I imagine that at night there are dreams that relive the horror of the storm and other dreams that reach back to a time before the devastation, a time when the home is still firmly rooted on its foundation, the old worn chair is still in the corner and grandmother's tea set is still on the shelf.

These are the dreams that motivate people to rebuild their homes just as they were before the storm. Make it like it was so that we can have our old homes back again. Take the shattered and scattered pieces of our lives and put them back together again.

If we've not been through that experience, we cannot fully imagine what it would be like. But, in other ways, I think we do have some understanding of what it is like to long for a home, a place that we construct in our minds using the building materials of memories and dreams, a place where everyone we care about is still there and nothing has changed, a place where our hearts find rest and comfort. And some of us even have actual places that almost follow the outlines of our dreams.

There is such a place for me on a fragile slip of an island off the coast of New York State. It is a little seaside summer community that I first visited over thirty years ago. In that span of time I've lived in seven different places, but each summer I've returned to this same little community, first with my family of origin and later with my own family.

In that time virtually nothing about this community has changed. There have been only a handful of new houses built. The same families return each year and everyone knows each other's names. After dinner children still ride their bikes to the one store in the town for ice cream cones with chocolate sprinkles. The same crowd still gathers at the community center for a dance on Saturday night and we all shuffle around the dance floor to many of the same songs. And, no matter where you are you can still hear the surf pound the beach with the same steady rhythm, like a heartbeat through it all.

This past summer I anticipated our family's time there with an extra layer of longing because during the year our family had uprooted and moved across the country to a new and different place. The move prompted in me a longing for the familiar. So I was especially eager to return to this little community that I know so well, a place that follows the designs of my dreams, a place where everything still is where it was. In short, I longed to return home, for a time at least.

When we arrived, sure enough, nothing had changed. It's wonderful to have one place in your life that doesn't change. And it offers an interesting perspective. Most often when we long to return to that place we think of as home, when we get there we find that our longing is not satisfied and we assume that it is because so much has changed. It is no longer as we remember. It no longer follows the outlines of our dreams. However, when you return home and find that it has not changed and yet the longing within you is still not fully satisfied, then you must face the possibility that perhaps what you were longing for was not home, but something else.

What do you suppose is that something else for which our hearts long with a feeling that is very much like homesickness? I once read an unsigned editorial that contained this memorable line: "After a man visits his boyhood town he finds that it wasn't the old town he wanted, but his boyhood." So, perhaps what we assume to be homesickness is really nostalgia. Perhaps that longing within us is the residue of grief over those who are gone, including the one who we were at some earlier time who is now gone. That is, if only our lives could be reconstructed again according to some familiar former design, perhaps the longing would cease.

Now, to be sure, nostalgia can be very powerful, but the kind of longing I have in mind usually is not as simple as that. For instance, often at Christmas our celebrations seem incomplete. Someone is missing. Or perhaps there are pieces of our lives that are missing. So we dream of home and long to return to a place and time when no one was missing, when everything was complete. But if we were able to return to such a place and time I think we would find that someone is always missing, there was never a time when our celebrations were complete, when the longing was not there.

So, I've concluded that what we sometimes take to be nostalgia, a longing for the past, may also have elements of a yearning for what we have yet to experience. It is our soul's leaning toward that which is still just out of sight, like a plant leans toward the window even though it has never been in the sun.

What we long for is not merely some time from our past. Rather, we long to have our past, present and future gathered up into a harmony that is not achieved in the days of our lives. What we desire is not merely to be with our families, but to be united with them in a way that is not possible even when they are present. We are homesick, not for some home of our past, but for a home we have never seen and cannot readily imagine, a home that even our dreams cannot fully trace.

That is how we can understand Saint Augustine's observation that our hearts are restless until they find the rest that is found only in God. Augustine also said that each one of us has an empty place in our hearts that is in the shape of God, and that means that nothing and no one else can entirely or ultimately fill it. This empty space is not a square hole, or anything so simple as that, but a complex, hungering, God-shaped space where only God fits and only God can fill. Try as we might to fill that space with other things - with human relationships, earthly success, a reconstruction of our past - sooner or later they will leave us unsatisfied. What we long for is something else and something more. Our homesickness is a yearning for God.

In the New Testament book of Hebrews the author reminds his readers of various examples of faith. There he recounts the story of Abraham. The Lord told Abraham to set out for an unnamed land where he and his family would dwell with God. Abraham immediately left his home and everything that was familiar, headed for this new land and wandered his whole life in search of it. In his wanderings he was sustained only by the promise and by this longing for the land in which he would build a home in the presence of God. To be sure, there would be times in his wandering when Abraham would long to return to the place he had once called home, but now he was more powerfully drawn by a promise of a home he had not yet seen, a place where his heart, now restless, could find rest in its true home, in God.

The author of Hebrews wrote of Abraham and his family: "They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one." This is not a desire for some heavenly home after we die, but rather for a home in which we are as much with God in this life as we might expect to be in the next, the only home in which the fragments of our lives can be made whole.

If our longing were only for the home we had left, we could always return. But once we are claimed by the promise of a home in the presence of God, a return to the homes we left behind is no longer enough. Even if we were to discover that nothing about our former homes has changed, we have changed. Now we are drawn, not by a memory, but by a promise and so our hearts are always marked by a certain longing.

