A slight disclaimer: What follows is the basic text (minus the occasional digressions) of a sermon that I preached at Comox United Church, Comox, B.C. on December 24, 2021. It is not an essay. It is written to be spoken and in a manner that reflects my preaching style, which I suspect might be described as “informal.” Nor does it have the full assortment of citations, acknowledgements, and footnotes normally (and quite reasonably) expected in a more formal work. Please forgive the grammatical peculiarities!
Blessings
Phil Spencer
Home. I like the sound of that and I especially warm to the phrase, “home for the holiday.” The world’s largest furniture retailer, IKEA, has done some pretty extensive cross-cultural research related to their business, surveying people “about their domestic experiences and expectations”…1 and one of the things learned was that their respondents believe that “a home” was composed of four things: comfort, safety, belonging, and love. Interestingly, there’s no mention of a place or residence in that description, but it describes more of a position, an attitude. Nonetheless, if we’re wanting to “be home for the holidays” (that is, if we want to be with those we love) it sometimes demands leaving our normal residence to travel to another locale. So, again, welcome to all of you to the Comox United Church fellowship tonight—what for some of you is your regular church home (which means you can be described as “hosts”), and for those who don’t normally attend here, and particularly those of you from out of town ("guests”), well, our hope is that you might find some elements of “home” here, that this is a comfortable place, a safe place. We hope that this would be a place where you might experience love and have a sense that you belong, for while I’m new here myself, I’ve come to know that the people are sincere when they say, “all are welcome.”
I find there’s some special blessing in both being a guest, and in hosting at this time of the year, in attempting to be hospitable and flexible and accommodating to allow for some sense of “home” though honesty does demand that we admit that there may be some (how shall we put it?) some trials associated with both those roles as well. It’s not always easy being a guest or being a host, even when both parties are working hard to be “at home.” There can be some challenges. After all, there’s the business of making sure that various diets are accommodated, those dislocations from normal beds—and guests, I do hope you’re enjoying the hide-a-bed. Have you found that mysterious metal bar strategically located in your lumbar region yet? There are the varying travel arrangements (“Is it possible for you to pick me up at the airport? Yeah, in Victoria. My flight arrives at 3 A.M.”), and, of course, there’s that horrible moment when you realize that you just used Aunt Gladys’ toothbrush by mistake and you spend 5 minutes trying to dry it off, hoping she won’t notice (honestly, it only happened once and I really rinsed it well).
And of course, this is all against the backdrop of what we’re hoping for as a “perfect Christmas.” I mean, we really want it to be so good and why wouldn’t we? The family’s all back together. What could possibly go … wrong … at home … with the family … together? Frankly? In my family that means all sorts of things, and for all sorts of reasons, because homes are usually complicated, imperfect places.
Please, don’t get me wrong. This is not the voice of world-weary Yuletide cynicism because I positively love Christmas. We believe in celebrating the Christmas festival to excess in the Spencer household. I’d boast that we know—and I’m quoting Dicken’s A Christmas Carol now—we know “how to keep Christmas well, if any [one] alive possessed the knowledge” … and just to be safe, let me throw in a, “God bless Us, Every One!”2 We decorate “to the nines,” make all sorts of special foods, hang out with our family and friends, we try for just the right gifts, observe all kinds of peculiar traditions (traditions that probably only make really sense to us). We do all that stuff and more. We revel in this time of year and that’s acute now, after last year’s severe restrictions. Yet, in doing all that stuff—in focusing on all those details—things can get complicated, and I can still end up “majoring in minors,” as it were. On top of that, I’d even dare to say that there’s something rather disruptive about this season. It can take you to the heights and paradoxically, it can reveal brokenness, and all that’s not quite right, which I think rather fits with the Christmas story, a story about “home.”
Our Scripture reading begins with seemingly the most important person in the Mediterranean world: the Emperor, Augustus Caesar, ruler of the vast Roman empire.
Now Augustus, he was something! Having declared that his adoptive father (Julius Caesar) was divine, Augustus was thus referred to as—and experienced church hands, see if this “rings a bell” for you—Augustus was referred to as “the son of god,” as “saviour,” and as “lord.” That’s how the Emperor was described when Jesus was born, for he was seen as the most important person in the world! And empires, as the Canada Revenue Agency reminds us every April, and with pretty much every purchase you made to prepare for this holiday, empires are expensive. Hence, Luke tells us that a decree went out that (please note the audacity of this!) the world—the Greek word, oikoumenē, the whole inhabited world—it should be taxed. But then the story quickly shifts from that grand picture—the politics of empire—and really, dismissing it as mere background to something much more important from the palace to the barn, as it were, to some most-obscure nobodies in a most unimportant part of the realm. We’re told that everyone went to their own ancestral towns to be registered.
If you ask someone today where’s “home,” or more accurately, where “their people” are from (and most of us have some sort of answer to that question) well, that’s where everyone in Israel was headed—to the place of “their people.” By the way, this was considered a particular cultural accommodation by the Romans to the people of Israel. This wasn’t a rule for the whole world—it just applied in Judea. It was actually a way they kept the peace in an especially tumultuous land. They were perceived as a particularly stubborn nation, and if this would shut ‘em up and keep the taxes flowing … good enough. Rome was pragmatic, if nothing else.
