Merry Christmas! I love this time of year, everything about it, all the trappings. I love the music and the food, I love the singing and the baking. I love decorating the house and the church. Isn’t it beautiful in here, with the cedar boughs adding the perfect accent? I love the things we do to make ourselves warm, the sweaters, the hot drinks, fires in the fireplaces. I love the things we do to lighten up the world, candles, lights on the houses. I love going on our annual family Christmas light drive, going around town with a thermos of hot chocolate and some Christmas cookies looking for those amazing neighborhoods where every house is covered in lights. I even love shopping for presents—I just need to figure out how to avoid the lines. But most of all, I love the time with family. I love being home. As the old song goes, “There’s no place like home for the holidays.” Christmas feels like home and all the comfort that word conjures up inside of me.
And yet, I’m acutely aware as we read this Gospel tonight, that the first Christmas was anything but home for Mary and Joseph. They were not home for the holidays when this day first became holy. They were at the end of a long journey, having just left their home, a journey that had been made much more difficult given the late stage of Mary’s pregnancy. The town was overcrowded because of all the visitors, and there was no good place for them generally, and certainly not given the fact that Mary was about to give birth. So there they were with the animals, not exactly the most sanitary conditions, and only a manger to serve as a crib. And these were the relatively good days for them, the days before Herod finds out and they have to flee as refugees to Egypt in order to save themselves. No, this whole scene is not home. It is a scene full of displacement and discomfort. It is messy and dark.
We know that Mary and Joseph were not the only ones without homes in this world. There are people away from their homes longing to be back there. There are people who have no homes, people who cannot afford a home, people who have lost their home, people who have been kicked out of their homes. And there are a lot of people for whom home is not a good place. Home might conjure up a lot of good feelings for me, feelings of comfort and peace, but that is not the case for everyone. There are a lot of people who are literally home, but are not home in the positive sense of the word. Or even if home is not a negative idea, home can be a complicated one for many. There is some kind of sorrow or pain attached to their home, dreams dashed, relationships that might not be broken, but might be ruptured. Or there might be people who are not there who should be, perhaps people who will never be there again, lost loved ones who should be in that home with you. There are some for whom the comfort of home, even at the holidays, cannot overcome the pain in the rest of their lives. Maybe one of these circumstances describes the situation that you are in, or have been in at some point in your life. Based on conversations I’ve had over the years with countless people, I suspect that most of us, at some point, have felt one of these, or something similar to some degree, a difficulty with home, or a sense of home that does not conjure up a feeling of comfort and peace.
In the midst of that difficulty, that darkness that we experience, Mary and Joseph and Jesus, the Holy Family, are in solidarity with us, knowing exactly what it feels like to be alienated from home. The Christmas story reminds us that they have been there. They know in a very visceral way our greatest despair. In the power of the Incarnation, the Christmas story reminds us that God has been there. Not only has God been there, but that place of darkness and alienation, that place of homelessness, is exactly the place where Christ is born. God makes a home not where expected, but where God is most needed—with a family away from home on a dark night in a manger.
“Glory to God in the highest,” as the angels sing, for Christ is born in the messiness of the manger of our lives. “Glory to God in the highest,” for God kindles a fire in our darkness to light the way. “Glory to God in the highest,” for God makes a home wherever we find ourselves, in exactly the place we need God most.
AMEN
