CHRISTMAS EVE PS 84:1-4,10-2/Luke 2:1-20
(MSG) / (NLT)
“HOMEWARD BOUND!”
I love Luke's account of Jesus' birth. It's so beautifully told – it's the stuff of plays and pageants, but it's much more than that! It's no fairy tale! Luke pinpoints the events in question to a very specific time in human history. “About that time Caesar Augustus ordered that a census to be taken through-out the Roman Empire. This was the first census when Quirnius was governor of Syria.” (Luke 2:1)
Caesar Augustus, or Octavian as his mother liked to call him, was emperor from 31 B.C. To 14 A.D. His first census took place during the first of two terms Quirinius served as governor of Syria. Luke's account of Jesus' birth reads not like a fairy tale but like an inspired historical, literary leger.
So the emperor of the Roman empire issues a census that basically sends everyone home so he can more effectively tax everyone, but unbenowst to him, he sets in motion a series of events that fulfill ancient prophecies and make it possible for all of us...to truly go home!
Some may've responded to the order with enthusiasm: “He's sending us home? That's great! That's where I wanted to go anyway. Put my feet up. High five the fam! Have a glass of wine...!”
Nice - but that's not how it was for Joseph and Mary. Bethlehem was quite the trek, across treacherous terrain, a trip they'd never be allowed to do today. I mean they had no seatbelts, no state-inspected car-seat..., and that donkey was in dire need of a tuneup way back in Jerusalem. Still...
“Everyone had to travel to their own ancestral hometown to be accounted for. So Joseph (and Mary) went from his home town of Nazareth up to Bethlehem, David's home town...”
(Luke 2:3-4)
Luke mentions it's David's home town because one's origins are important – they say something about who you are. They're heading to their ancestral home. It's about returning to their roots, recon-necting with the past. No wonder it draws us in. It connects with a deep longing inside each one of us – the longing to go home, to be at home, to bring it on home, to be on the homestretch! It's better, after all, if it's home-made, homespun, a homerun, or at least worth writing home about! After all, home is where your heart is, so make yourself at home! What are you homesick for if not...home sweet home? If you kick the can, you're...home free! I don't know about you but...I just wanna go home!
Right? We have an inner, supernatural homing beacon that's dialed in on home. We talk about it, we sing about it, and we make art about it. The number of books and films that involve someone trying to get home is mind-boggling. The songlist includes classics like Take Me Home Country Road, Homeward Bound, Sweet Home Alabama, It's Time To Go Home (Taylor Swift), Lego House (Ed Sheehan), and the holiday classic, I'll Be Home for Christmas (if only in my dreams).
Movies bring it home as well including Lost In Space, Marooned, Planes, Trains & Auto-mobiles, Finding Nemo, The Hobbit – and of course The Wizard of Oz..: “There's no place like home!”
There's a longing...within every restless human soul...to go home, to be...at home. The entire Bible can be read as a grand sweeping narrative of exile and homecoming that is repeated throughout.
The concept of 'home' exercises a powerful influence over human life. Foreign-born Americans spend billions annually to visit communities in which they were born. Children who never find a place where they feel they belong carry an incapacity for attachment into their adult lives. Many of us have fond memories and deep longings for times, people and places where we felt we were truly home.
-2-
But sometimes going back can be really disappointing. I experienced that once when I revisited my childhood home in Long Lake, Illinois. No one had lived there for years. It smelled, it was dark and empty, and the ghosts of Christmas past were sleeping in my bed. It was pretty.....spooky.
Many of us struggle this time of year because the present reality doesn't match up to those memories and the expectations they create. There's a sense of contentment, love and acceptance that we connect with home and when the moment comes and goes it leaves us longing for it – or more of it!
This longing is best expressed by one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis: “(If one were to) go back to those shining moments in the past, one would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.
These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself. Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.” (C.S. Lewis)
I think of Joseph and Mary. They travel all that way, over rugged hills and steep ravines, but when they arrive in Bethlehem, they can find no place to stay. Why? Because this is not their home. They're homeless sojourners - immigrants and before you know it they'll be on the road to Egypt.
That was not their home; nor is this ours. And what we seek - that place of joy, contentment, love and acceptance - is not so much a location....as it is a person, a presence, we seek.
One day, this child in a manger will grow up. He'll travel from place to place as if to say – all of this, is to delight in but none of this, is actually home. And he'll tell stories to convey the truth of this.
The most famous of these tells of a young man who is restless and discontent and more than a bit rebellious. He takes claim to his inheritance and heads off into a kind of self-imposed exile, squan-dering it all seeking to live it up, seemingly making himself at home..., yet never really is.
