Christmas Playlist - I'll Be Home for Christmas

Pastor Burcham’s Sermon

Sunday, December 20, 2009

[Video. Song I’ll Be Home for Christmas.]

Home. What do we mean by that? We say that we want to be home and especially this time of year, which is curious to me. Why is it at Christmastime that we have this longing to be home? But more than that, what is home? It’s more than just a place, isn’t it? Because home is more of an atmosphere. It’s more of a feeling. So sometimes maybe home is the sights, it’s the sounds, it’s the people and maybe also it’s the place where we are but there’s something intangible about this concept of being home. It’s a sense of belonging. It’s a sense of love. It’s a sense that this is home.

For instance, if you’ve moved recently, you moved into a new house, a new condominium or a new apartment, for a time, that’s the place you live. And then at some point, you really can’t pinpoint it, all of a sudden, it’s not just some place where you live but now it’s home. So what is this place called home?

What is it that we long for and we yearn for at this time of year because we want to be home for Christmas? It has to be pretty powerful. As the song illustrates, written in World War II, there was many a soldier who was longing to be home for Christmas. They were across the seas, fighting a war and yet they wanted to be back with family and friends. And I doubt seriously that it was just a specific place they were longing to be. It was the whole idea, the concept of home.

And yet today, we have soldiers, men and women in Afghanistan and in Iraq and around the world and each one of them, I’m sure, are longing to be home for Christmas. We have a whole slew of college kids who just finished up their final exams this past week and each one of them wanted to be home for Christmas. How about the business traveler who is going to make one last run this week and he wants to finalize that deal quickly so he can be home for Christmas?

It’s a powerful force in our lives. Each one of us, at some level, have this desire, this longing to be home. We can’t really discount it or minimize it and say, “Well, it’s just homesickness. It’s just the kid who makes his first trip to summer camp and, all of a sudden, he’s crying on the phone because he wants to come home.” Or it’s the college freshman who, after two weeks on campus, discovers that, “Well, you know, living at home wasn’t such a bad idea after all.” It goes deeper than that.

For instance, one of my neighbors is from Bosnia. Now they’ve lived in the United States since they were 12 and 17 years old and they have no intention of leaving. They plan to make this their permanent residency and they are American citizens and, yet, they save every nickel and every dime so they can fly where? Home. They, along with millions of others, foreign‑born Americans, spend millions of dollars flying back to their birth country because they have this desire, this sense that they want to go home.

How many of you in the next few days will pack up the SUV or your minivan and you’ll head for some place called home? You’ll go to great efforts to get there. If it’s inclement weather, it won’t stop you. You’ll battle through it. If it means you have to sit in airports for long times, you’ll do it. In fact, you’ll dip into the savings just so you can be home for Christmas.

But what is this idea of home? Because to me, it’s pretty elusive. We have this longing, we have this yearning and all kinds of things can stir up this wanting to be home and it can transport us to this constant idea of home. For instance, last week, I was down in the basement and, all of a sudden, an aroma started to fill the house and I realized that Michelle was making Chex mix upstairs. No, no, she didn’t open the bag. I mean like in the oven. Do you remember that? Yeah. That transported me back to my childhood. It took me back home where my mother always made Chex mix around Christmastime. You see, all it took was just a smell.

Sometimes, it’s a sound. Sometimes, it’s an ornament. Sometimes, it’s a place. But something will transport us back to this place called home but we only get a snippet of it. We only get a glimpse of this idea of home and then it’s gone. It’s elusive.

The last time I was in Michigan, my home state, my brother and I decided that we were going to go by the house we grew up in. So we got on the road where the house was and we zipped right past it. Never even saw it. We had to turn around and come back. The school that was kitty-corner to our house had been torn down, so now there was just a vacant lot. And the other part of it, which I really can’t understand, it really has me puzzling, is that somehow the home I grew up in and the yard I used to play in shrunk dramatically. Because I remember it much larger than what it was when I saw it.

Rick and I were searching for a little bit of nostalgia, for a little bit of home but instead all we got was disappointment because it slipped through our fingers. Home is elusive.

Those of you who will be traveling and you’re going to be going back to your parents’ house, your grandparents’ house, you’re going to be going home, how long will that last for you before you’re ready to come back? A couple of days? A couple hours? Because it’s elusive. We strive for it. We yearn for it. We try to recapture this sense of belonging, this sense of love, this whole idea and atmosphere of home but yet it keeps slipping through our fingers and it never lasts very long.

It doesn’t last because home can’t be found in this world. Our true home, that true sense of belonging, that feeling of being loved, that this is the place where I’m meant to be cannot be found in this world. That’s what St. Paul was getting at when he wrote to the Church at Corinth. He says, “For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down, when we die and leave these bodies, we’ll have a home in heaven.” We’ll have a home in heaven. He says where we are right now, it’s like a tent. It’s a temporary dwelling. It’s something we have to sort of put up with and we have to sort of muddle through with this tent we’re living in but home, ah, home, our permanent place we’re going to live, that’s yet to come.

