By The Rev. J.C. Austin
I’m not someone who has ever really struggled with homesickness of any kind. The only time I can remember truly experiencing anything like it was in the two years that I spent living abroad: the first for a year in Australia in the early 1990s, and the second for a year in South Africa at the end of the 1990s.
Now, don’t get me wrong: they were both life-changing experiences, each in their own way, and each having a profound impact on my sense of myself, my understanding of the world, and the things I most appreciate and care the most about.
But the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas were also 
a real challenge in terms of feeling so far away from home. And Thanksgiving was particularly hard because, of course, while other countries have a day of Thanksgiving, our celebration of Thanksgiving is quintessentially American: turkeys, cornmeal, and pecans are all indigenous to the Americas, so finding them in Australia took no small amount of effort so I could have a Thanksgiving dinner of roast turkey, cornbread dressing, and pecan pie. But I did, and managed to even turn out pretty solid versions of both the turkey and the dressing, which I was especially proud of since I had never attempted either on my own before (I was only 22 at the time).
The pecan pie was another story, though. I really wanted pecan pie because I particularly associated it with Thanksgiving at home; my mother’s parents had a large pecan tree in their yard, and always had home-roasted salted pecans around when I would go there, as we did almost every Thanksgiving. Ironically, I didn’t especially like pecans growing up, and I don’t remember having pecan pie as a staple dessert.
But something about that association between those meals and pecans had me fixated on baking one for my Australian Thanksgiving. So I made up pie dough for the crust, mixed together the filling for the pie, and carefully placed a tree’s worth of pecans on top of the filling, then set the oven. The problem was, I miscalculated on the conversion from the Celsius settings on the oven to Fahrenheit somehow, and I ended up baking the pie at something like 500 degrees Fahrenheit instead of 350, which I only realized when I began smelling the smoke from the next room.
At first, I just thought it was from some wildfires that were near the city, carrying across on the wind. But then I realized the smell was coming from the kitchen rather than the window. With a start, I lept up and opened the kitchen door and a cloud of smoke came out thick enough to imply that there was a wildfire contained solely within the confines of my own kitchen. Making a mental note to check the clearly non-functional apartment smoke detector later, I opened the oven and withdrew a round, perfectly black charcoal briquette in the dish where my pie was supposed to be.
It’s a funny story now (who knew that I really would need to master that 9/5ths conversion fraction for Celsius from 5th grade math in the real world?), but at the time I was kind of brokenhearted. Somehow that pie had become a symbol of being able to go home for the holidays, or at least bring home to me on the other side of the world, and it was gone, and all I could feel was the distance and the absence of it now.
Years later, I heard this song by Waylon Jennings, the country singer, and it took me back to that experience almost instantly because it so perfectly articulated what it felt like to be so far from home, longing so deeply for its promise and grieving its absence. Perhaps you will have your own story that it speaks to:
I’m a long way from home
And so all alone
Homesick like I never thought I’d be
I’m a long way from home
And everything is wrong
Someone please watch over me
I’m not accustomed to these feelings
The loneliness is burning in my soul
Sometimes the mind is so misleading
I wish I’d stayed at home like I was told
I’m a long way from home
And so all alone
Homesick like I never thought I’d be
I’m a long way from home
And everything is wrong
Someone please watch over me
As I was thinking about our Advent theme this year, “Close to Home,” and considering this first Sunday of Advent, on which we light the first candle of the Advent Wreath, traditionally called the Candle of Hope, both this song and its deep resonance with the experience of homesickness came to mind almost immediately for me. That may sound a little counterintuitive at first. Advent in general and the first Sunday and particular is supposed to be about waiting in hope for something good to happen; how could a song that so perfectly encapsulates loneliness and loss be helpful with that?
Well, because for hope to really matter, for it to resonate in all its power and beauty, it has to be able to both acknowledge and speak into the reality of hopelessness. Not necessarily hopeless in the sense of having given up even the possibility of hope, but at least hopeless in the sense of an absence of hope.
And the truth is, we have a hard time with that, especially here in the United States with our cultural temptations to what is sometimes called “toxic positivity”: responding to uncomfortable and painful emotions with false reassurances to try and dismiss the reality of them rather than acknowledging and engaging them directly. But that is what Christian hope is all about. It doesn’t try to shoo away or paint over the realities of pain, loss, or even despair; it steps right down into the midst of those realities, acknowledges their reality and the need to change them, and then points beyond them to what God truly intends for us and is already at work bringing to us.
It is precisely that which Jesus is talking about in this passage, which is both powerful and good news, albeit counterintuitively at first. “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world…”
This is probably why Advent cards aren’t a thing the way Christmas cards are: “people will faint from fear and foreboding” just doesn’t have the same mass appeal as “peace on earth, goodwill to all” when you tape them to your refrigerator. The thing is, though, it doesn’t say all people, or even which people. And that’s important, because the people fainting from fear and foreboding from the Advent of Christ’s final coming are the ones who are most invested in the world staying exactly as it is, in all its pain and division and injustice; the ones for whom Jesus coming in power and great glory is categorically bad news.
But there are others: the ones to whom he says, “when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” He’s speaking there not to the ones who will lose hope when he comes, but who are feeling without hope now: all of those who feel homesick in the midst of the realities of this world; all who long for the home of love, joy, and peace that God intends for us and promises to us in and through Jesus Christ; all who are struggling to hold on to hope and may be tempted to despair or to numb themselves.
And in Advent, we remember not only the gloomy realities of the world as it is now, but also the gleaming promises of the world that God always intended for us, that God is already recreating for us here and now through Christ and which God will bring to full healing and completion in the end.
So if “I’m a Long Way From Home” is a counterintuitive Advent song, I want to conclude with one that almost sounds like it was written for all of us who are longing for the home we hope for in Jesus Christ. It’s called “A Sort of Homecoming,” by the rock group U2. The narrator of the song is addressing someone who is experiencing loneliness, distance, and grief.
First, he promises to meet them “on borderlands,” space that is both marginal and transitional and can thus be a place of great loneliness, and declares that they will not simply endure there but will thrive: “on borderlands we run,” he says, which is a wonderful way of summing up how we as Christians are invited to live as Advent people: thriving together with Christ in the transitional space and time until he fully and finally comes. And that is also the second promise: that both the narrator of the song and Jesus himself are already coming home, and will be there shortly. So with that in mind, listen to this song with Advent ears:
And you know it’s time to go
Through the sleet and driving snow
Across the fields of mourning to a light that’s in the distance
And you hunger for the time
Time to heal, ‘desire’ time
And your earth moves beneath your own dream landscape
On borderland we run.
I’ll be there, I’ll be there tonight
A high-road, a high-road out from here
O come away, o come away, o come; o come away, I say
O come away, o come away, o come; o come away, I say
Oh, on borderland we run
And still we run, we run and don’t look back
I’ll be there, I’ll be there
Tonight, tonight
I’ll be there tonight, I believe
I’ll be there so high
I’ll be there tonight, tonight
And your heart beats so slow
Through the rain and fallen snow
Across the fields of mourning to a light that’s in the distance
Oh, don’t sorrow, no don’t weep
For tonight at last I am coming home
I am coming home
“Your redemption is drawing near,” Jesus promises, and that is the promise that is the best of all the news for us, I think, because it is not a promise that we will eventually get to go home. No, it is that the light in the distance invites us not to sorrow or weep because at last, Christ is coming home, bringing home to us.