At Home

BMCC Sunday Sermon · 5 Jul 2026 · Speaker: Frankie So

[Editor’s note · Draft: This article was auto-reconstructed from the Sunday recording. Because of limited speech-recognition quality, the speaker’s exact words, names, and scripture references are approximate — please verify against the audio before finalizing.]

That Sunday, worship opened with loud praise and song. The congregation lifted its voice together, turning heart and mind back to the One worthy of worship. In that spirit we opened to Nehemiah 2:11–20 and chapter 3 — a passage about coming home and rebuilding.

Nehemiah was cupbearer to the Persian king, a man of rank surrounded by fine clothes and food. Yet, a descendant of an exiled people, he chose to return to the ruins of Jerusalem — its walls broken down, its gates burned, the whole city desolate and despised. Nehemiah did not rush to give orders. He came to Jerusalem and first stayed quietly for three days, going out alone by night to inspect the rubble and see the breaches clearly before he spoke a word. Through this passage, Frankie led us to ponder a plain yet profound question: what, really, is a home?

He counted out the many functions of a home. A home is the safest of places, a door that locks, marking a boundary of security; it supplies our emotional needs and is where we confirm who we are. A home preserves memory — the photos in an album, the names of ancestors, the genealogies kept in an ancestral hall — all ways of carrying affection and community from one generation to the next. A home has its rules: take off your shoes, wash your hands. A home also lets people leave — a healthy home is one that lets its children grow up, go out into the world, and come back. A home is not merely a comfortable place; it is where a person finds their feet again and rebuilds their confidence.

Then Frankie connected Nehemiah’s rebuilding to our situation today. The walls of Jerusalem were not built by one person. Nehemiah chapter 3 reads like the long list of credits at the end of a film, recording one after another who repaired which section of wall, who took charge of which gate. It is the most tedious chapter to read, and the most important — because it shows that what was accomplished was never the work of a single hero, but of every person willing to pick up tools on the stretch of wall in front of their own home.

That reminder feels especially true for every one of us. We can outsource many things, but never “our own home.” You would not want your house renovated by a stranger, and BMCC, too, is a home that every one of us is invited to build up and tend together. To rebuild, you have to get your own hands dirty; everyone has a part. Frankie noted that a home is sometimes ragged and broken, and that sense of “still not quite there” is familiar to many. But it is precisely because we care that we are willing to give ourselves — to tend a corner with love, to cherish a memorable chapter of BMCC’s own history, and to carry forward the things we long to hand down from one generation to the next.

This year marks the thirty-fourth anniversary of Blessed Ministry Community Church (BMCC). Across those thirty-four years, a long line of unnamed people have held this home together, bit by bit, until today. Frankie invited everyone, in this month that belongs to BMCC, to be one another’s “secret angel” — nothing grand, just small and steady acts of guarding this home for a month. Perhaps guarding a newcomer, perhaps guarding a piece of history, perhaps simply, quietly tidying that dusty, overlooked corner no one tends to.

In the different seasons of life, there are always precious things we choose to cherish and to tend. Someone said that the fire that is yours is something no one can carry on your behalf; another described the reordering of one’s own life as the moment of “being set alight once more.” What is it that you are guarding?

BMCC is a home that welcomes everyone. Whether you feel settled today, or feel “not quite there yet” and still under reconstruction, here there is a stretch of wall that is yours, a place that is yours. May you, too, find in this home the fire that will not go out.