Home for Christmas

Home for Christmas

Imagine yourself home for Christmas. You’ve probably pictured a place—somewhere on the map of these fifty United States, or perhaps elsewhere—that you consider your truest place of origins or identity or
kinship. It may be where you grew up, or where you live just now, or somewhere in between. And when you get there, whether in your mind’s eye or in reality, it is a good place to be, containing certain familiar features—landscapes, cooking, furnishings, sounds, and loved ones, or their memory.

The season of Advent that leads us to Christmas will have us exploring the question of what it might mean to be home for Christmas in a different sort of way. Are there ways in which we might make a home in a place that is far from our ideal geographical home, yet nonetheless close to God, and to our sense of spiritual groundedness? Many Christmas stories, including our originating story in Luke Chapter 2 about the first Christmas, recount experiences of people dislodged from home and “re-lodged” elsewhere; driven from home only to discover a different sort of home in an unanticipated context. Christmas, it seems, is an invitation to make a home wherever we happen to be, God’s presence providing the only essential geography.

I look forward to our Advent journey together—toward home, and away, and then home again, wherever that may be.

Grace and peace.

Paul