Everyone Needs a Place to Call Home | 9/7/25
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How can you practice radical hospitality in your daily life, creating space for others to feel welcome?
How might we as Trinity live out our vision of welcoming all people in fresh ways this season?
How does the idea of God’s household challenge the way you see the church today?
What gets in the way of you fully believing, “I belong here”?
How do you personally “breathe deep the breath of God” when you feel weary or lost?
Transcript:
Whether it is your first time here or hundredth or thousandth or more time here, I’m so glad that you are here, and I hope that in this place there is something that feels like you are home. Because when we discover our home in the good news of Christ’s love for us, there is no better place for us to be.
So welcome, welcome. On this day when we consider this idea that everyone needs a place to call home, this is a theme that we can see running through the pages of Scripture, and particularly as we read about Jesus’ interaction with people in the Gospels, and then the stories from the early church in the New Testament, there is much there to teach us about creating space where people feel at home.
So I want to read just a few verses today that come from the second chapter of Ephesians. I’ll invite you to follow along, if you’d like, on the screens as I read this for us:
So now you are no longer strangers and aliens. Rather, you are fellow citizens with God’s people, and you belong to God’s household. As God’s household, you are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. The whole building is joined together in him, and it grows up into a temple that is dedicated to the Lord. Christ is building you into a place where God lives through the Spirit.
This is the Word of God for the people of God. And God’s people say, thanks be to God.
Would you pray with me? Come, Holy Spirit, and breathe life into the words that I speak, that they might carry a word from you into our hearts and lives this morning. Amen.
Some people just have a way, don’t they? They have a way of making you feel welcomed, of feeling like you are at home in their presence. One of the people that has done that for me and for my wife, Catherine, and for our kids over the years, is Charlene. From the moment you arrive at Charlene’s house, it is very clear that she is making space for you to feel at home.
It starts when she opens the door and welcomes you in with a warm embrace. And then, most likely, there is a small gift of some kind just to let you know that you’re loved. And usually it’s a favorite of yours that she’s remembered and she’s giving you. And if you have children with you, there’s definitely going to be a gift for the children as well. And if you have a pet with you, there’s even going to be a gift for the pet.
On the nightstand by the bed where you sleep at night, there’s going to be a book that she likely picked out just with you in mind, thinking that it might be something that, when you get to your room at night, you might want to pick up and read. And there will be wonderful meals at the table, lovingly prepared. And then the conversation is rich as you sit there together.
The best gift of all in going to visit Charlene is the gift of presence. This woman, who is now a retired bishop in the United Methodist Church, who, when she was active, had more to do on any given day than she could possibly get to. And yet, when you showed up at her house, everything on the to-do list, it felt like, was set aside, and she was fully present for you right in front of her. It felt so good, like you were really at home.
In a very different way, almost 20 years ago now, I had this feeling of being welcomed and at home—as bizarre as that sounds—on my first trip to the country of Angola, half a world away, with people that I had never met before. That first time, when I took the plane from the capital city of Luanda to the inner province of Malanje, and we landed on that tiny strip of airway that was left over from when the rest of the airport had been bombed out during the Civil War that had just ended a couple of years earlier.
But when we landed, after we kind of got over the jitters of what we had just experienced, and we looked out the window, there were dozens and dozens of people waiting for us to welcome us. And you would have thought that we were their long-lost family members coming back home. That’s how they made us feel as they donned us with scarves and other gifts that they had brought. They embraced us, and they were eager to take us to their churches and to their homes to get to know what life was like there. It was this strangely wonderful feeling of being home. Some people just have that way about them, a way of making you feel at home.
In the year 2001, the United Methodist Church launched a campaign, and this campaign was really all about encouraging us as a denomination and as churches within the denomination to practice this kind of way in the world: to be hospitable, to be welcoming, and to make space where people might feel at home in our churches. A slogan with that campaign that you can still see show up today in some places—perhaps some of you remember it—was Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors.
It was an aspirational value, something that we could strive toward. And I’m so glad that now, almost 25 years later, we continue to be on a journey of seeking to do all we can to grow in our love and openness to everyone who might come into our presence, longing for them to be able to find a home within our churches.
As I was thinking about it this past week, it occurred to me that that slogan, “Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors.” describes the earliest form of church really well. It could have been the slogan for the church that we read about in the book of Acts, beginning with that day of Pentecost, when people came from all sorts of places with all kinds of different backgrounds, from different languages and practices.
And yet many of them, on that first day, because of what the Spirit was doing, came to believe and came to be part of this new community that would become the church. The Spirit was indeed at work, moving in the early days of the church, creating a culture of radical hospitality.
You know, I sure hope that in our time we can recover the goodness of that word radical. That’s a word that’s been maligned in recent days. But when I go to the dictionary, as I did just this past week, and I look it up and I look at what Merriam-Webster has to say and what Oxford and Cambridge have to say, you know what I find as the very first definition of radical? I find this: affecting the fundamental nature of something, far-reaching or thorough.
That’s exactly how the early church impacted notions of hospitality in its day. It was radical. It was far-reaching and thorough in the way in which the church adopted ways of being that the world had not known. Think about some of the stories that we have in the book of Acts.
Peter having a dream, a Spirit-inspired dream, where everything that he had thought previously was right and true, and the way that he was supposed to follow and the rules that he was supposed to be obedient to, got flipped on their head so that he might offer welcome to a man named Cornelius, a Gentile, of all things.
