This is Our Home
This is our home.
Home can be a complicated idea. A place where you can kick your shoes off and leave the pretense at the door. Home can turn into a facade sometimes when we have people over though, right? If I came over to your house for the first time ever you may clean up a bit and if it smells anything like my house you’d light a candle. But I’m not talking about the idea of ‘hosting’ at your home…I mean home for real.
Where you are yourself. Where you’ve soaked the carpet with tears and laughed until it hurt. Where you read the Word of God early in the peaceful morning and late into the anxiety-filled evenings. Home like where you’ve yelled at your kids and felt the heart-pounding anxiety of loneliness that feels, not only endless, but pointless as well.
Home can be the place you are most comfortable and most fearful of at the same time. Sometimes all you want to do is get out of home because the walls feel like they’re closing in and there’s no possible way you can escape before it presses so tightly around you that there will be no way out. Home is also the place you probably feel the safest. You can lock the doors, curl up on the couch with a blanket and take a deep breath unlike those you’ve had rushing around underground on the MTA or busy at work all day. Home is where your family grows up. Where your children become adults. It’s where your family, regardless of its size, is fortified - for better or worse.
Queens Church, this is our home. It’s a physical space that holds our presence, it will foster our worship, serve our community and bless our neighbors. This home will be a place linked to transformation and breakthrough. For many of us this will start today. Our children will be dedicated to the Lord here, our friends will be married here, our dead will have their funerals and our new believers will be baptized…all from this stage, all under this roof. It will be a place that holds complicated emotional weight for each of us. We will be convicted of sin, have heart-wrenching discussions with people who we desperately love but can’t come to reconciliation with. It will get messy with food from our fellowship meals and confession of our deepest sin.
But I’m here to tell you that, regardless of all of that, we need to understand one thing before any of us takes another moment to enjoy this new space that God has given us and by the GRACE of God we will be able to keep --- this home is not our church. You are the church. We are the church. The church is God’s people gathered together to worship Jesus and love their neighbor through gospel proclamation and sacrificial living. That’s why we say Jesus is our Passion and Love is Our Mission.
You, and everyone in Queens, are welcome in this home. Welcome to come as you are, welcome to be honest with the Lord and honest with one another, welcome to confess sin and repent of it because of the kindness of God.
This is our home but this home is not eternal. We have a King who gives abundant life as his inheritance and this inheritance is available to all who trust in him. We are thankful for this space but this space is nothing to be worshiped and nothing to place our hope in. Let us enter into it with this mindset about us: that we will occupy it with integrity and seek to allow God to use us in it to grow his church his way for his glory. Amen.
Welcome home.
