December 26, 2004
By Jack Price

What are your favorite Christmas songs?  So  much of the celebration of Christmas is wrapped up with holiday music.  Here in Kansas City, there are at least two all-Christmas music radio stations.  Any time of the day or night we have the opportunity to hear everything from Jingle Bells to Blue Christmas, from  Little Drummer Boy to We Need a Little Christmas, and from the Hallelujah Chorus to I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas! 

There are two songs I have heard over and over, that I call my persistent favorites.  One is “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”.  You remember the words:

I’ll be home for Christmas, you can count on me.

There’ll be snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree.

Christmas Eve will find me where the love light gleams.

I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.

The other song I have really enjoyed is “Home for the Holidays” --

There’s no place like home for the holidays,

O, no matter how far away you roam,

If you want to be happy in a million ways,

For the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home.

Being home for Christmas just feels right.  This is true whether it’s a “White Christmas” or not – whether home is a farm in Vermont or Kansas, or an apartment in the city.  Home is the place where everything feels at peace, as it should be, even if your home is not idyllic.  This is true even when such a place exists only in memory or even in your imagination. 

Home is that longed-for place where everything is right.  It is the place where you are loved and valued.  It is where each of us, all of us, can be at peace within ourselves.  The fondest wish is being at home “if only in our dreams”. 

St. Augustine, the North African bishop of early Christianity wrote, “Our hearts are restless, O God, until they rest in Thee.”  Twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich suggests that we come from eternity and will return to eternity.  For now, however, we are cut off from eternity.  We long for eternity.  The results of that longing is anxiety, a vague awareness of loss that pulls us toward an awareness of eternity in this life.

The prophet Jeremiah reflects this idea in today’s scripture reading.  He speaks for God: 

See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor, together; a great company, they shall return here.  With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back

I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.  My people shall be satisfied with my bounty, says the LORD.

The great vision of Jeremiah sees to the end of his people’s exile, when God gathers all people home from the ends of the earth.  God calls them from everywhere they have been.  God brings the scattered home to Jerusalem.

We join our vision to Jeremiah’s.  All of us are in exile of some kind.  Those are in exile who are living at the fringes of society, who are left out, who are put down, and who are unwelcome.  All are in exile who know grief, loss, bitterness, despair, numbness of feeling or thought, barrenness of hope, loneliness.  Jeremiah’s vision is for all people:  “Their mourning will be turned into joy.”  All people will be gathered home to God and in God.

The Gospel of John expresses this same truth.  It is the meaning of “God with us”.  “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”  Word is the Greek Logos and has the connotation of creative energy and life force.  It is the word that describes God’s creative power in the first chapter of Genesis.

            Word becomes flesh and blood and makes a home with us.  The Word literally lit. “pitches a tent” and sets up residence in our midst.  This idea then is applied to Joshua of Nazareth.  Jesus is the centerpiece of God’s sweeping purpose, what the Bible calls the “kingdom of God”.  It is the transformation of creation and a new birth of life.

The coming of Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas is God’s homecoming.  Even more, it is our homecoming to God.  Our calling as church is to be at home with God and God in us.  The centerpiece of the Bible’s great cosmic vision  of human history is reflected in it’s final book Revelation:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals.   God will live with them as their God; they will be God’s people,

and God personally will be with them and will wipe every tear

from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’  And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making

all things new.”

The mission of the church is to invite and enable all people to be at home with us in this new thing that God is doing.  God is radically inclusive and radically welcoming.  Too often the church is more concerned with protecting its territory.  Even today, we can be more interested in protecting traditional understandings of the God experience than in embracing and sharing that experience itself.  This is the reason Herod sought the baby’s life in Matthew’s gospel,  It is the reason Jesus conflicts with the Pharisees and the reason Jesus was killed.  But Jesus’ faith was strong enough to endure even to death.  His vision of God was clear enough to show God to us in his living and his in dying.

Will our hearing be sensitive enough?  Will our vision be clear enough?  Will our faith be resolute enough to see the God that Jesus saw?  Only the clear vision of God sees to the authentic heart and motives of a person.  Only the Spirit of God enables us to know ourselves.

            Remember, the truth of God that Jesus revealed, that the Holy Spirit still reveals, is not a truth of laws and doctrines.  It is not a truth of precedents and propositions.  It is not a narrow truth of fundamental doctrine.  It is rather a poet’s truth.  “In each heart lies a Bethlehem, an inn where we must ultimately answer whether there is room or not.”  (Kneeling in Bethlehem by Ann Weems)

            There are two questions facing us in life.  What is it that brings you to life?  What deadens you?  In other words, where is exile and where is freedom?  To be brought to life is the journey from exile to freedom.  It is what it means for God to be at home in us and for us to be at home, to be at peace, in this life.

            Let us be at home.  Let us be at peace.  The gift promised is given.  In each life, in each circumstance, the blessed gift of peace, of homecoming, waits to be received and opened in your life and in mine -- in ours as a congregation.

            The gift of homecoming is shalom and this is much more than a cessation of hostility or the absence of war.  Shalom means wholeness and  connectedness to all of life and to the source of life.  It means living with a sense of joy, living in joy.   Even on this day after Christmas, angels are bending near the earth.  Hear their song as it sounds in your own heart:  “Peace on earth, peace to all”.  May the peace of Christ pitch a tent, set up a home, and live in you richly now and forever.  May God’s Spirit lead you from exile to freedom, through the wilderness to home.