“Finally, Jesus says, when he came to his senses, he said to himself, 'I will go home to my father!'” (Luke 15:18) He'd convinced himself he was missing out only to realize what he really longed for was back home. When he arrived, a party broke out celebrating how he'd returned to life!
(Luke 15:24)
Back in Book one of the Bible we learn the reason why we all have this longing. There we're told that we were created to live with God in his luschious garden. That was the world we were built for, a place in which there's no parting from love, no decay or disease. It was all these things because it was life lived in the actual presence of God. That was our original home but like the young man in Jesus' parable, we grew to resent the Father of the house, rebelled and wound up on the outside. Exiled.
The Bible says we've been wandering as spiritul exiles ever since. That is, we've been living in a world that no longer fits our deepest longings. Though we long for bodies that “run and do not grow weary” we're subject to disease, aging and death. Though we long for love that lasts, all our relation-ships are subject to the inevitable entropy of time. Even people who stay true to us die and leave us, or we die and leave them. We may work hard to re-create the home that we have lost, but, says the Bible, it only exists in the presence of the heavenly father from whom we have fled. (Isaiah 40:31)
-3-
This theme is played out again and again in the Bible. After Adam and Eve's exile from the ultimate home, their son was forced to restlessly wander the earth because he murdered his brother Abel. Later Jacob cheated his father and brother and fled into exile. After that, Jacob's son Joseph and his family were taken from their home into Egypt because of a famine. There the Israelites were en-slaved until, under Moses, they returned to their ancestral home. Centuries after this, David, before he became king, lived as a hunted fugitive. Finally the whole nation of Israel was exiled in Babylon, to which God, through the prophets, promised they he would one day call them home. “Look and see, for everyone is coming home – your sons from distant lands, your daughters will be carried home!”
(Isaiah 60:4)
Isaiah goes on to connect this prophetic promise with a messianic prophecy connected with the Lord's epiphany: “They will bring gold and frankincense and will come worshipping the Lord!”
(Isaiah 60:6)
It's no coincidence that story after story contains the pattern of exile and homecoming.The Bible reveals that the human race is a band of exiles trying to come home. Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son is about every one of us. It's Jesus' call to us, to you and me, is to come to our senses – to stop seeking to satisfy that longing with temporary substitutes...and come home by making our home in him.
One of you shared how you were abandoned by your mother and step-father. You wound up going from foster home to foster home, and later from man to man, hoping to find a place, a relation-ship, in which you'd be at home. One day someone shared with you the story and love of Jesus and how he alone, loves his family truly unconditionally. “Now, no matter where I am, I'm at home!”
“In the ancestral home of David, a Savior has been born, who is Christ the Lord.” In this babe of Bethlehem, God has come to make his home among and within us. But for that to happen he requires your whole heart. If he's to rule in your life you can't just give him the shack in the back, the leftovers... You can't experience all that 'home' has to offer with one foot in the door and one out!
(Luke 2:11)
That's whats so cool about the way the shepherds respond. They don't take a vote, they don't send in a squadron of sheep first, they don't check their daytimers & make an appt, they decide they're all in! “'Let's get over to Bethlehem as fast as we can and see for ourselves what God has revealed to us!'” And then, Luke adds, and I really like this, “They left, running...!” They were all in!
(Luke 2:15-16)
How about you? Are you ready to run with it? Is Jesus at home in your life? Are you at home in his? What might that look like, if you were...more all in? Just because there was no room in the hostel, which was really hostile, doesn't mean he can't be at home in you! As Isaac Watts, former slave-trader, put it in his famous carol: “Let every heart prepare him room”! Or a home!
(from Isaac Watts' Joy to the World)
There's only one who can fully and forever satisfy that longing for home and that's the one who wired you with a homing device, and then sent his son, to help you find your way home...to Him!
As Crystal put it in trying to express what she experienced when she died on the operating table: “It was like being bathed in love. It was a brightness I didn't just see, but felt. It, he, felt so familiar, like something I remembered, or even recognized. The best way to put it is this: I was home!”
(from John Burke's Imagine Heaven)
In the words of the psalmist: 'What a beautiful home, God-of-the-angel-Armies! I've always longed to live in a place like this; I've always dreamed ot living in your home where I could sing for joy to God alive! Better is one day in your home than a thousand elsewhere!'” (Psalm 84:1-2, 10)
“The shepherds went back home, glorifying and praising God for they'd seen and heard!”
(Luke 2:20)