Then we read about the story of Philip, another one of the disciples, having an encounter with an Ethiopian eunuch, somebody that under normal circumstances he would never have interacted with. But the Spirit was doing something new. And so Philip goes, and he responds to this man who wants to know more about this Jesus that he reads about in the prophets. Philip spends time with him.
Or consider the story of Paul’s own conversion—this man who had been participating in the execution of the early Christians and stood by and watched as Stephen was stoned to death, but then has his Damascus Road encounter. And afterwards, do you remember the next part of the story? This man, who only moments earlier, days earlier, would have been incredibly feared, is welcomed with extravagant hospitality by some of those early Christians into a home where he can be tended to and cared for, where he can be healed from the blindness that he has had, so that he might become the missionary that God was calling him to be.
The Jerusalem Council—we read about it in the 15th chapter of Acts—comes to a decision that indeed, no matter what they previously understood to be the way that God wanted to operate through the early church, they needed to change their thinking. Because as they listened to the stories from Paul and Barnabas and others about what God was doing in places that they had not been to, surely the Spirit was at work there. So who were they to interfere in this new thing?
You know something? Sometimes things that get off to a really good start, though, encounter a challenge along the way, and things can start to go off the rails. And so as we continue reading in the New Testament, we realize that in some of those early communities of faith, some things were beginning to happen where those who had been included began to be those who were excluding. Ever experienced that happen? How, once somebody has been included, then the shift happens, and they become the ones who exclude others.
And so Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians that we read this morning, is issuing a reminder to the church of who they are. He uses phrases like “the new humanity,” a new people that is created from different people so that they might be one. The letter refers to them as God’s household—a place where no one is a stranger or alien, a place where no one has first rights of ownership, a place where all are fellow citizens in the new kingdom of love that God is building.
In other places in the New Testament, we hear similar themes articulated, including in Second Corinthians when Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ… new creation.” New creation! Wherever the Spirit of Christ is, something new is happening.
So, as we think about, how everyone needs a place to call home, part one of the message today is a message to the church. To the church universal, all the way into the church right here—we, the people of Trinity—to be reminded that we are called to be that place, that community where God is at work doing something new through the gift of the Spirit. The place where, led by the Spirit and bound by love—two of our core values at Trinity—we begin to disrupt old categories of division, to dismantle tired ideologies of superiority so that we might discover new friendships with people who were previously strangers or even alien to us.
If you look at our vision statement as a church here at Trinity, you’ll see that the very first way that we are invited to courageously witness to Jesus’ presence among us is by welcoming all people—to make space for everyone. So, part one of the message today is for the church.
Part two of the message is for each of you. I’m so glad that you are here. I’m so glad that you made the choice to come to this place on this day, to be a part of this service and risk— because yes, sometimes it’s a risk—engaging in this community.
I’m so glad because I believe that in the life of the church, it’s possible for us to find a sense of home that can change everything. I believe in the potential of the church to be the place where everyone can find home. Not because of who we are, not because of who I am or who you are, but because of who Christ is, and because of the way Christ can be at work in us and through us.
In the Scripture today, we hear the author refer to Christ as the cornerstone or the keystone—an idea that’s picked up in other places in the New Testament as well. A piece that is so essential that everything else holds together, fits together because of that one piece. Apart from Christ, we cannot be the community that we are called to be, church. But with Christ as the cornerstone, indeed the Spirit can be at work in ways beyond what we could ever ask or imagine.
I love the phrase that showed up in the video this morning: Home is the presence of Jesus. Because when Jesus takes up residence in our hearts and our lives, we can become at home in our own bodies and in a community where imperfect people are learning to love one another better and also to love our neighbors.
When I was involved in youth ministry back in the early 90s, one of the things that we would do would be to listen to new music that was coming out and go to Christian music festivals. And there was a band that I learned about during that time, an alternative Christian rock band called The Lost Dogs. What a name. I didn’t follow a lot of their music, but there was one song of theirs that really got my attention.
It came out in 1992, and the title of the song is Breathe Deep. Now, that’s probably a song you’ve never heard of—and if you have, you win the prize today. So see me afterwards for that. But many of you probably are familiar with the Billy Joel song from around that timeframe, We Didn’t Start the Fire. Remember that song? And it went through a long list of historic events, things that had happened over time.
So this song was kind of in a similar vein. The verses were very rapid in pace, and they were lists of categories that we sometimes use to define people. So, for example, the second verse of Breathe Deep goes like this:
“Suicidal rock idols, shut-ins, dropouts. Friendless. Homeless. Penniless. Depressed. Presidents, residents, foreigners, and aliens. Dissidents, feminists, xenophobes, and chauvinists.”
And then when it went to the chorus, the feel of the song totally changes, and the chorus says:
“Breathe deep. Breathe deep the breath of God.”
There was in that chorus this recognition that no matter who we’ve been, no matter what we’ve done, no matter where we’ve gone, no matter how lost we may feel about our own lives or selves, in Christ, new creation. And in Christ, everyone can find a home.
Home is a place where we can breathe deep the breath of God. Home is a place where we know we are accepted. Home is a place where we don’t have to earn love. Home is a place where we are surrounded by grace.
I want you to turn to somebody close to you right now and say, “I’m so glad you’re here.” Go ahead.
And now I want you to turn to somebody else and say, “You belong here.”
Did something just lighten a little bit in you? That felt good, didn’t it? It feels good to say to somebody else, “I’m so glad you’re here.” And it feels good to hear somebody else say to you, “You belong here.”
The Scripture this morning ends this way: “Christ is building you into a place where God lives through the Spirit.”
I’m so glad you’re here. You belong here. Welcome home. Amen.