Now enter Joseph (we’re briefly introduced to him in the previous chapter) someone whose home is in Nazareth, but when asked “where his people were from” he’d proudly say that his family was related to the ancient King David, now dead for a thousand years, and his ancestral home was Bethlehem, Therefore, that was where he had to go to be taxed. We’re also told that he went with his fiancé, Mary, who we should note wasn’t actually legally required to go, but being that she was just about ready to bear a child, she traveled with Joseph, surely because being together for this important event was enormous for them, even at the cost of the discomfort and possible danger of traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem. That distance was the equivalent of traveling from here to Ladysmith, which you can appreciate was no small thing when, at best, the most accessible form of transport would be the back of a donkey, or as more likely, the back of a wagon. Then again, maybe they just thought it wise for Mary to be away from home, what with the scandal surrounding her … “situation.” Nazareth wasn’t a big town and most everyone had heard of the strange circumstances around this pregnancy. People could be pretty opinionated about this breach of the cultural rules and without Joseph around comfort, safety, belonging, and love might be in short supply. It’s probably best, probably safer, that Mary and Joseph were together for the birth, even with the increased risk related to travel. So, there was lots of disruption on that first Christmas, what with needing to go home and, paradoxically, to not be at home.
Luke tells us that when they were in Bethlehem it came time for the delivery (and interestingly, it doesn’t actually say what time of day it happened. Me? I always picture it at some time in the wee hours of the morning, but who knows?). What is clear is that things turned out okay because the baby was born and wrapped up to keep him warm and feeling safe. Then a most curious detail: the baby’s first bed was a manger, a feeding trough for animals and it was that way because there wasn’t room for them at the inn. Not the most impressive home for the Saviour. But one of the questions that comes to my mind is: “Why were they thinking of staying at an inn and not with family?”
That would be the normal thing to do—descend on relatives! Home away from home! Driveway camping! “Save the neck for me, Clark.”3 In fact, in that culture, it would likely be insulting to not stay with family. Maybe it was that embarrassing scandal about the pregnancy, a most serious breach of cultural norms. Family would have been shamed, so it was maybe it was just easier to avoid that disruption. As my mother used to say, “Let’s not borrow trouble” and it was probably just less complicated to stay at some sort of commercial establishment.
Of course, hostels in those days weren’t exactly what they are today. They’d likely be the upper story of a house, with the animals housed below or, if they were just one story, they’d surely have some kind of stable next door. When you don’t have a lot of options—a town filled to the brim with travelers, when even Uncle Norm’s hide-a-bed was in use—you just make do. It looks like the only available option for this about-to-deliver Mum and fretful Dad was to bunk where they kept the animals, likely the lower part of the house, or possibly even a stable or a cave. Whatever it was, it probably wouldn’t likely feel like home in the sense of comfort, but it did provide safety, and belonging and love, well … those aren’t necessarily things contingent on “place,” are they? But it’s quite a contrast, isn’t it? From the palace of Emperor Augustus—son of god, saviour, and lord—to an infant (as yet unnamed in Luke’s Gospel) ,a most ordinary baby in something much-less than a palace. But, yes, this is someone who is being revealed to be the Son of God, the Saviour, the Lord. And so God scandalously stepped into human history, making a home with us, and the disruption that this infant brought begins to be felt beyond the Holy Family.
For now the scene shifts to the countryside (how much time has passed isn’t said) but we learn that it’s night time. The characters we’re introduced to are shepherds who are at home doing what shepherds do: keeping an eye on their sheep. A modest occupation, was shepherding, not especially glamorous, but to these ordinary folk there appears an angel, and I’m told that in the ancient world there were no more mysterious and exalted creatures than angels.4 And as typically happens when an angel appears in the Bible, the people they’re visiting are utterly terrified. Perhaps it’s their size, or their appearance, or just the strangeness of being confronted by a messenger from God, but throughout the Biblical story, for the message’s recipient, there’s something truly disturbing, if not frightening, about an angel. Seeing that, this angel tells them not to be afraid because they have good news, brilliant news and that news is that a Saviour’s been born (the long-awaited Messiah!) and not too far away from there either. He’s just over in Bethlehem. And to make identifying this particular baby clear, the shepherds are told that, curiously, the babe will be found in a manger. To drive the immensity of the announcement home, the sky is suddenly filled with the angelic presence and the very heavens echoed: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favours!” Then … gone. When the shepherds recovered from this soul-shaking message they received, and set off to Bethlehem, where they found Mary and Joseph, and the child in the manger, just as they’d been told. They quickly began to tell this remarkable story to any who would listen (you could fairly say that theirs was the very first Christmas gift ever given—the good news of Jesus!) and as the story concludes, we’re told that Mary began to try and make some sense of this whole strange series of events.
It’s a great holiday, is Christmas, and underneath all the traditions lies a most wonderful story. But in the midst of that story, what I hope we can hang on to, is the thing that actually brings us together tonight, and created all the ripples and disruptions and traditions that brings us to be “home for the holidays” and that is that, remarkably, God chose to make a home with us. The author Walker Percy observed that in some way, all of us are born homesick—it’s in our design—and that leads us on a kind of pilgrimage to find our home. Christmas is about God responding to that yearning in us. God graciously did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves, which was to bring us home, and not just for the holidays, but forever. Ours is no distant, disinterested God—our God is with us. That’s what the name St, Matthew uses for Jesus—Emmanuel—means: God is with us. As we read in that glorious concluding portion of the Book of Revelation:
See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them ….5
Tonight, we celebrate. We come home to celebrate that God brought us home, that God is still with us, and will be always. To which I say, thanks be to God. Amen.
2 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46/46-h/46-h.htm ], closing paragraph
3 A gratuitous reference to the character of Cousin Eddie in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
4 Darrell Bock, Luke, 84.
5 Revelation 21:3