A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

December 14, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Home for Christmas

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Zephaniah 3:14–20
Luke 2:1–5

“All went to their own towns to be registered.”

Luke 2:3 (NRSV)

Have you heard that Saddam Hussein was found and captured last evening? That stunning piece of news greets us this morning, signaling an important and positive development for the world and for the progress that is so necessary in the nation of Iraq.

Although it pales in comparison to that dramatic story, another news item that appeared this past week has particular relevance for us in Illinois and for the world of art and architecture. The news was of the sale of a house, in Plano, Illinois, called Farnsworth House. This structure was designed by the famed modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. This past week it was sold at auction for $7.5 million.

It was not the price that made the story newsworthy. Structures by Mies van der Rohe have long fetched lofty prices. No, the significance lay in who bought the house. The National Trust and the Landmark Preservation Council of Illinois made the purchase, but they could not have done it without the contributions, many of them quite significant, from 350 individuals from around Illinois and, indeed, around the country. Three hundred and fifty people ponied up $7.5 million to purchase a house in which none of them would ever live.

What could have motivated them to do such a thing? They wanted the house to remain on its original site in the midst of the prairie. They did not want it sold to a developer and hauled to another location. And so now the Farnsworth House will never have to leave home.

It was a victory for preservationists, and for some strange reason, I read the story as if it were a Christmas story, because Christmas has so much to do with home, doesn’t it? Garrison Keillor, in one of his best “News from Lake Wobegon” pieces, describes the homing instinct that is in us human creatures all the time but that particularly insists on having its way at this time of year. Keillor says,

We turn a corner in some wretched shopping mall and the snatch of a canned Christmas carol hits our ears, and a switch is turned on in our heads. The gates open, tons of water thunder through Hoover Dam, the electricity flows, we get in our cars and head home as quickly as we can, like salmon swimming upstream.

Why do we do it? Why do we press our way through mobbed airports and clogged highways as if our lives depended on getting to the place where we belong at Christmastime? I believe it is because home is at the heart of the Christmas story. According to Luke, years ago, during the reign of Emperor Augustus, all went to their own hometowns to be registered. Among the pilgrims was a young couple named Mary and Joseph. Mary was about to have a child, and his name would be called Jesus. He would be the Son of the Most High God.

Volumes of theology have been written about the meaning of the birth of Jesus Christ—two thousand years worth of analysis and explanation to help us understand the incarnation, that is, the coming of God to us, God’s choosing to make God’s own home in human life and in the world in which we live. Perhaps no one has expressed in a lovelier way the longing for the incarnation, for the presence of God, than Phillips Brooks in his wonderful Christmas hymn, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray.
Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell.
O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel!

Emmanuel is one of the greatest words you will ever hear. It means “God with us.” The poets, the prophets, the teachers, have been speaking of these things throughout the ages. One named John, in the prologue to his gospel, wrote the magnificent words we read on Christmas Eve each year:

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. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the power to become children of God, who were born not of flesh or of the will of flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word, the Word that was in the beginning with God and the Word that is God, became flesh and lived among us. And we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:10–14)

Reduced to its most basic, what the incarnation means is the Word that was God, that is God, has made its home in one human life, in Jesus Christ, born of Mary, in the city of David. But place is secondary to this matter of home. Home is finally about the willingness of God to come find us, wherever we are, to enter into the world and into our lives through Christ’s spirit, which can show up anywhere and surprise us and bless us and make us feel entirely at home under our own hats and in the world in which we live.

I read a beautiful little Christmas story this week, a story about a Presbyterian church in York County, Pennsylvania. The pastor has decided to introduce this year the Mexican tradition of La Posadas. That term, La Posadas, means “the shelter,” and this particular tradition reenacts the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, as they sought a place to rest so that Mary’s baby could be born. The pastor decided to help the congregation understand La Posadas by taking the porcelain baby Jesus that always rests in the church crèche and placing it in a box with prayers and Advent readings. The prayers, the readings, and the baby Jesus were then sent on their way from here to there, so that by the time of the Christmas Eve service, that baby Jesus will have been in every single home in the congregation.(1) Christmas is, finally, about home. Home is at the heart of it.

