Sarah (II)
The olives would be ripe for picking now and someone’s hand would pluck them from their stems as she had hoped to do and carry them across her sunlit courtyard to the house— the place she’d tended, where she’d laughed and loved and where she’d hoped to age, like the oak beams that held her home together, durable, immovable…. Well, that was what she’d dreamed. Instead of that, she lived an exile’s life, camped here, camped there, but never settled down for long enough to let her heart take root in foreign soil and learn to call it home. “No fixed abode” (an ugly little phrase) and yet the Lord God was her dwelling place.
This is my second poem to step imaginatively into the life of the Old Testament matriarch Sarah. If you know me personally you probably won’t be overly surprised that home, change, and uprooting are on my mind these days. “For we have not here an abiding city”1 — and oh, we want one, don’t we? But Christ himself was a homeless wanderer.
“Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations”2—someone reminded me a few weeks ago of these words, written by Sarah’s descendant Moses. God is our home, but here’s the wondrous twist: we are also his. As Jesus said to his disciples shortly before his death, “[i]f anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”3
One way or another, uprooting is inevitable. Even the most stable and secure of lives can’t avoid the violent uprooting of death. But our home with God and his with us—that endures.
Hebrews 13:14 (ASV)
Psalm 90:1 (ESVUK)
John 14:23 (ESVUK)