Leaving Home - preached at Presbyterian College Baccalaureate 2023

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 65: 17-25 and Acts 10: 24-34 Sermon title: Leaving Home Preached on May 12, 2023, Presbyterian College Baccalaureate I’ve titled this sermon, “Leaving Home.” Are ya’ll ready to leave? Have you learned what you came here to learn? Have you done what you came here to do? Are you ready to leave this place, which, maybe for the last few years, has felt like home? For me, coming here and being with you tonight, is a homecoming. I once sat where you are now. In my four years as a Presbyterian College student, I ate my meals in the Greenville Dining Hall. I played intramural sports. I made friends who became family. Here, I fell in love with a classmate named Sara Hernandez. She once said that I smelled like a mix of Old Spice deodorant and Georgia Dorm, and so you might say that this place became a part of me. It had seeped into my pores. It was home for four years. Then I left, as you are soon to do, and as you leave home to go out into the world, I call on you to reflect on what you will take with you from this place and what you are leaving behind. When you leave home, you can’t take everything with you. What will you take? What are you leaving behind? I’m talking about more than the valuables that you’ll load into a U-Haul trailer tomorrow or the couch that you’ll try to get rid of. I’m thinking now of the Apostle Paul, who said in 1st Corinthians 13: “When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” He left them behind. I’ve done the same. The student I fell in love with here, Sara Hernandez, we’ve now been married for 20 years, but for my relationship with her to start, I had to get a haircut. When we first met, I had long hair, which she wasn’t into, so while I was captivated by her every move, she didn’t pay much attention to me. Then one afternoon, I went to get a haircut from Danny Nelson (He was running an unlicensed barbershop in Georgia Dorm.), and as my auburn locks fell to the ground, I suddenly looked to Sara like someone worth taking seriously. Soon after I had left my long hair behind, on a Saturday night, she took me by the hand, led me from the Sigma Nu Fraternity house to the dugout on the baseball field, and kissed me. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. I may take the memory of it to my grave. Only what did I have to leave behind? I haven’t had a full head of hair since, but my hair line is not the point. My point is that the journey you are on demands you leave home. You can’t have the bright future God intends, and you can’t become the person you are destined to become if you aren’t willing to be refined, if you aren’t willing to leave parts of yourself behind. Don’t forget that. Sacrifice is required for you to become who you are destined to become. My sophomore year, someone gifted me a pair of roller blades, which I wore on the day of a test into Dr. Peter Hobbie’s Old Testament class. I rolled into his class, took the test, rolled up to his desk to turn my test in, then a few days later, he handed it back with a red “C” at the top, alongside a note that said, “Come see me in my office.” Having been summoned, I sat down in front of his imposing desk on the second floor of Neville Hall, and he asked me one of the most important questions anyone has ever asked me, “When are you going to start taking seriously the gifts that God has given you?” At that time in my life, I didn’t know I had any gifts and skills. I had no idea what he was talking about, and so it was Dr. Peter Hobbie who could see who I might become if I were able to leave my rollerblades behind. For Peter, it was something like that. When Jesus first called him, he dropped his nets and left home. He left behind his identity as a fisherman in a small town in favor of becoming who God intended him to be, only think about what happened to Peter and remember that for him, it was no one-step process. When Jesus was arrested, Peter was the one who denied Him three times. He had the opportunity to stand by his Savior, to suffer alongside Him. Instead, he denied the Lord, and suffering from shame, he went back where he came from. After denying Jesus three times, in a sense, he went back home and back to fishing. The one who had dropped his nets and walked away from his fishing boat to go and fish for people hit this one, big bump in the road and, figuratively speaking, he goes back to live in his parents’ basement in Galilee, thinking to himself, “I almost did it. I almost became who He thought I could be. I was almost the Rock that Jesus said I’d be. I almost left home, but now I’m back where I started.” As you think about graduating from Presbyterian College, this place that may have started to feel like home, do you have that fear? If you don’t, your parents do. Your teachers do, for they have prepared you to take what you’ve learned here out into the world, but this process of leaving behind childish ways to become someone else, to become the one God calls you to be, the one this world needs you to be, is one that requires persistence. I left this place, diploma in hand, and landed a job cutting grass for a lawn maintenance company called Habersham Gardens. I drove the truck from mansion to mansion. One afternoon, I was finishing up a job with a crew in this woman’s driveway. She pointed me out to her children and whispered, just loud enough for me to hear, “That’s why you go to college kids, so you don’t have to do that for a living.” Now how did I get from that driveway to this pulpit? Not only did I leave home, but I kept on believing that I was on the way to some place even better, though it was all too unfamiliar. You are on your way from this place, which may have become so familiar that the smell of it has seeped into your pores, but you must leave because this place is not your destination. We are all on our way from one place to the New Creation, but the thing about the New Creation is that we don’t know what it will look like. All we know is that we must keep walking towards it, believing in it, until we get there, leaving the familiar in favor of the promise. So it was with Peter. After Jesus walked into his life calling him to leave home and become the Rock that Christ’s Church would be built upon, God placed in Peter’s life a man named Cornelius. What Peter knew about Cornelius was that he was Roman. In Peter’s mind, he was all wrong. He was uncircumcised, so he was impure. He ate the wrong food. He had grown up worshiping the wrong God. Peter wasn’t interested. However, in a dream, God told Peter, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” Now that was another drastic call to change his whole way of life. Peter had grown up eating certain foods. His mother told him how to live a pure and holy life, and that kind of lifestyle, the one full of convictions bred into him, had to be left behind. Why? Because God is always calling us away from those places that feel like home towards the New Creation. Therefore, leaving behind all that he had been raised to believe, he went to the house of Cornelius, and Peter began to proclaim, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” That’s a big deal, and it never would have happened had Peter stopped growing. It never would have happened had Peter not been ready to listen. It never would have happened had Peter settled into an earthly home, mistaking it for the Kingdom of Heaven. That’s what I have to say to you tonight. Tomorrow, you graduate from college, but your education is not complete. Tomorrow you’ll leave home to go out into the world, but don’t settle in, for the next place you go is not your destination. Tomorrow you will take an important step towards becoming the person God created you to be, but you still have work to do, and you must continue to listen to the people God places in your path who will help you along the way. For Peter, first it was Jesus. Then it was Cornelius. For me, here, it was Sara Hernandez, then Dr. Peter Hobbie. Since then, there’s been a hundred more, and just as many setbacks. The wisdom that I have to pass on as a 2002 religion major with a mediocre grade point average is this: God isn’t done with you. The diploma that you’ll receive tomorrow – get it framed. Hang it proudly, but never mistake your diploma for the sign that you’re complete because your education isn’t over, and your journey is just beginning. From this day forth, when you look at your diploma, may it remind you of all the people who got you where you are right now, all the people who made an impact, all the people who saw something in you that you couldn’t yet see for yourself. And keep looking for people who will help you along your path to the New Heavens and the New Earth, for while you must leave this place, you are on the way to something better. All that is required is that you continue leaving your old self behind, holding on to the promise that there are gifts inside of you that must be taken seriously. Gifts that the world outside this campus so badly needs. Leave this home and keep going. Leave your old self behind to become who God intends you to be. Walk towards the New Heaven and the New Earth, which is our eternal home.