If you go into a busy, crowded place this time of the year, you are likely to hear one word buzzing through the air: home. People asking each other, “Are you going home for Christmas?” “Will you be home for the holidays?” “Are your kids all coming home?”
Home. Home. Home. The word seems to be everywhere. Everyone talking about home.
Every year at this time, we think about home, we want to be home. We associate home with Christmas.
Yet, in a time when our ability to travel anywhere is severely hindered by a pandemic, going home is hard. In a time when gathering with others is subject, always, to our best understanding of a changing situation, changing rules, tests and vaccinations; when our efforts to gather together and be home are fraught with anxiety on top of all the usual emotions; we ask ourselves what does it mean to be at home?
We have learned to think of home, being with our family, in different ways. We do facetime and skype calls so we can see one another, we hold zoom meetings with our kids so we can, in some manner, be all together.
We have stood outside windows, looking at our loved ones through the glass. Or drive-by gatherings, waving and blowing kisses through the car window.
Still, we long for home, whatever and whoever that means for us. We long for the places where we know everybody and are known by everybody. We long for the familiarity and comfort, the shared history. As Dorothy said, there is no place like home. This has always been true.
I am sure Mary thought so, as she struggled to get her body into a comfortable position on the floor of a stable. I know she would have preferred to be at home to deliver her firstborn child – surrounded by the women who knew and loved her and could midwife her and her child to safety. Maybe Mary looked at Joseph with tears filling her eyes and said, “I just want to go home.”
Home for Christmas.
Everyone longs for home, especially at Christmas. And when we think of home, we may be thinking of a time and place that was golden in our lives, with the people who have been dear to us, at a time that was happy for us. In some sense, home is not someplace we can return to, because it is a memory.
Still, we long for home. Home may be something your heart yearns for your whole life long.
And as I was writing these thoughts down, the song, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” began playing on the radio.
But tonight we hear these words: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God – and the Word was God.” Christ, the Word; his true home was with God, for, as the gospel says, he was God.
He came down to earth, took on bone and flesh and blood and became truly human. He gave up all the comfort and security of home to be with us, to become one of us. God let him go – God’s beloved Son – and gave him to us. They were separated one from another, severed from each other, all for the sake of the world God loves. Father and Son, both gave up the joy, the delight, of being together, so that the world might know him.
The Word became flesh and lived among us, so that he might become light for all of us. He gave up his home, became homeless in the world for the sake of the world. He came to a place that was not his home, a place where he was unknown; he came to us that we might know him, full of grace and truth. And, perhaps, in a way, to become our home.
Sometimes we have to rethink the notion of home. Sometimes a pandemic comes along and forces us to make adjustments for the sake of love and life. Sometimes it becomes necessary to sacrifice something for the sake of something truly good.
Our Lord Jesus was not home for Christmas. But in another sense, he carried pieces of home with him here – the knowing, the caring, the loving. He carried “home” in his body, to bring a little bit of that home to us.
To use a phrase that has becoming familiar to us this Advent season, he became a house for the holy here on earth. Inviting each one of us to abide with him.
May you have the blessings of home this season, wherever you are.
May you enter into the presence of the Christ child, God with us, knowing him in his grace and truth.
May you abide in a house for the holy, and become, in yourself, a house for the holy, making room for hope, peace, joy and love.
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Photo by Shot by Cerqueira on Unsplash
