Pastoral Ponderings—“Welcome Home”- Jan. 17, 2024
We heard the greeting “Welcome home!” countless times in I couldn’t tell you how many different settings when we were at Disney this past week. Sounds like it must be one of their new things these days. Despite the fact the I know it must be some kind of marketing ploy, it’s still a powerful phrase that resonates on multiple levels. But how can you call Disney “home” so that the greeting can in any way make sense, when none of us really live there? Yet the term still fits in wonderful ways.
The Disney/Pixar movie “Inside Out” talks about “core memories”– those memories that stay with us, and somehow help shape us– to the extent that one of the Disney shirts I saw many times walking around the parks read “This is a Core Memory Day.” Disney’s movies, and the whole idea of their “Magic Kingdom” that is such a draw for many of us, leads me to want to describe our trips there more as a pilgrimage than a vacation. For many, facets of Disney form huge chunks of the fabric of our lives. So maybe “welcome home” fits. At least it does for us, and it certainly has a positive, powerful feel to it.
It takes getting away like this to our Disney “home” to realize that maybe the same is true for the church, and the Kingdom of God that Jesus talks about. Is it too bold to say that I think Disney in some ways tries to emulate the welcoming grace of the Kingdom of God with their claim to be “most magical place on earth?” Maybe we could re-evaluate how we think of and how we do church, that it might do us as well as it does Disney, to use the phrase in the same way for our guests, greeting them as well with a warm “welcome home!”
One of my Army buddies in the Cincinnati area is considering starting a church that doesn’t really fit the mold. He’s toying with ways to describe what he’d like to start, and offered this starting point– “if you are into Jesus, into loving others… a bit more open and a bit less judgmental, let’s talk.” In our contentious, broken and often offensive world today, shouldn’t a place that feels warm and welcoming, rather than abrasive and divisive, have a wonderfully attractive sense of “home” that we so often yearn for? I’m SO proud to say that our church family (in all three locations!) DOES exude that kind of welcoming warmth.
So we are blessed to be able to bring God’s kind of magic into our communities, and can honestly say to those who are lost, hurt, searching, the least, the last, the lost—“welcome home.” I hope you can feel that reality too, so that you, too, can be comfortable and excited about welcoming others into the warmth of God’s grace in our places of worship. Keep up the good work, and keep sharing the fantasmic blessing of God’s family that Jesus has welcome us into, and welcomes others into as well! —Pastor Jim