Nowadays many of us travel vast distances, perhaps many times in a year, either for business or for holidays. We book our accommodation in advance, and we take with us pretty much everything we think we are going to need. We are never far from phones and e-mails. Both family and work know where to find us in an emergency. Thus connected we feel more comfortable, but our experience of the places to which we go is limited, because we are that much less dependent on what we may find there.
In Biblical times journeys were very different. If we are to understand what the accounts of those journeys might have to say to us, we need to think ourselves back into a very different concept of what it means to undertake a journey. Fortunately we don’t need to travel very far in time or space to recapture at least something of what travel used to mean, and still means for some people. For some of us, as recently as 50 or 60 years ago, going away to boarding school for three months or so at a time was something like a real journey into unknown and possibly hostile territory, even if we flourished well enough once we settled down there. Much more poignantly, some of our neighbours, certainly down the hill in Belsize Park, still remember what it meant for them or their parents and grandparents to leave home with little more than a suitcase as they escaped from vicious regimes in central and eastern Europe in the 1920s and 30s. More recently, the Jamaicans who came to London to work the buses in the 1950s, or the Bangladeshis who came to work in the garment industry in the 60s and 70s also knew what it meant. On this the 4th of July, we remember too the many thousands of Europeans who left their homes behind from the 17th century onwards to seek a new life and new opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic. And such movements continue to this day, as poverty and war drive courageous or desperate men and women to leave their homeland behind. As a church we support the London Churches Refugee Fund which helps some of them to find their feet here.
Jacob was a refugee. Having cheated his brother Esau out of both the birthright and the blessing that should have been his as the eldest son, he had to leave home in a hurry to escape his angry brother’s murderous intent. Like so many refugees his destination was determined by where he could expect to find family members to take him in. So he set off for Haran, where his uncle Laban still lived. Having only the vaguest notion of which way to go, or what it would be like when he got there, he didn’t even know that he had arrived until he asked directions from the shepherds gathered around the well. They were waiting for all the shepherds to assemble so that together they could shift the heavy stone over the well, but when Rachel appeared, Jacob, who seems to have been something of an Obelix when it came to shifting stones, moved the stone single-handed and drew the water for her flock. It was love at first sight. He was strong, and she was not only beautiful but family and prosperous with it. Touched as he was by the vision of Rachel’s beauty, Jacob seems to have been just as quick to notice the size of Laban’s flock. Uncle Laban turned out to be a tricksy negotiator, but Jacob remained steady in his resolve, and as fair in his dealings with Laban as the latter deserved, eventually winning the fair maiden and returning with her to his home in the land God had promised to his father and his grandfather. There the twelve sons of Leah and Rachel would grow up to become the founding fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel. Even then his journeying was not over, for famine would eventually drive the whole family to take refuge in Egypt under the protection of Rachel’s eldest son Joseph. And still there was one more long journey to be made, for Jacob insisted that his body should be carried back to the promised land, to be buried with Abraham and Isaac in the family grave. Jacob knew what it was to love his home, and yet be obliged to leave it as chance or providence directed.
I think we can all recognise, and many of us can identify with Jacob’s love of the place he knew as home. If we were fortunate enough to know stability and affection as children, the place we first came to know as home will always be special to us. If we have to go away, for whatever reason, we will cherish the memory, and be drawn back to it, if not physically then at least psychologically in wishing to create similar conditions for our own children and grandchildren. In the Old Testament, this sense of belonging, of home, is very firmly attached to the land of Canaan, which Abraham and Isaac and Jacob learned to call home. Known to later generations as the land of Israel, the new name that Jacob was given when he wrestled with God on his homeward journey, the intense desire of the Jewish people to establish a permanent home in the land of Israel has been a critical factor in history ever since.
Yet we are continually being called by the gospel to leave home, to move beyond our comfort zones as we set out to do the work to which God calls us. This was to be the experience of the apostles after Jesus’ death, and in this evening’s reading he begins to train them for it. In the New Testament the family network and the land which shaped Jacob’s notion of home, has become the close-knit group of disciples around Jesus – later still the Christian community, the Church – from which they will set out and to which they will return. Like them we are called to take very little with us, only a staff and a companion, symbols of the real but limited physical and emotional support that our Lord knows we need. Enough to help us as we go, but not so much as to encumber us or hamper our progress.
So it is that we live in constant tension between home and away. We are continually being sent out, for example to undertake some new venture, as Emma is doing among us to-day, or as Jim will be doing at the LSE from September, and yet we are constantly being drawn back into the fortifying, empowering community of God’s people that we recognise as home. And every move that we make offers us the opportunity to think again about what really matters, to leave behind those bits of baggage that got in the way. I doubt whether in this life any of us will end up with as little as just a staff and a companion, but we should aim to become less attached to all the stuff that we accumulate whenever we stay anywhere for a while – possessions, traditions, ways of doing things. Comforting as they may be, they are liable to get in the way when next we are called to move on.
At the end of his life there were just a few things that were still precious to my father, mostly for sentimental reasons. When he asked for each one to be placed in his hands so that he could enjoy looking at it one last time, we knew he was ready to set out on his last journey, his journey home to where he would be surrounded by all the things that really mattered to him – the people he had loved, in the presence of the Lord whom he had served.
He ordered them to take nothing with them for their journey except a staff.