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Home for Christmas?

December 7, 2014

At this time of year, the word “home” is spoken about as much as the word “Christmas.”

“Are you going home for Christmas?” “Do you have your home ready for Christmas?” people

ask. “I’ll be home for Christmas” we sing, “if only in my dreams.” But for those who will be

home for Christmas as well as for those who will only be there in their dreams, this can be a

difficult word. For is any of us really at home – for Christmas or at any other time of the year?

The songs, the carols, the stories tell us of how homes should be at Christmas – filled

with smells of cinnamon and cookies, evergreen trees and bayberry candles, suffused by the soft

glow of candles and firelight, with families gathered together, trimming the tree, making

Christmas decorations, baking Great-Aunt Anna’s special spice cookies, telling again the old

story of the birth of the baby in the stable. In the background, our imagination even pipes in

carols softly playing. But how many of us live in such idealized settings? How does the

frustration over the tangled tree lights and the resulting angry words fit into the picture? How

does the strain of tight budgets fit into the scene? What about memories of unhappy and painful

times past? Where in the idealized picture is the argument over politics or religion at Christmas

dinner? What about the families separated by divorce, disputes, or just by distance? None of us

lives in the ideal home.

The events of the world around us also can make us feel we don’t live in an idealized

world. With wars and violence in the Middle East, the cold cruelty of ISIS, and the plight of

refugees around the world, we see the lack of home in our world. And this year especially with

demonstrations in Boston and around the country over the treatment of African Americans by

police and our justice system we are painfully aware that we do not yet live in the world

envisioned by the Prophet Isaiah. Jon Stewart, a prophet for our age, was left speechless on his

show Wednesday night when a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict the police officer

who killed Eric Garner.

So how do we live then with the discrepancies between Christmas as we live it and as we

see it in our world and the visions of sugar plums which still dance in our heads?

The bad news is that the sugar plums are only visions. But the good news is that they’re

not what Christmas is about. The lovely smelling, well-decorated, filled-with-harmony home is

nice if you can get it, but it’s not what we’re celebrating. What we’re celebrating is the birth of a

child and the love, justice, and radical welcome which that child grew up to embody and to teach

others to embody. That first Christmas had nothing in it of the customs we now associate with

the day. Think for a minute about the birth of that child.

Picture the stable where legend says he was born. We have romanticized it into a place

of sweet smelling hay with a baby lulled to sleep by the sound of animals and warmed by their

breath, but have you ever visited a stable? It didn’t smell like potpourri. The animals were

upset by the presence among them of these strange people. The cries of the woman in labor and

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later the cries of the child made them shift and cry out themselves. Mary was in great pain and

had no bed or chair. She was alone, far from her mother, her sisters, her aunts, her cousins, from

the women who would have helped her through such a time. Instead she was with a man she

hadn’t even officially married yet, who meant well, but didn’t know what to do – he was a

carpenter, not a midwife, – and as frightened as she. There was no bassinette for the baby who

at last arrived healthy and whole – now there’s a miracle. Joseph put fresh straw in the feeding

trough and laid the baby in it after cleaning him up as best he could and wrapping him in an extra

cloak, because they didn’t have any baby clothes in the stable. When visitors did arrive that

Christmas, it was not friends and family come to help and care for them, but shepherds and

wizards who had come to stare at the child and make cryptic pronouncements which puzzled his

parents. It was not – in its circumstances – a merry Christmas. And when it was over, Mary,

Joseph, and their newborn son left Bethlehem not to return to their home, their families, their

familiar roads, but to flee into exile in Egypt to protect the child from Herod’s death squads.

This Christmas story ends in fear and bewilderment; it is not like the other stories of the

season which end with villains converted to lives of love and joy. This story is more like the

story of our lives, with joy and sorrow mixed, with circumstances not as we would always have

them, with no resolutely happy ending, but a journey on to unknown territory, of life if not of

surroundings. The story of Jesus’ birth is a metaphor for our lives.

Like any good metaphor, it speaks to us on several levels. On one level it tells us that the

way our lives are is normal, that life is not a Christmas story; life is the Christmas story – messy

and beautiful, joyful and painful, hopeful and fearful all at once. But on another level it speaks

not only of the way things are but also of the way things will be. Christmas is not an end, but a

beginning; it is not the fulfillment, but the promise. And the promise it makes us has to do with

our longings, our yearnings,our homesickness. Christmas speaks to us of where is home and

what is home and when we will find ourselves at home.

