Homily | 🏠 Homesick for a Home You Can’t Name

First Sunday in Lent

Assigned Scripture Readings: Genesis 2:15–17; 3:1–7 · Matthew 4:1–11

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

I want to start this morning by reading you something. Frederick Buechner was a novelist and a preacher, one of the rare people who was genuinely great at both. He wrote this portrait of Eve, after the garden.

Like Adam, Eve spent the rest of her days convincing herself that it had all worked out for the best. Their new life didn’t turn out to be as bad as had been predicted, and somehow their marriage weathered the change. If they had moments of terrible bitterness over what had happened, they had other moments when it became more of a bridge than an abyss between them and when the question of which of them was to blame got lost in the question of how both of them were to survive. One son died an ugly, senseless death, and another went through life as disfigured by remorse as by a cleft palate. But all in all things didn’t go too badly. When the last child left home, it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to be alone again with a man who, after his third martini, might still lash out at her as a snake in the grass and a bad apple, but at least they still had their independence and their principles, which as nearly as she could remember were what they’d given everything up for. They stood, however grimly at times, on their own feet.

It was only once in a while at night, just as she was going off to sleep with all her usual defenses down, that her mind drifted back to the days when, because there was nothing especially important to do, everything was especially important; when too good not to be true hadn’t yet turned into too good to be true; when being alone was never the same as being lonely. Then sad and beautiful dreams overtook her, which she would wake up from homesick for a home she could no longer even name, to make something not quite love with a man whose face she could not quite see in the darkness at her side

“Homesick for a home she could no longer even name.”

This is where we are on the First Sunday in Lent.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Here we go. Forty days of being told we’re terrible people. The Lenten piety Olympics. The grim project of becoming slightly better versions of ourselves through discipline and willpower and giving up chocolate, as though the main problem with humanity is that we haven’t been trying hard enough.

But that’s not what Lent is for.

Lent begins with a question: what is the ache that Buechner just named? The homesickness we feel sometimes, late at night, when our defenses are down. The sense that the life we’ve built — the good life, even, the decent life — is worth having, but somehow not quite the thing. Not quite home.

That ache has a name. And the name is Sin. It’s a name that’s gone out of style. We call it different things now: self-sabotage, disconnectedness, insecurity, hubris. But sin is one syllable, so it’s easier to say.

And I’m not talking about sins, plural; the list of infractions, the itemized moral failures. I mean Sin, singular; the existential condition. The deep-down thing underneath all the individual mistakes. And to understand what that is, it behooves us to read Genesis right.

The Garden of Eden story isn’t a news report about something that happened once, a long time ago, to two specific people. All that blaming of Eve or Adam is a distraction. This ancient poem is a diagnosis. We are Adam and Eve. This story’s set not in history but in your heart and mine, right now.

God makes this garden — this home — and places human beings in it. And everything is given. Everything. We’re made in the image of God, breathing divine breath, walking with God in the cool of the evening. We have it all.

And then the serpent shows up. And he doesn’t say, “Pssst. Put that styrofoam in the recycling bin.” He doesn’t tell them to go do something awful. He offers things that sound almost reasonable. He’s basically a life coach. He’s got a podcast. He sells courses online. And his message is simple: Are you sure God isn’t holding out on you? Maybe you need to take matters into your own hands. Secure your own existence. Be your own person. Hey... Be like God.

In that moment — in that flinch of anxiety, that flash of what if it’s not enough, what if I need to manage this myself — the grasping begins.

But the heartbreaking thing is, the thing they reached for, they already had. They were already like God. Made in the divine image, held in divine love, walking with the Holy in the cool of the evening. They already were what the serpent was dangling in front of them.

Let’s sit with that for a moment, because it’s the whole story.

The tragedy of the Fall isn’t that they wanted something wrong or wicked. It’s that they couldn’t trust they already possessed the very thing they were reaching for. The hunger was real. But they were already home. Yet still they grabbed.

Now, God isn’t surprised by this. God didn’t make a mistake when God made creatures capable of anxiety and grasping. The same freedom that makes the Fall possible is the same freedom that makes love possible. You can’t have one without the other. Think of any marriage that’s lasted decades, or any parent watching a grown child walk out into the world: the love is real precisely because it isn’t guaranteed. Faithfulness means something because unfaithfulness was always possible. God didn’t make robots. God was after love.

You know this feeling. Think of the person who can’t stop drinking... They’re not hungry for alcohol, they’re hungry for an end to their sorrow. But they’re trying to manufacture that peace themselves rather than receive it. Or think of someone you love who worked eighty hours a week for thirty years, chasing security, chasing enough, chasing the feeling that they’d finally made it only to arrive at retirement and find the pain was still there, quiet but unchanged, waiting. The grasping is misdirected longing. But it’s still longing. It’s the homing instinct of a creature made for love.

God isn’t disgusted by us in our woundedness. God looks at our anxious, grasping, arrangement-making, standing-on-our-own-two-feet selves and sees a beloved creature that’s homesick.

Which is why Matthew 4 is so profound.

Jesus has just been baptized. The voice from heaven has just said: This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. And immediately, the Spirit drives him out into the wilderness. Forty days. No food. Alone. And then the tempter comes.

Same pitch as the garden. Same sales technique. If you are the Son of God, prove it. Be. Like. God. Are you sure you can trust the Father? Maybe you should manage this yourself.

And Jesus (hungry, alone, in the bleak wilderness) just doesn’t. He doesn’t grasp or prove. He rests in the Father’s love with a completeness that Adam, surrounded by abundance in a garden, somehow couldn’t manage. The text follows this rhythm: It is written. It is written. It is written.

This isn’t Jesus winning a Bible trivia contest. This is Jesus speaking from the grain of the universe. Saying out loud what’s simply, actually, ontologically true about what we are and whose we are. Three times the tempter swings. Three times Jesus simply stands in what he already is. Because he knows what Adam forgot: you can’t lose what you already fully are.

Paul calls Jesus the Second Adam. And the gift, he says, exceeds the wound. Grace isn’t a patch job. What’s on offer through Jesus isn’t a re-do but a consummation. Not the image restored, but the image fulfilled. Not just walking with God in the cool of the evening, but being taken, through Christ, into the very life of God.

The forty days of Lent aren’t a performance test. They’re an invitation to stop performing. To let the defenses come down, as Buechner says, and let the homesickness surface. To name the grasping for what it is. To grieve what it’s cost us.

You’re safe to see all of that. Because Jesus has already gone before you into the wilderness and come back. He entered the human condition not from the outside, as a fixer, but from the inside, as one of us... And carried it through death into resurrection.

And the voice that said you are my beloved over him at the Jordan says the same thing over you in your baptism. It was said over you before you did anything to deserve it, and it’ll hold when you’ve done everything to forfeit it. That’s the word underneath all the other words. That’s the home underneath all other homes.

You’re already beloved. You’re already held. You don’t have to grasp for it.

That word doesn’t depend on your discipline or your forty-day streak or your spiritual résumé.

Happy Lent. Amen.