Welcome Home

Where is home for you?

Is home the place where you currently live?

Maybe the place where you were born feels more like home.

Did you miss going “home for the holidays” this year?

During this time of pandemic we have been told to stay home to protect the health and safety of our neighbors.

Yet some of us can’t stay home because our jobs can’t be done from home or because we are called to (or maybe even forced to) put our lives on the line to care for others.

Too many of us quite literally have no place to call home.

Sometimes when we return to the place that feels like home, we aren’t welcomed back.

And sometimes we don’t feel at home no matter where we go.

After a family emergency in 2017 I found myself “going back home” to West Tennessee a lot more often to care for my dad’s affairs while he was recovering from a motorcycle accident.

I’ve been away from Jackson, Tennessee for 20 years, so it isn’t surprising that when I went back to the town where I was born it didn’t feel like home.

I would go back to my dad’s house, but my dad wasn’t there. His girlfriend and some of her family were there, but I didn’t know them very well. And the house where he lived, well, it wasn’t the house that I knew growing up. That house was destroyed in a tornado in 1999 and was rebuilt.

But when I would get up early and sit out on the front porch sipping coffee, I would remember that my grandparents spent countless hours on the porch of the old house sipping coffee and waving at everyone who drove by. I would remember running around in the back yard with my cousins and accidentally catching a nail on the side of the house with the palm of my hand. I would remember the sound of the old gravel driveway when one of my 7 aunts or uncles pulled in for a visit.

In those moments I remembered the sense of welcome and embrace I experienced, however long ago and far away those memories were. And I suppose in those moments I got even just a little sense of what it feels like to be “at home.”

Though according to the liturgical calendar, this is the Second Sunday of Christmas, we might well call it “Homecoming Sunday.” But like our various relationships to the idea of “home,” it is a complicated sort of homecoming, yet one that holds great hope.

We hear once again this evening the great hymn of the Incarnation- of God becoming flesh – from the first chapter of John’s Gospel – the same Gospel we hear on Christmas Day. This is the Christmas story – the Christmas song. But it’s not the angels and shepherds, “away in a manger, no crib for his bed” Christmas story, or is it? John sings of the Word Made Flesh – of God born into this world…into the manger of our hearts and bodies. Acclaimed by angels, made known first to shepherds, this birth is the birth of true life for all people, and all creation.

God desires to make a home, not just in Mary’s womb, not just in our hearts…but in our very bodies.

God desires to make a home not just in your body and in mine, but also in this earth, in our neighborhoods, and in everything that has breath.

Yet John writes: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

God who was far off has become near in the mortal flesh of Jesus. And God has come to dwell with us, to make a home with us. Yet God doesn’t only come to make a home with people who make look or behave or vote like you or like me. God desires to make a home among those who have been made outcasts – those for whom, like the Christ Child, the powerful and privileged of this world can find no room.

Author, poet, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton writes:

Into this world, this demented inn
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ comes uninvited.
But because he cannot be at home in it,
because he is out of place in it,
and yet he must be in it,
His place is with the others for whom
there is no room.
His place is with those who do not belong,
who are rejected by power, because
they are regarded as weak,
those who are discredited,
who are denied status of persons,
who are tortured, bombed and exterminated.
With those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in this world.

I think back to those times in Tennessee when I was at home, yet not. I think of those times when I have felt like wasn’t at home anywhere.

I think of all the places in this world where it seems we have not received, not accepted , not made a home for the gift of God-made-flesh.

I think of how we are only 9 days into our celebration of Christmas and we’ve already started to reject and push away the very beloved of God among whom Christ has come to dwell. We celebrate Christmas yet our actions and choices too often say “God couldn’t possibly have come to dwell in this person…God couldn’t possibly have come to dwell in that place.” “He came to his own, and his own people did not accept him.

I find myself wondering, yes even during Christmas, “can there really be redemption and restoration for this weary world.”

Yet we do take heart this Christmas.

Because the weary world does rejoice.

The prophet Jeremiah sings of this great Christmas homecoming: “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.”

The Word is made flesh. All earth rejoices. Heaven and nature sing.

God has come to dwell with us, to make us people of God, to make all things new.

Will we receive him as he comes to dwell in us, as he comes to make his home in and with us, in all humanity, in all the earth? Will we find room, will we make room for God?

Perhaps this is our work of Christmas in this new year of 2021.

Poet Robert Herrick writes:

Why does the chilling winter’s morn
Smile like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like to a mead new shorn,
    Thus on a sudden?
Come and see
The cause why things thus fragrant be:
’Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and lustre, public mirth,
To heaven and the under-earth.
We see Him come, and know Him ours,
Who with his sunshine and his showers
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come,
And fit it is we find a room
To welcome Him.

Amen