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A faithful presence of love in the absences of our city.

Utopia

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Close your eyes.  What do you think of when I say home?  Think for a second.  What do you see?  

Do you see — Your house?  Your childhood home? Your idyllic picture of home, like your dream home or the Home Alone house or the Father of the Bride house?  Is it a place full of life, kids, family?  Is it near lots of great neighbors who bring you apple butter and jam?  Is it safe?  Is it in the city?  Or maybe out in a suburb where everything is clean and things match?  Is a mountain home?  A farmhouse?  A place with land and animals?  Or is it a high rise apartment?  A penthouse?  You want to move on up, to a deluxe apartment in the sky.  Is it a place where everyone has their own room and everything has a good and proper place?  Is it a place full of people playing games?  People talking?  Relationships filling the home?  What is your picture of home?  

When I think of home, I know it starts to stir up these longings, desires…I feel them in my gut.  I want almost everything in the paragraph above.  I want space and neighbors.  I want suburb life and city life  I want a full house and a quiet house.  Mountains, streams, streets and parks.  Kids playing outside.  Safety, security.  Matching things and unique odd things.  Not a cookie cutter and yet sometimes a cookie cutter, because it  brings a house without drafts and lots of things to fix.  I want games and conversation.  I really like the Father of the Bride house.  I drove by the Home Alone house earlier this month outside Chicago.  It looked small from the street, but wow what a neighborhood.  Huge trees, parks, city squares…#Utopia.

Woody Allen tells the story of #Utopia in a film called Midnight in Paris.  Owen Wilson is the main character, Gil.  Gil is a writer.  His dream of home is the 1920’s in Paris.  Here he lives in the city, and he writes beautiful and conflicted prose.  The problem is…he lives in the early 2000’s.  He is about to marry a women that he doesn’t love.  His writing is neither beautiful or conflicted.  He longs for a different life, where his dreams become reality.  And then they do…one late night he stumbles upon a cab that takes him back in time.  This cab ride places him right in the middle of Paris in the 20’s.  He meets Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, TS Eliot, Pablo Picasso.  It is heaven on earth…he is home.  Every night he is in Paris, he leaves Inez (his fiancé) for a midnight stroll.  He makes his way to the spot, where he catches the cab that takes him home.  Here he escapes.  He escapes Inez.  He escapes her horrible family.  He escapes all the troubles of his world and his writing.  Theres something about home that when we dream of it, we dream of escape, don’t we?  Gil ends up falling in love with Adriana.  She becomes part of his longing, his homesickness, his nostalgia.  She is everything Inez is not.  They have long conversations.  They think deeply about the world.  They don’t ever even talk about shopping.  Gil begins making plans of a more permanent relocation.  And then one night while in his #Utopian paradise, Gil and Adriana are transported from Gil’s #utopia to Adrianna’s.  Yes, she has one too.  She wants to go home.  Her home is the time of the impressionists.  Degas, Monet, Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh.  She wants to make her home here.  And in that moment we are met head on with the consequences of nostalgia, of homesickness…it always keeps us out there.  Scanning the horizon for the picture, for the dream, for our #utopian home.  

But the longing, the longing is right.  We do long for our home.  We search for it.  We pine for it.  We scan magazines, Pinterest, Amazon, social media, tv shows, books, paintings, movies, art for it.  We dream about big houses and big yards and great neighborhoods and full lives.  A place where we can finally be at rest.  And not dead. ;-).  The longing is right.  But as CS Lewis says, when you discover an unmet longing in this world at that moment, perhaps you should be reminded that you were made for another world.  The longing is right.  It is embedded.  It is the glitch in the Matrix.  It is the virus in our hard drive.  You can’t find your home, unless that home is with God.  You were made for Him.  He is where home is…your longing is Edenic.  The good news is God is a homemaking God.  He sent His Son Jesus to make a home with you and to secure your homecoming.  And where He is, we are home.  Not backwards.  No nostalgic Delorean ride “Back in Time” to the garden.  But forward…to new heavens and new earth.  Home.  Where God and man dwell together again.  #Utopia is God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — dwelling together in the place that God has prepared for us, new heavens and new earth.  It isn’t our #utopias filled with people just like us, all in Victorian houses, with green parks and fried chicken and apple pie.  It is a multi-national party, a good and reigning King, a kingdom full of people whose best vision of home is dwelling with Him, a longing finally made full and satisfied, a place whose moniker on the front yard reads Shalom, whose neighborhood is full of the presence of God.  El Hogar, Maison, Huis, Haus, Koti, Repouso, Casa, Baile, Dom, Thuis, Oikia…Home.  


Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.

Revelation 21:1-3

~ Justin Edgar

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