Home for Christmas?
Advent 2004, week 3by Lucy Meade
Advent is the Church’s month of preparation for Christmas – one of the three primary Christian holidays. In the spirit of preparation, urbana.org is running a series this year on the theme of the coming Christmas. This week Lucy Meade meditates on Home for Christmas.
Other essays:
Week 1: Ritual in Worship
Week 2: Gift Giving
Week 3: Home for Christmas?
Week 4: Immanuel - God is with
Us.
Lots of people associate Christmas with home, but in the world today around 45 million people live physically uprooted from home. More than ten million of these are refugees, up to twenty-five million are displaced civilians living in their own countries, and roughly nine million are completely stateless – they have no citizenship or nationality, no legal status in any country, and as such have little or no access to basic human rights like employment, education, or even burial.
Home is a place of belonging – it’s the physical, emotional, and relational place in which we know and are known; in which we love and are loved. At home we are safe; we can rest. But you don’t have to be physically displaced to feel homeless. Some of us have grown up in houses that weren’t safe; where we felt neither known or loved. For many, if not all, of us, home is also a place of disillusionment. Something that promises so much inevitably falls short and we feel the awkward distance between ourselves and those who should understand and cherish us the most.
I have come to realize that none of us are at home. By nature of our very humanity we are displaced peoples. We are banished from the Garden; exiled from God’s home for us. That is true whether we know and love Jesus or not. This world is not home. We – humanity – are all residents of a country that ultimately is not our own. This is one of Scripture's prominent themes: from Genesis to Revelation it tells us a story of wandering people. Some of these people have become pilgrims, strangers in this world who have citizenship in Heaven. Some are simply lost.
Advent is a season in which we consciously acknowledge the tension of living in transition – waiting, watching for something promised that hasn’t yet appeared. Advent invites us to identify with Israel; particularly with Israel in the inter-testamental period when God was silent, when the prophets’ writings grew ancient and still the Messiah hadn’t appeared, when God’s people lived without land or power of their own, when they yearned for God’s Kingdom – which would be their Kingdom – to come.
The difference between pilgrims and stateless people is this: pilgrims are journeying towards a destination. They have hope. Those of us who look forward this season to a celebration of the coming of our King are those who have gained a citizenship, a nationality, a home. We are not home yet, but we have all the rights of citizens and the identity of those who belong to somewhere and someone – we have a people and a family. But we are still residents of strange land. We are aliens yearning for the home none of us have ever seen. How do we live well in this tension? Do we buckle down, huddle together and ride it out? Do we blend in to the full extend we can, working the systems of this world to our advantage whenever and however we can?
Jeremiah had a word for God’s people carried away to Babylon about how to live appropriately in exile. He told them to build houses and plant gardens, marry and have children, and to seek the peace and prosperity of the city they had been exiled to. This was not the message the exiles were hoping for! It implied years of living among the Babylonians, away from home; years of tension, waiting, displacement.
Centuries later a young woman burdened with an unplanned pregnancy gave birth to a baby boy far from her home – and even farther from his. From the ignoble beginnings in a stable they would flee to Africa to escape a massacre. There Jesus would begin his human life doubly displaced, away from his ultimate home and without a human home. He says later of himself, “the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
The author of Hebrews says to his audience:
By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundation, whose architect and builder is God. … All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country – a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
Hebrews 11: 8-10, 13-16
Notice the actions of the faithful mentioned in the passage: they look for, see and welcome from a distance that which is promised; they admit that they are aliens and strangers on earth; and they long for something, somewhere, better.
Faithful pilgrims, then, anticipate and imagine, that which no one has seen. We believe that God will do what he has promised. Faithful pilgrims say aloud, to one another and to the world around us, that we don’t belong here. We remind ourselves that we shouldn’t expect to be comfortable here, to find perfect peace or justice or joy or beauty in this place. We are not discouraged or disillusioned because we know that while oppression and loneliness, violence and grief are inevitable in this country, there is a country to look forward to. And so we long for the promise to be fulfilled.
Christians during Advent really rehearse those character traits which are to set us apart from our neighbors. One of these is hope. We are neither pessimists nor cynics; we are neither optimists nor idealists. We are a hopeful people who know to whom we belong and that God’s promises are more solid than those “realities” that mark our current lives. Our hope is not a private coping mechanism but a public declaration: “The Christian is liberated from fear about his own future in order to care about the fear and struggles of others. Hope is not merely a private matter, for the scope of God’s kingdom is universal.”1 We are hopeful pilgrims, inviting the displaced in the world to join the pilgrimage.
Notes Lucy Meade is a former military brat who grew up in England and Nebraska. After four years in Belarus, she is now in Madison, Wisconsin with InterVarsity, where she is working in the Urbana 06 program development process.
1 New Dictionary of Theology. Ferguson, Sinclair B., Editor. InterVarsity
Press,
1988.
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