That is why people of faith always feel a bit like strangers, even in the most familiar settings. I remember a friend telling me about a trip that he made to Honduras for a hunger relief agency. He told of walking in the streets of one of the little villages surrounded by children who barely had enough to eat. He was greeted warmly by families whose income would not exceed several hundred dollars a year. An extra dimension of poignancy was added to his experience because at the time he was carrying camera equipment that cost almost two thousand dollars.

When my friend returned home and was reunited with his family they went out to dinner at a popular Italian restaurant. Although the occasion was leavened with the joy of reunion, when the plates heaping with spaghetti were brought to their table, my friend wept. He was home again and yet, in another way, there was no longer a home to return to. Reflecting on the experience, he said, "I never had the same sense of home again after that trip."

"They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth," writes the author of Hebrews, "for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they left behind, they would have had an opportunity to return. But, as it is, they desire a better country, a heavenly one."

Do you ever get homesick? According to the author of Hebrews, if your longing is for the place you left behind, you can always return. But perhaps, just perhaps, your longing marks the place where God's promise has been etched in your heart like an aching, God-shaped space that is drawing you toward the fulfillment of the promise, drawing you home, to the home where you have not yet been, a place of rest for our restless hearts, home at last.

Floyd Brown: Martin, we really enjoyed the sermon, and you really are apropos when you talk about disasters because we are having them internationally. Certainly on the West Coast of this country, we've had disaster upon disaster and with the continuum of disasters we are having, say in California - floods, fires - what is it doing to the families? How is the church involved? What is it doing to their faith? Are you getting any reports on this?

Martin Copenhaver:  Well, like anything else, Floyd, people respond differently. For some people it's a real challenge to their faith as disaster can be, whether it's on a national scale or on a personal one, and for others, they find themselves asking some of the larger questions about what life is about, what's really important to them, and where they might find some hope. I mean, people respond very differently. As far as the churches go, I think churches are discovering, as somebody said, that although one may not live by bread alone, you don't live very long without it. You need to be concerned about both - bread for the body and the soul and shelter and home, a spiritual home, as well as a shelter from the storms of life - quite literally, and I think churches are doing a marvelous job. But somebody made this comparison, that the churches are like rescue missions and sometimes we don't get the sense. They become more of a club house than a rescue mission outpost. But I'm proud of the way churches respond.

Brown: You are. I understand that there are people who are undergoing such devastation, and they are losing their homes and many of them are just walking away with nothing, just walking away and leaving California, moving to another state without having the ability to recover anything. You know, we seem to marshall our efforts for flood relief and other things in other nations when they have disasters, but I don't seem to get that continuing feeling that we used to have from Christians all over who seem to rally around these people. Maybe we're in such an affluent society today that isn't necessary any longer.

Copenhaver:  Well, unfortunately, it seems to be short lived, doesn't it? What the sociologists call "compassion fatigue" sets in and you have people rallying very quickly and then the sustained help is what's difficult to maintain. I would say that for many people though, for people of faith, it's not relying on our own compassion anyway. We don't care for people because we feel sorry for them, but because God cares for them and that's beyond how we feel about them at any particular time. Our own sympathies may be touched momentarily, but that sense of ongoing responsibility, I think, can only come from recognizing that God cares for those people, seeing them from God's point of view as it were, as much as we're able to do that.

Brown:  We're in a society today that's dominated by the baby boomers. We talked about it. I guess you're right in the middle of it yourself. Has this changed the mentality at all of our nation on a whole? What is it like ministering to this group today? I don't know whether you have a comparison. You're a young man, but tell me a little bit about ministering to the baby boomers today.

Copenhaver:  Well, I am myself a baby boomer, born in 1954, in the midst of the baby boom, and churches, just like people in marketing and elsewhere, the electorate, are interested in how to reach baby boomers with only, I would say, limited success. You know, the year in which I was born, 1954, was the year that "under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance, which is kind of significant. I think at that time people assumed that growing up American, you would grow up with a Christian faith just by breathing the air of the culture, and we no longer assume that. We can no longer assume that. But I think for a while churches were lulled into some kind of complacency about how to pass on the faith, and felt that they did not have to do the kind of concerted effort that now believe we must. Baby boomers are tough because we're used to having all sorts of choices. You know, you go into a supermarket and it's no longer a choice between corn flakes and oatmeal. There are fifty different kinds of breakfast cereal.

Brown:  Absolutely. Sure.

Copenhaver: And that kind of consumer mentality also applies to their approach to church life. What is it that's meeting my needs right now? And if this isn't meeting my needs, we'll move on to something else. And, unfortunately, what you have is people picking a little bit here, a little bit there, whatever is appealing at the moment, a kind of religious smorgasbord, I would say.

Brown:  The traditional aspect of it is not as strong an influence today as to what they are looking for in their religious beliefs as it has been in the past.

Copenhaver:  Looking for what might serve them or comfort them - them - us! C. S. Lewis said the Christian faith ultimately is something of unspeakable comfort but only after it is something of challenge and of some harsh words that need to be said. Before it's a word of comfort, it's a harsh word. What we find is we're not often able to keep baby boomers long enough for them to move through that stage, through what may be a challenging word to the more comforting word. How do you keep people tied in when it's not an immediate gratification of their needs?

Brown: So your sermon has to be different as well.

Copenhaver:  Absolutely. Absolutely. I think we need to tap the religious longing that is in people. People still have a very strong religious impulse, and to address that and then, also just from my perspective as a Christian minister, to preach the gospel and let the gospel do its work. I can't make that happen.

Brown:  Martin, it's a pleasure talking with you.