I’ll Be Home For Christmas

I'll be home for Christmas

You can count on me

Please have snow and mistletoe

And presents on the tree

          (I’ll be Home For Christmas, Bing Crosby)

As we are launching into the Christmas season, so much of Christmas vibe has to do with home, the smells from the kitchen, gathering with relatives and friends, family around the Christmas tree. It has actually become a celebration of the idea of the American dream family, a month to culturally pretend everything is hunky dory as we spend and consume. Somewhere in all of the craziness, we lose Jesus.

It seems we’ve traded in the King of the universe for a particular image of Christianity. Christmas promises a safe and secure, “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” kind of religion where we enjoy our glazed ham or roast turkey, spend hours decorating with north woods decor, and imagine our perfect gifts, and often the credit card debt that purchased them, somehow make the season bright.” But living a life connected to God is never about the image we present, or the” life we pretend to have. 

This week I was thinking about the old patriarch Abraham, to whom God gave the gift of packing up and leaving the security of all he knew and heading off to someplace he didn’t know in order to find a home in another place that would never actually be his. Looking back at his experience, the scripture tell us that “Abraham went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed as a foreigner in the land of promise, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, co-heirs of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God…. {Abraham and those who followed his way after him} confessed that they were foreigners and temporary residents on the earth. Now those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they were thinking about where they came from, they would have had an opportunity to return. But they now desire a better place — a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them. ( Hebrews 11)

If Abraham was the only one, maybe we could just ignore it. But this wandering homelessness, this looking for a home and finding God in the wandering is all through the story. Isaac and Jacob also lived in tents. Joseph’s journey started in the bottom of a dry well. Moses and the Israelites all met with God in the middle of a barren wilderness where God himself told them to build a tent to house his worship. Later it was men who came up with the idea of building the permanent home for God here. Saul met God and became a king wandering around looking for escaped livestock. David became a king wandering in the wilderness with a bunch of convicts trying to avoid getting killed by jealous Saul while his wife ran off with another guy. Elijah met God on the run hiding in a cave in the mountains. Hosea’s wife kept running to town to make some extra money by selling herself to whatever guy had the dough….John the Baptist preached in the desert while wearing camel hair clothes and eating locusts and wild honey… and none of this seems like our dreamy Hallmark story.

Then we come to Jesus. He was born in a stable or shelter that belonged to someone else. They were on the road and away from family, but things with family weren’t too smooth anyhow. The birth visitors were mostly shepherds right from the fields, and if you’ve ever been around a bunch of sheep, they probably weren’t smelling that great. Then one of the local political powers decided to try and kill him, and went for a mass slaughtering, and the little family of 3 went on the run into Egypt, which would be a lot like someone from the US running to China or maybe communist Russia. When he got older, Jesus was a wandering preacher rejected by the leaders of his people. His most important talks were to blue collar working people on the beaches or in the hills. And when asked where he was staying, he said the son of man has no where to lay his head.

Maybe this consistent theme is because we tend to settle in to this broken world, fill ourselves up with things that won’t fill us up, build our shacks in the garbage dump, call it home, then act like kings in the midst of the refuse. And God says this is not our home.

So as we launch into this Christmas season, what are you looking for, and where are you looking? Is it possible God is leading you on a journey that may be harder than you ever imagined, to find the home your heart is longing for? It’s the one journey that will lead us home.