Robert Frost, in a pair of often quoted lines from his poem The Death of the Hired Man,

wrote “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” But if

you read the whole poem, you see that that’s not the definition of home which the poet meant to

stand. That definition is countered by this one, offered by the dominant voice in the poem: “I

should have called it/ Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Isn’t that the home we all seek, the place where we are welcomed without consideration

for what we bring, a place of unconditional love where we may cease from all our strivings to be

worthy and find the rest we desire? Home is where peace is fulfilled and love reigns. Some of

us may have felt this unconditional love or at least a touch of it in our childhoods, but to become

adults we have to leave our childhood homes, in spirit if not in body, for part of adulthood

involves realizing that those homes can no longer house us. We must journey on, searching for

home.

But we are not left to wander undirected. For the good news the Christmas story

dramatizes is that into our ordinary worlds, Love breaks. The voice of Love calls us onward; the

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angels of Love speak to us in our dreams and in the voices of other human beings, and the

servants of Love, our fellow hungerers for home, bring us the gifts of their searchings.

We have glimpses of what being truly at home can feel like in the tug of the heart at the

first carol of the year, or in the happy tears which come into our eyes when George Bailey

realizes that his uneventful life has really been wonderful, when Scrooge embraces strangers,

feeds the Cratchits, and dances with his niece, and when the Grinch carols with the Who’s. We

glimpse it in the darkness of Christmas Eve when we sing Silent Night surrounded by the candles

of our fellow seekers.

True home isn’t found in our individual dwellings or in our individual lives. True home

is experienced wherever love connects others. Do you ever listen to Storycorps on public radio

on Friday mornings? People interview each other about their lives. This past Friday a woman

who cared for AIDS patients in Arkansas in the early 1980’s when even doctors, nurses, and

their own families wouldn’t touch them. She wasn’t a doctor, or a nurse, or even the family of

an AIDS patient. She just happened to be visiting a friend in a hospital when she heard a man

calling for his mother. When she went to get help from the nurses, they told her his mother

wouldn’t come and that there was nothing they could do for him. So she sat with him for the next

13 hours, holding his hand, until he died. The man thought his mother had come to him, and

died feeling at home in her love. She went on to care for over 1,000 AIDS patients, creating

home for them.

This is a home for Christmas. For the message of this season is that it is not our task to

create the ideal home to be a setting for Christmas, but that it is our task to create spaces in our

lives that we might be a home for Love. And the more we widen those spaces in our hearts, the

more room we create for Love to dwell within us and among us, the more we shall find the

peace, the joy, the home we seek.

Home is here and now and open to us every day, just as the power of Christmas is here

and now and open to us every day – neither is limited to some special person, place, or time.

Wherever we let Love fill our hearts and rest our souls, there is home, and whenever we find our

lives, no matter how dark they seem, illuminated by the light of Love, there is Christmas.

- Pamela M. Barz

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Readings for Home for Christmas?

The House of Christmas by GK Chesterton

There fared a mother driven forth

Out of an inn to roam;

In the place where she was homeless

All men are at home.

The crazy stable close at hand,

With shaking timber and shifting sand,

Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand

Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,

And strangers under the sun,

And they lay on their heads in a foreign land

Whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,

And chance and honour and high surprise,

But our homes are under miraculous skies

Where the yule tale was begun….

To an open house in the evening

Home shall men come,

To an older place than Eden

And a taller town than Rome.

To the end of the way of the wandering star,

To the things that cannot be and that are,

To the place where God was homeless

And all men are at home.

Isaiah 11: 6-9

Leopards will lie down

with young goats,

and wolves will rest

with lambs.

Calves and lions

will eat together

and be cared for

by little children. 7

Cows and bears will share

the same pasture;

their young will rest

side by side.

Lions and oxen

will both eat straw.

8 Little children will play

near snake holes.

They will stick their hands

into dens of poisonous snakes

and never be hurt.

9 Nothing harmful will take place

on the LORD’s holy mountain.

Just as water fills the sea,

the land will be filled

with people

who know

and honor the LORD.