Home for Christmas: Christmas Eve Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Donald L. Hamer, Rector
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Trinity Episcopal Church
Christmas Eve 2011
“Home for Christmas”
One of the most popular Christmas songs over the years has been “Home for the Holidays.” I remember as a kid listening to Perry Como -- with his red sweater -- who sang kind of the classic version of this:
Oh there’s no place like home for the holidays.
For 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.
The song conjured up images of families gathered around a fireplace and home-baked pumpkin pie. It became something you longed for even if you had never experienced it.
And “going home” or people “returning home” is such a central part of the holiday for so many of us. My own daughter returned home from Washington, D.C. – just in time to finish my last minute Christmas shopping and wrapping for me! The interstates were packed over the past few days, as were the airports and bus and train terminals, with folks traveling to some version of “home” – parents, children, siblings. At Christmas time, our hearts seem always to drift to some version of “home” – whether real or romanticized.
And so it is ironic that at this season in which the home hearth is so desirable we also turn to the most beloved story of the New Testament found at the beginning of the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Because in this story none of the central characters are going home – they are all going away from home.
n Mary has left her family in Nazareth to join her betrothed husband.
n Joseph is leaving his home in Nazareth to return to his ancestral home in Bethlehem for the census – clearly he no longer has relatives there or Jesus would have been born in someone’s guest room instead of a shelter for animals.
n The shepherds are summoned by the angel away from their posts in the fields outside of Bethlehem to search for the child who is proclaimed to be the Messiah. To put the distance in perspective for you, it is a distance similar to walking from the top of Avon Mountain to arrive here at Trinity.
n And perhaps most importantly, the ultimate departure from home is for Jesus himself. He went from the infinite to the finite, the almighty to the powerless, from absolute Spirit to the most vulnerable of humanity in the person of a helpless human infant. You can’t get much further from home than that.
Quite different from the nostalgia associated with “Home for the Holidays,” where everything is familiar and comfortable. The characters in the nativity story are going away from that which is familiar, comfortable and reassuring. Indeed, all of them are heading to a first Christmas which is uncertain, unfamiliar and even a bit scary.
During this past year we have “adopted” a refugee family from Syria, in partnership with our friends at Trinity College. For them, this has been an amazing year – and their family is still not together, with some remaining in Egypt, unable to gain access to our country. They, along with many in our congregation, uniquely know what it is like to be forced to leave one’s homeland with virtually nothing but your family pride and enter into a strange new world where virtually nothing is familiar and you are totally vulnerable – depending upon the hospitality of friendly strangers.
This is also the story of the people to whom the prophet Isaiah was writing. “The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light,” he writes. “For the yoke of their burden , and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian. . . For a child has been born for us, a son given to us, authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” You know, as Western Christians, we tend to focus on the last half of this passage and tie it to the “joyous” Christmas story of Luke. We celebrate the arrival of the one who will fulfill God’s mission, but we forget the beginning of the passage that talks about the struggle. God comes in the midst of a world of conflict, and that is the world that Jesus entered. That is the world which Jesus came to save. It is the world into which Jesus calls us, his followers, to continue the mission he began as a vulnerable infant on that first Christmas morning.
How is it that in the midst of disruption, the scene at the manger is one of peace? What can we learn – what spiritual insights can we gain from looking at our traditional western notion of a homey Christmas next to Luke’s picture of a group of displaced people away from home.
Considering the two distinct pictures reminds us of those Christmases when we have been separated from family, or when family or friends from far away have joined our family for Christmas. And what actually happened on those times was that God led us to discover a new family – the family of those who were gathered in Jesus’ name around a common table, sharing a common belief, celebrating together the hope and the promise that was born with the Christ child. It is not the promise of the Garden of Eden that all will be simple and idyllic – but it is the promise that God is with us and remains with us in a world that includes war, injustice and violence.
And that is a reminder we can take with us this Christmas: That around that gamy manger, with the sounds and smells of the animals nearby, perhaps even providing a bit of warmth, the shepherds and the Holy Family had indeed found a home. And the hearth of the home, providing both light and warmth, was Jesus, the infant, himself. He became the light of Mary and Joseph’s life; he brought the attention and the adoration of the shepherds and later the wise men as they gathered around that manger. And he became the Light of the World.
What does it mean for us that Jesus was born in a barn? The answer is as challenging 2000 years later as it was then. Would we believe it if we were led to a new born savior in a homeless shelter, or under a bridge? But here we have it in Luke’s Gospel, the Savior of the world is born into the most humble of circumstances.
The Gospel of John proclaims that “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” That is the extraordinary story that we celebrate this day: Not that the Word became text, or the Word became a Bible memory verse. The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us – in all our varied circumstances, in all our varied cultures and backgrounds, in every facet of human life. Jesus became one of us.
The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6, tells us that “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” And nowhere does that hold more true than on Christmas night. For indeed, tonight we can reflect that wherever we feel the presence of Jesus, whenever we see the face of Jesus in others, there we can find a home. Jesus made His home with us. Let us always find our home in Him. Blessed Christmas. Amen.