, and the call of Abraham in Genesis 12 can give us some hints about how to make the right moves.

You should hop only if God is calling. This message may not come in an audible form, a voice from the clouds saying, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house …” (Genesis 12:1), as the LORD speaks to Abraham. But word will come in the deep inner sense you have that a move is going to be right for you and your loved ones, right in the sense that it gives you new challenges, new responsibilities and new opportunities for growth. God never calls us to new places only for more money, or greater luxury, or a bigger nest, or additional acquisitions.

You should hop only if the new land is a Promised Land. The LORD wants Abraham to hit the road, not because there is anything wrong with his present land, but so that he will be in a place where the promise will come true: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing” (12:2).

God is determined to do something wonderful with Abraham in the Promised Land. This can be our destiny as well, if we hop to a land where we can fulfill our potential to be a blessing to others – through volunteer work, church involvement, family life and your particular profession.

But at the same time, we should not move if our desire is only to escape the problems of our current situation. Unresolved tensions in the present land have a way of tagging along and polluting the Promised Land, so we must hop only if we’ve made peace with the land we now live in.

The grass isn’t always greener on the other side, unless we are called by God to hit the road toward a land of promise. Abraham heard this call, and hopped well, moving to a land where the LORD could use him to be a blessing to others – to his family, his descendants and people of faith throughout history, including ourselves.

Abraham moved, but he didn’t lose his sense of place; for him, centeredness came from being in the right place with God, and from building altars to the LORD throughout the land of Canaan.

We, too, can retain our sense of place if we “build altars” through faithful living wherever we may be. We can have a certain centeredness if we consider each new home to be a “Bethel” – a House of God. Not a House of Luxury or a House of Wealth or a House of High Technology, but a House of God.

It is only by making each new house a House of God that we can avoid the motion sickness that leads to the breakdown of home and family.

There is nothing wrong with staying home and staying put. But if we do move, we should be careful not to jump because we are “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, [and] desirous of everything at the same time,” as Jack Kerouac put it. Instead, we should hop because we desire to hear God’s guidance and live in a land of promise.

Finally, there is a sense in which God is calling us to get hopping! No, God may not be asking us to move from the specific geographical location we call “home,” or to a new job or a new ministry, but God does ask us to recognize that we are on a spiritual pilgrimage (see Hebrews 11:8-16). We can’t get bogged down spiritually. Growth is not merely an option for children of God.

Have you ever noticed how often people in the Bible are changing their addresses? It is hard to find anyone who is in a serious drama with God who is not on the move. No one ever finds God by nailing life down. Maybe that’s because faith is always discovered along the way.

You certainly cannot follow Jesus without moving, and you can’t move without leaving something behind. Some disciples were asked to leave behind their families and professions. Others were asked to leave behind their sin, or their wealth, or even their grief over the dead. Jesus is always moving on, and he expects his followers to travel pretty light.

The first disciples had a hard time with this and kept wondering when Jesus was going to settle down. They were waiting for him to establish the kingdom right then and there, so at last they could stop walking around.  Like the disciples before us, we don’t know exactly where Jesus is leading us right now. But that’s okay. We’re not asked to be clear about where we are going. We are asked simply to turn our eyes upon Jesus.

If we keep moving, God will take care of the motion sickness.