By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Those of us who have experienced homesickness will describe it as a physical as well as emotional condition, in which the contemplation of leaving a familiar place for an unfamiliar place creates feelings of sadness and anxiety. While most people look forward to traveling to new places and seeing new things, people who suffer from homesickness look backward at all of the comfortable known experiences they will be leaving behind. The routines that give them a sense of stability will be disrupted; the people that anchor them in their day will be absent; they will be set adrift in an uncertain future far from the predictability of the world they have created around them and that uncertainty is unsettling to them. Unfortunately, there is no cure for homesickness. It is a chronic condition, apparently, if the DeMott line is any indication, buried deep within your genes but if managed properly, it doesn't have to be debilitating. Adults who suffer from homesickness often suffer secretly because they have learned how to handle it: namely, that if you grit your teeth and plow forward through the anxiety to get to the other side of it, most frequently the new experiences and places you will discover away from home are enjoyable enough to make up for the temporary pain you suffer upon separation from the old.

Now you may be thinking, "Well, all of that is very interesting but I myself have never suffered from homesickness, so what does this have to do with Isaiah?" Well, I would argue that all of us -- at least all of us over the age of 30 -- no matter who we are, have experienced at least a form of homesickness that is applicable to our text because it is prevalent in the general population. Moreover, as you get older you become more and more at risk for this particular form of the disease, and it can become so chronic, so persistent, that it leaves you crippled and and unable to move. The Greek phrase for this form of homesickness is nostos algos, literally translated "pain and desire to return home". Nostos algos, or, in English, nostalgia.

Robertson Davies said, "The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past." I knew a 92 year old man whose sole occupation was watching CNN all day apparently for the purpose of confirming his belief that the world had gone steadily downhill from the days of his idyllic childhood when movies cost a nickel, wives lived to serve their husbands, and baseball broadcasters knew how to call a game. While reminiscing about the good old days with peers who share our cultural memories can be fun, too much nostalgia can become a disability: our homesickness for the past can lead to a refusal to encounter the future because we become certain that nothing that lies ahead could possibly compare to what has come before. Ted Koppel said, "It becomes increasingly easy, as you get older, to drown in nostalgia."

And apparently this danger is not a new phenomenon. In Isaiah 43, God chastises Israel, saying to the people, "Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old." The people of Israel have been exiled to Babylon and are terribly homesick for all that they have left behind. They sit around in their Babylonian apartments remembering the good old days when they lived in Jerusalem: those good old days where everyone spoke the same language, and went to Temple every Sabbath, and ate the proper foods, and treated their elders with respect. The best future the Israelites can envision is one that returns them to the secure familiar past.

Now, one of the problems, of course, with nostalgia is that we yearn not only for a world that is past, but that never really existed in the first place because our memories selectively screen out the bad and leave only the good. Once, when I was frustrated by the amount of time my son was spending in front of the computer, I said, "You know, when I was your age, I spent an awful lot of my day outdoors. I'd come home from school and go for a hike, or play with the animals in the barn, or just lie under the trees looking at the clouds. And I'd read for hours. I'd go through whole books in a few days." Barely looking away from his computer screen, John said, "I thought you said before that you watched a lot of TV when you were a kid."

"Yeah," I said hesitantly, "I did that too, but I also remember going outdoors a lot, and I know I read all of the time."

By now, John was dubious. "Yeah, and when did you do homework?"

I thought for a minute. "You know, I don't remember doing any homework, but I must have because my grades were fine." I laughed at my own memories of this impossible past when I watched hours of TV, hiked miles in the perennial spring weather, plowed through book after book, and never did a single bit of homework but received straight As, a past that clearly could not have existed in reality but at the same time was part of my certain memory of childhood. We are nostalgic not only for the past, but for a past that never existed because our memories conveniently erase all of the difficulties leaving behind an idealized world constructed out of the things that feel most familiar, secure, and comfortable.

As one senior put it, "The good old days meant climbing trees, chocolate milk, sucking on ice chips just cut by the iceman, licking Mom's mixer beaters, and catching lightening bugs in a jar. [It also meant] hard-to-push lawn mowers, polio, and widespread prejudice. All in all, I'll take today's life anytime. Heck, indoor plumbing and life-saving pharmaceuticals alone make the choice easy. Lets' face it, if I'd been my age back in those good old days, I'd be dead right now."

God says to the people of Israel, "Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing!"

God tells the people of Israel to get their heads out of their dreams of the past. "Forget those days when you lived in a comfortable familiar place. Don't dwell on how things used to be," God says. "In fact," God adds, "don't even sit around remembering how I, your God parted the Red Sea, or brought down the walls of Jericho, or helped David defeat Goliath, because even that glorious magnificent past is still the past. Yes, I did great things for you, but frankly, you ain't seen nothing yet. I am going to do a completely new thing," God tells Israel. "The future that I will create for you is going to open up roads in the widerness, transform deserts into gardens, and tame wild beasts. Drag your eyes away from the past and get ready for what is to come, because it's going to be beyond your imagining."

And that's our trouble. That's why we let ourselves get mired in nostalgia because even if we are homesick for an idealized past that never really existed, at least we can imagine it might have been. We can take all of the things we know make us feel good and project them into the past to create in our memories a secure comfortable world that we are certain we would have loved had it really been that way.

But when we look forward to the future, we can't see what hasn't yet been. We don't have anything familiar to wrap our minds around. God is promising us something completely new, but we don't even know how to imagine that because how do you imagine something you've never seen before? How do you imagine what you've never experienced? When Jesus told the disciples about the cross that waited for him in Jerusalem, he also told them about the promise of the empty tomb, but the disciples were not comforted by that promise. Their minds could never move past his words about the cross, because as terrifying as such a death might be, it was at least within the realm of their experience. The disciples knew suffering, they had seen death, but how could they possibly imagine resurrection?

The fact is that we can't. We can't imagine it. And that is what faith means. Faith recognizes that our imaginations are simply not large enough to be able to foresee what new life God might be able to bring out of the circumstances we are now in, but faith trusts that even though we can't imagine it, God can still make it happen.

Faith is proclaiming to ourselves and others that even though we don't know how it will happen, we will trust that our God is a God who can create gardens in the desert.

Our God is a God who can make the lion lie down with the lamb.
Our God is a God who can part seas and shower down manna in the wilderness.
Our God is a God who can topple walls, and defeat giants, and cause the blind to see.
Our God is a God who can transform our crosses into empty tombs.

God isn't asking you to imagine the future; God is telling you to trust in the God who can imagine it and will life to it. God was there in your past, God is here in your present, and God will absolutely be with you in your future, bringing powerful love to bear on all things so that new life will spring forth for you in ways that you cannot envision. This is the good news: "Have faith," God says, "because you ain't seen nothing yet."