I remember talking to a member of a congregation I once served. I had not seen her in awhile, so when I ran into her in the city, I told her that I had missed her. She replied, “I’m sorry I haven’t been in church, but I’ve gotten to the place where it’s uncomfortable for me to be there.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know what happens to me, but I come in and get my bulletin and I take my seat in the pew, and then the choir will begin to sing, or you will read a passage of scripture that pierces me right to my heart. And there I am, with my eyes filling, longing for, wishing for, I don’t know what.”

That kind of thing happens to us in church, I believe, because here we come home to ourselves. We come to the place where we can be safe and where we can be who we really and actually are in the presence of the holy, loving, and everlasting God, who loves us, who created us, and who intends to spend all of eternity with us. The Psalmist is right: we do come into God’s presence with thanksgiving, but we also come with longings and broken places and doubts as well as faith. God is here to receive us exactly as we are.

Robert Frost, the poet, once wrote, “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” Christmas, for me, is the place where God—for reasons of love and grace—comes to us, embraces us, welcomes us unconditionally and gladly, saying, “I’m so happy you’re home. My light, my love, my mercy, my gift of new life—these are all for you.”

Homecoming—it is at the heart of the Christmas story. It is a story that did not begin in Bethlehem. For centuries, the prophets had spoken of homecoming and restoration. The prophet Zephaniah, whose words were our Old Testament reading this morning, sang a joyful song of homecoming: “I am going to remove disaster from you,” he wrote. “I will gather the outcasts. I will bring you home, says the Lord.” Now to be honest, Zephaniah usually did not have such a sunny message. He usually took delight in predicting a grim “Day of the Lord,” when everything was going to turn out badly for everybody. I do not want to coat Zephaniah with sugar and spice this Christmas.

Zepahniah’s default position of gloom and doom reminds me of a story that is told about a church that had several morning worship services each Sunday, just as Fourth Presbyterian Church does. It seems that one Sunday morning, the pastor walked into the narthex of the church and found Alvin, a young boy whom he knew from the congregation, standing there. Alvin was reading a plaque on the wall of the narthex. On it was a list of names. “Pastor McGee,” Alvin asked, “what is this?”

“Well, son,” Pastor McGee said, “this is a memorial to those who died in the service.”

Soberly they stood for awhile and then Alvin asked, in a voice hardly audible, “Was it the 8:00, the 9:30, or the 11:00?”

Zephaniah could look at life through a dark filter. In fact, his message of hope this morning is so strikingly different that biblical scholars think it might have been added during the Babylonian captivity, when the children of Israel languished in exile. Six centuries before Christ, these were people who also longed for home, longed for a word that there was a place where they belonged, and that, as my southern grandmother was fond of saying, “We’ll get there directly.” What happened to our ancestors in faith was that a foreign enemy had overrun their homes and destroyed their communities. The children of Israel were taken away as prisoners to Babylon, taken into exile.

I wonder if you’ve ever had a period in your life or a situation in your life where you felt as if you were in exile.

I think about a woman I know, who for fifty years lived in her own house. She and her husband had raised their children there. He died. The house was sold. She’s in a nursing home now. She cannot take care of herself. Her body is quickly becoming her enemy. The children are busy. They come to see her when they can, but you know how it is. Exile.

I think about how it might be for a young man who graduated with an MBA last spring and was so thrilled to get his first good job in the big, exciting city of Chicago. He moved here, does his work, but cannot find a place to belong. His family is thousands of miles away. I see him sitting sometimes, having supper by himself at the Corner Bakery. He knows about exile.

I think about the gay son or daughter who wants to go home for Christmas this year but who is so afraid of being judged or rejected by family or by the church. You do not have to go to Babylon to know about exile.

For years I have been haunted by the thought of mothers and fathers and children in the cities of this great land who try as best they can to survive on the streets but for whom there literally is no home to go to. The fastest growing segment of the homeless population in Chicago is families with children under the age of eight years old. You do not have to go to Babylon to know exile.

I think of our nation this second weekend in December. Certainly we are in limbo, trying to make our way through the strange land of a war that seems to show no signs of ending. There are so few precedents to guide us. We live in a time marked by a deep sense of dislocation. The worlds we used to know do not exist anymore. “The medical institutions, the educational institutions, the judicial institutions—worlds that seem less and less able to deliver what we need. The old social fabrics fray.”(2) We know about exile.