In fact, it’s actually a pervasive theme throughout all of scripture if you take a look at it of this sense and this yearning of being displaced from our true home and this yearning and longing to get back to that place of home. Go all the way back to the beginning of time. Adam and Eve, God creates them and He places them where? Where is their home? Their home is paradise. He puts them in the garden. That’s where they’re supposed to live. That’s where God intended them to spend an eternity. That truly is home for mankind is in paradise, is in that garden. The problem is we didn’t like the house rules and so we rebelled against the house rules and God said, “You have to leave home. You can’t stay.”

And ever since that, if you go through Scripture, there’s this theme of always being displaced from home and a yearning to come back. The first siblings, Cain and Abel, Cain is jealous of his brother. He kills his brother. Scripture says now Cain has to wander aimlessly throughout the earth. No home.

How about Abraham? God calls Abraham and, through him, He’s going to make a mighty nation but what’s the first thing God asked Abraham to do? Leave your home. Travel to a different land. How about his grandson, Jacob? He steals the birthright from his brother and what’s the first thing he has to do? He has to go live with his uncle. He has to leave home. How about Joseph? Joseph gets sold into slavery and now he has to live in Egypt. Pretty soon, all of the Hebrew people are displaced from their home and they have to live in this foreign country, always yearning and longing to come back home.

Trace it all the way through and now you have Joseph and Mary and they have to leave Nazareth to travel to Bethlehem. The very first Christmas, they didn’t spend it at home. God’s people always being displaced from home. And we’ll never find it. We’re always yearning for it. But God had created and designed for us to live in paradise and, ever since then, we’ve been wandering about trying to rediscover that.

Tim Keller in his book, The Prodigal God, talks about this very idea and he says this, “The bible says that we’ve been wandering in spiritual exiles every since.” He’s talking about ever since we left the garden. That is, we’ve been living in a world that no longer fits our deepest longings. We may work hard to recreate the home that we have lost but, says the bible, it only exists in the presence of the heavenly Father from whom we have fled. Home, truly home only exists in the presence of our heavenly Father.

We can only get glimpses of it, shadows of it, little snippets of it but we never know truly what home is until we’re in the presence of our Father in heaven. Paul, talking about home, Chapter 5 of 2 Corinthians again says this, “Yes, we are fully confident and we would rather be away from these bodies, for then we’ll be at home with the Lord.” He never says that here, in this world, is home. No, because our true home is with our Father in our heaven. Our true home is for us to once again go back to the place in which God created and designed us to live. God wants us to live in paradise, in that garden where He first put Adam and Eve and so we long for it and we yearn to be back home.

It’s for that reason that Jesus left home. Jesus left home so He could bring us back home. Maybe you never thought of it that way, but Jesus had to leave His heavenly home. He reigned with the Father and the Spirit in heaven. All authority was His, but He chose to leave home and to come and live among us so He could bring us home. The gospel writer, John, puts it this way, “Jesus knew that the Father had given Him authority over everything and that He had come from God and that He would return to God.” He had left home, His home with the Father, and come to live with us but He was going back home. But this time, He wants to take us with Him home.

Christmas actually is the beginning of Jesus’ quest to bring us home. And we need Jesus to take us home because we’ll never find it. We are incapable of finding our own way home. The sin that has corrupted us, the sin that has corrupted our world prohibits us from finding our way home. We’ll never discover it on our own. God Himself has to come and get us and bring us home.

Hundreds of years before Jesus was born, the prophet, Zephaniah, said this, “On that day, I will gather you together and I will bring you home again.” I’ll bring you home again. It means that’s the place where we were designed and meant to live was in the presence of the Father, so He will come and He will bring us home again because that’s where we belong. That’s our permanent place.

Over the years of my ministry, I’ve had the privilege of being at the deathbed of faithful Christians and, on many occasions, they’ve looked at either their loved one or they’ve looked at me and they say, “I’m ready to go home. I’m ready to go home.” Something about the dying process for a Christian that a revelation takes place and, all of a sudden, they realize this place they’ve been yearning for, that they’ve desired, this sense of belonging and of being loved, it’s within their grasp so they want to go home. They want to go home.

I know some of you are mourning as you do every Christmastime because you think of the ones you’ve lost, spouses, children, siblings. Does it help to know that they’re finally home? That deep yearning and longing that each one of us has, to have that place of belonging and to know they’re home? They’re home. And then to know that you and I have a home, that Jesus left His home so we could return home. Jesus Himself said, “In my Father’s house, there are many rooms.” He says, “And I’m going there to prepare a place for you. I’m getting it ready for you.” You see, heaven is a real place. It has all the sights, all the sounds, all the smells, all the things that we imagine that come together to form this place called home. And Jesus says, “I’m going to come back so you can come home and you can live there and you can dwell there and you’ll always know that you belong. You’ll always know that you’re loved, that this glimpse we have now, these snippets of home, we’ll truly experience it and we’ll experience it for an eternity. Jesus left home so we could go home.

I wonder if that’s why at Christmastime, maybe more than any other time during the year, we have this longing to be home. We sort of tune into the words “I’ll be home for Christmas” and we’re searching for that and looking for it. Maybe it’s because in the eyes of Mary’s Son, we see a glimpse of home. Or maybe it’s the fact that God has come to live among us, that we understand that home has been opened up for us, that we will one day go there.

I wonder, should we change the song? Instead of “I’ll be home for Christmas,” I’ll be home because of Christmas. Amen.

Copyright 2009 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church