I like sports. That has not always been the case. As a boy I gained enthusiasm for baseball and football in particular from my father. But during high school and college I completely lost interest (it had something to do with the guitar). But by my early twenties it all came back - especially my love of baseball. This was in the mid 1970's, during the ascent of a Phillies team led by Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton.

There is a reason why baseball and your team affinities are so much a location thing - so often tied to your hometown. It’s all about where you grew up, or some place you have adopted, for whatever personal reasons, whatever strong sentimental ties. For me, it’s the Philadelphia Phillies. I haven’t lived there for nearly forty years, yet I still consider it my hometown.

Someone has said (I can’t find the author so I can’t properly attribute it): “Like the word church, we use home to refer to a building, but it really isn’t about buildings at all. Home is about relationships that make you feel glad to be alive, glad to be who you are, and hopeful about who you might become. So home can be several places: it can be your household and your family, a close circle of friends, a favorite spot where you feel just right, and hopefully - at church.” Last month I found a short term home amidst a team of middle age baseball players. And week to week I find an extended home at HBF.

Our final home is depicted at the end of the bible as a place where “the dwelling of God is with people, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God” (Revelation 21:3). I know this text says this will be centered in the new Jerusalem, but I like to think of it as Philadelphia. Yet it will be unimaginably better! All who are there will belong, and be fully “at home” - without tears of mourning or crying or pain, and ultimately without death. We will be there, forever, at last. God himself, and the Lamb Jesus Christ will be on his throne, and we will live in the light of his presence, unimpeded, forever (Rev. 22:3-5). What exactly will that be like? We don’t really know in detail, but it will be - home. Maybe this is another reason why I like baseball so much. In other sports, the object is to score points or goals or touchdowns by vanquishing the opposition. In baseball (to borrow from George Carlin), the object is to be safe - at home. And while we find acceptance and safety and encouragement at home, we don’t stay there all the time. So it is with HBF: we love to come together to worship and learn and encourage and minister to each other relationally, but the idea is to get “out of the house” and bring the message of the offer of God’s eternal home to all we encounter in our daily lives.