There are good lessons that can be learned during times like these. We can learn to tell the truth. We can learn to express genuine feelings and face the reality that life is made of shadow as well as light, of welcome and a sense of homelessness. We can tell the truth that even people who seem entirely all-together can become afraid and can feel lost, can have a terrible time trying to find their way home. The beauty and message and wonder of Christmas is this, that even when we cannot find our way home, God will find us. That’s the guarantee.

Some of you are familiar with Anne Lamott’s book Traveling Mercies. A story she tells in that book makes me think of the mission of Fourth Presbyterian Church in the heart of our city, the mission to be a light and a guide and a beacon so people can find themselves and find God, can find meaning for their lives, and can find a way to connect with all the things that truly matter. The story Lamott tells is of a child who got lost one day. She ran up and down the streets of the big city in which she lived. But she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the police car, and they drove around together until she finally saw her church out the window of the police car. She yelled at the police officer, “Stop!” and he puts on the brakes. She said, “Sir, you can let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.”(3)

Yesterday I had a wonderful conversation with our son, Sam, who is married to a physician, who was working overtime on Saturday because of the flu season. Sam was on full-time daddy duty with our three-year-old granddaughter, Virginia. He decided to take her out to breakfast, a brave thing to do with a three-year-old. They went to a little diner that is not far from where they live in Connecticut and ordered Virginia’s favorite food, pancakes. She can eat them by the pound. Sam said that what made breakfast so delightful was that there was sitting on the table a little jukebox. Sam chose some Christmas songs. Virginia was thrilled to hear “Jingle Bells,” of course. The other one she said she loved was “I’ll be home for Christmas. You can count on me.”

I do not know where you’re going to be for Christmas this year or what you’re expecting when you get there, but I want to suggest to you today that there is in our human hearts a true sense that there is a place where we belong, and that somehow we got separated from it a long time ago, and we miss it. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it so well, “We sense that that place misses us, too,” and because we cannot find our way there, the place comes to us, and it turns out not to be a place at all. It turns out to be a person. Emmanuel, the one who came to be with us forever. (4)

Don’t tell the ghosts of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Frank Lloyd Wright, but home is not about houses. It isn’t even about the place where we were born or where we have lived. In fact, for many, the home in which they grew up was in no way a sanctuary but often a battleground, where there was injury and absence of wholeness. No, home in the lasting sense of the word is about safety and peace and acceptance and being everlastingly welcome. Only God can give us any of those gifts unconditionally.

If you saw the New York Times on Thursday, on the cover was a picture of a man named Sergeant David Easely. A handsome, strong man, a member of the 436 Transportation Battalion, he was saying good-bye to his family before he left for a tour of duty in Iraq. He held his two boys’ heads in his broad embrace. His wife’s arm rested on the shoulder of one of the sons, and the other son, the younger one, encircled his father’s neck with his arm. You could see his little hand, graceful as a dove, resting on his father’s cheek. When I saw the picture, I thought of the little baby Jesus making its way through all the homes of the congregation in Pennsylvania. And I thought, he is here already, right at the heart of this family.

From Traveling Mercies, I close with this. Anne Lamott describes a life of exile, her own exile in a life of fear and self-abuse. One night, while she was at home, she was disturbed by a sense of the presence of Christ. She thought she was losing her mind.
“But then,” she said,

Everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: you let it in one time, give it a little milk, and it stays forever. So I tried to stay one step ahead of it . . . [and was successful, until the Sunday I went to church]. I began to cry, I left before the benediction and raced home. I felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked . . . under a sky as blue as God’s own dreams, and I opened the door of my houseboat and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, “I quit.” I took a long breath and said out loud, “All right, you can come on in.”(5)

And so it is at Christmas. We say, I give up . . .

Be near me, Lord Jesus; I ask thee to stay
Close by me forever and love me, I pray.
Bless all the dear children in thy tender care,
And fit us for heaven, to live with thee there.

May our lives be your manger, Lord Jesus Christ. And may the world be flooded with your light and with your love. Amen.

Notes
1. The Presbyterian Outlook, December 8–15, 2003.
2. Walter Bruggemann, “Conversations among Exiles,” Christian Century, July 2–9, 1997.
3. Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies (Pantheon Books, 1999), p. 55.
4. Barbara Brown Taylor, “None of Us Is Home Yet,” The Preaching Life (Cowley Publications, 1993), p. 158.
5. Ibid., Lamott, p. 50.