Sermon quotes on home
Louisa May Alcott
“The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.”
Delphi Complete Works of Louisa May Alcott, Delphi Classics 2013, p.2238.
Augustine of Hippo
The Holy Scriptures are our letters from home.
Karl Barth
The wisdom and goodness of the Creator abound in the fact that, following the creation, establishment and securing of a sphere of human life, He wills to fashion and does fashion it as a dwelling-place for the man who can recognize God and himself and his fellow-creatures, and who in the recognition of what is and occurs can be grateful and express his gratitude. . . . The office of these lights, the heavenly bodies, is to summon him in relation to his Maker to sight, consciousness and activity.
Church Dogmatics Study Edition 13: The Doctrine of Creation III.1 § 40-42.
Craig G. Bartholomew
Place is a quintessentially human concept in that it is part of our creatureliness. E. Casey, who has done the most comprehensive work on the philosophy of place, notes that “to be in the world, to be situated at all, is to be in place. Place is the phenomenal particularization of ‘being-in-the-world,’ a phrase that in
Where Mortals Dwell, Baker Publishing Group, 2011, Kindle Locations 174-176.
Craig G. Bartholomew
Place is furthermore never individualistic; rather, it “insinuates itself into a collectivity.”
Where Mortals Dwell Baker Publishing Group, 2011, Kindle Locations 185.
Brené Brown
Joy comes to us in ordinary moments. We risk missing out when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.
Edward Casey
In the past three centuries in the West—the period of “modernity”—place has come to be not only neglected but actively suppressed. Owing to the triumph of the natural and social sciences in this same period, any serious talk of place has been regarded as regressive or trivial…For an entire epoch, place has been regarded as an impoverished second cousin of Time and Space, those two colossal cosmic partners towering over modernity.
Winston Churchill
We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.
Charles Dickens
Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
T.S. Eliot
Home is where one starts from.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happy will that house be in which the relationships are formed from character.
Robert Frost
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Billy Graham
Nothing can bring a real sense of security into the home except true love.
Josiah G. Holland
In the homes of America [or any other nation] are born the children of America, and from them go out into American life American men and women. They go out with the stamp of these homes upon them, and only as these homes are what they should be, will they be what they should be.
Taken from Bob Kelly, Worth Repeating, p.171.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
Martin Heidegger
The world is the house where mortals dwell.
Conway Ireton
Lord God of Heaven and Earth, You revealed Your only-begotten Son to every nation by the light of a star. Bless this house and all who inhabit it. Allow us to find it a shelter of peace and health. Make our house a place of warmth and caring for all who visit us. Fill us with the light of Christ, that we might clearly see You in our work and play. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Circle of Seasons (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008).
Evel Knievel
Kids, do not try this at home.
ABC’s Wide World of Sports
Martin Luther
Should anyone knock at my heart and say, “Who Lives here? I should reply, “Not Martin Luther, but the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Martin Luther
What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God.
George Macdonald
God’s thoughts, his will, his love, his judgments are all man’s home. To think his thoughts, to choose his will, to love his loves, to judge his judgments, and thus to know that he is in us, is to be at home.
Jen Pollock Michel
The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem we are hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long for home because welcome was our first gift of grace and it will be our last. The settings of our first home and our last home testify to the nature of the embodied story God is writing in human history.
Taken from Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home Jen Pollock Michel. Copyright (c) 2019 by Jen Pollock Michel. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Jen Pollock Michel
Home represents humanity’s most visceral ache—and our oldest desire.
Taken from Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home Jen Pollock Michel. Copyright (c) 2019 by Jen Pollock Michel. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Jen Pollock Michel
For as long as there is a compassionate Father, there will be a home, a table, and a feast. This was Israel’s great consolation: exile was the middle act of the drama, but it was not the final scene.
Taken from Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home Jen Pollock Michel. Copyright (c) 2019 by Jen Pollock Michel. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Jen Pollock Michel
Home is always more than physical shelter from the rain; it must also necessarily be a place for humanity to keep company with God. Home is for holiness.
Taken from Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home Jen Pollock Michel. Copyright (c) 2019 by Jen Pollock Michel. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Jen Pollock Michel
One burden of homelessness is this: you’re always a stranger, counting on someone’s good graces.
Taken from Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home Jen Pollock Michel. Copyright (c) 2019 by Jen Pollock Michel. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to.
Alan Redpath
The secret of every discord in Christian homes and communities and churches is that we seek our own way and our own glory.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Peace like charity, begins at home.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.
William Temple
The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child’s home.
Edie Wadsworth
Hospitality is not inviting people to our perfect homes; it is inviting them to our imperfect hearts.
John Wesley
God is the first object of our love: Its next office is, to bear the defects of others. And we should begin the practice of this amidst our own household.
Ella Winter
Don’t you know you can’t go home again?
Quoted in a Letter to Elizabeth Nowell, 7 May 1943.
Yara Bashraheel
Maybe home is nothing but two arms holding you tight when you’re at your worst.
James Howard Kunstler
If anything, there appears to be an inverse relationship between our growing obsession with the home as a totem object and the disintegration of families that has become the chief social phenomenon of our time. We worship this idealized container for family life, and yet it turns out that the family cannot be sustained without the larger container of community life.
Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century Simon & Schuster, 1998.
James Howard Kunstler
The idea of a modest dwelling all our own, isolated from the problems of other people, has been our reigning metaphor of the good life for a long time. It must now be seen for what it really is: an antisocial view of existence. I don’t believe that we can afford to keep pretending that life is a never-ending episode of Littie House on the Prairie. We are going to have to develop a different notion of the good life and create a physical form that accommodates it.
Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Flannery O’Connor
We make our home by stories.
Meghan Daum
There is no object of desire quite like a house. Few things . . . are capable of eliciting such urgent, even painful, yearning.
G.K. Chesterton
What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating tenors of going abroad combined with all the human security of coming home again?
Columban
Let us, who are on the way, hasten home; for our whole life is like the journey of a single day. Our first duty is to love nothing here; but let us place our affections above, our desires above, our wisdom above, and above let us seek our home.
Henri Nouwen
Jesus has made it clear to me that . . . just as he has his home with the Father, so do I.
Wesley Granberg-Michaelson
“It is good once in a while to feel oneself in the hands of God,” Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, “and not always eternally slinking around the familiar nooks and corners of a town where one always knows the way out.” That’s the yearning that pushes pilgrims out the door, physically or spiritually, stepping away from home in order to search for the soul’s true home.
Without Oars: Casting Off into a Life of Pilgrimage, Broadleaf Books, 2020.
James Baldwin
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
Giovanni’s Room
Annie F. Downs
I think when we go looking for fun what we are actually looking for is home. We are looking for peace. We are looking for simplicity, something to fill that spot that has been left by growing up or growing out or moving on. While we think we want fun, what we really want is Eden.
Norman Wirzba
The Garden of Eden , literally the “garden of delight,” is humanity’s original and perpetually originating home, the place of our collective nourishment, inspiration, instruction, and hope.
Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Christie Purifoy
Our hunger is the exile’s hunger, but it is also the first step in our homecoming. We hunger, and in doing so learn the shape of our emptiness is the world’s great emptiness in or to prepare room for God’s presence. We imagine we are cultivating good or friendship or beauty. But we are, in all of these ways, cultivating God’s glory in our midst.”
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