Old Friends, New Dreams

What's homecoming when you are already at home? That's my question as I reflect on Sunday. Sunday was the first Broadway Homecoming. It was a remarkable day. Actually it was a remarkable weekend. My life is different than it would have been without the day -- and yet I was always (and already) at home. How does that make sense?

It makes sense in the same way that the Gospel makes sense. Each day, each moment is full of possibility. The question is will we see it and live it? This homecoming photograph is of a group of us who were here all together back in 1990, and half of us are still together. Suhyoung Baik, Rachel Metheny and I were here back in the day with Phil Amerson, and Mary Ann Moman and Vanessa Allen-Brown. Rev. Baik has been the only one who has stayed across all these years. But Rachel and I have both left and returned. So what does it mean to have homecoming when you are already at home (we were far from the only ones with that question).

It is like this -- Phil and Mary Ann and Vanessa and I have always been together. We have been physically apart. But with each other we are always at home. That's what I mean by comparing this to the Gospel. Jesus says time and time again -- that it is not the way things look to the world that is reality -- it is the way that they are, in the realm of God which is right here and right now.

It is the same way I think of things when people think about who we are and what we do at Broadway without paying attention to the depth. People from outside of us (including many of our funders) think that we do our summer program to "help" our low-income neighbors. They are so wrong. We do the summer program so we won't miss out on the energy, the joy, and the gifts of the children and families who make up our summer program. People think we do our tutoring program so that we can "help" these low-income kids do better in school. Nope. Wrong again. We do it so that we can invest in the lives of young people who will grow up to be scientists like Madame Curie, who will be astronauts like Mae Jemison, who will be lawyers and judges like Thurgood Marshall. Why would you want to miss out on something like that?

The Gospel calls us -- always and each and every day to see a whole new world. It calls us to do that not by leaders having a vision that was never thought of before - but by people living and trusting the vision that God gives to each of us, in the small daily acts of pouring ourselves out in love for one another.

In Christ we see a whole new world -- Paul says this in 2 Corinthians. We would do well to pay attention to it. And we do - when we celebrate the past by welcoming old friends home. We do that when we celebrate the future by naming the wonder of who we are today.

I guess my main hope for this whole homecoming weekend is that...we will see that whole new world even more clearly. I think this is always a possibility that arises from a good party. My observation though is that we think parties are not to be taken seriously. That's exactly the opposite. It is in the joy of the celebration that we truly know ourselves, that dreams get loosened up and shared, that laughter spills out and brings us health and healing. Nothing could be more important.

Old friends and new dreams all tied together. And through that -- a whole new world.