There is a crisis of homelessness in our world today.  So many people are living without a home.  I am not referring only to the poor men and women who are living on our streets today but I am thinking of those who have a home but have wandered away from it and are living their lives “away from home”.  The problem is not that we do not have a home to enjoy and rest in but that we are drawn away from our home and we are suffering from loneliness and isolation as we try to find a place to live in a world that is not our home.  We have forgotten what home is like.  It is not just a place to sleep, eat and have a roof over our heads.  Home is a place where we are nurtured in life, where we are loved and accepted for who we truly are, where we celebrate life and where we come to experience the joy of living.  In our home we are not strangers but we are royalty, blessed and clothed in honor, respect and dignity and surrounded in love.  When was the last time that you were “at home”?

    On the day of our baptism we receive a new life in Christ and we are welcomed into a new home.  Through the grace of our baptism we become the “children of God” and our true home is “in the Father’s house”.  Jesus tells his disciples in the gospel of John, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”  By the grace of our baptism we are not homeless but we have a place where we are loved, nurtured and where we find life.  The “Father’s house” is a place of love, life and joy.  In the Father’s house there is always a celebration going on, a banquet that is being prepared and an eternal embrace of love and compassion that is awaiting us.  Only in the Father’s house will we truly be “at home”.  God is our loving Father who is always waiting for us to “come home” and who urges us to “stay with me” and who is pleading with us to share in his heavenly riches, to eat at his table and to celebrate and rejoice in our shared life of love.

    Unfortunately, too many of us have rambling hearts.  We are restless and we think that we can make a better life for ourselves away from the Father in the midst of a world full of the illusions of pleasure.    We are convinced that we will enjoy a greater freedom away from home.  We find ourselves in places where “we don’t belong”.  We no longer live under the “shadow of the Father”, in his protective love, and we are burned time and again by a harsh world of indifference.  Too soon we lose our way, much like the people of Israel who we hear from the Lord “have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them.”  When we are away from the Father’s house we begin to see things differently, we begin to see ourselves differently.  Like the young man in the story of the Prodigal Son in the gospel of Luke, we begin to think of ourselves as slaves in a world that makes many demands upon us.  We no longer think of ourselves as worthy of the Father’s love like the first son or we think that the Father has never really loved us like the second son.  Both sons are suffering from being homeless, away from the Father’s house.

    The elder son in our gospel story remains close to the Father’s house but he no longer goes into the house to experience the Father’s love and care.  He sees his relationship with the Father as being defined by service and obedience.  He sees through eyes of resentment and bitterness.  His heart is not restless, it is hardened and cold.  He shares his anger with everyone rather than the Father’s joy.  The Father is pleading with him to come into the house and share in a life of celebration and joy.

    The door to the Father’s house is always open but one cannot enter if he is looking through eyes of bitterness, resentment and anger.  Neither can he enter if he sees himself unworthy and without dignity.  Both of the sons in Jesus’gospel parable need a new way of seeing themselves and the world.  They need a conversion or “metanoia” in their interior being.  They need faith.  The door to the Father’s house is a door of faith.  Faith is a way of seeing ourselves and the world the way that the Father sees – with love, truth, compassion, mercy and joy.

   We are called to help people to see with the eyes of faith, to know the Father’s love, mercy, compassion, tenderness, truth, beauty and joy.  This gift of faith opens the door to new life and will help us to find our way home.  There is a celebration going on in the Father’s house, come and join in and know that we are no longer homeless but that we have a place prepared and waiting for us at the table in the Father’s house.