Close to Home: Invited Home

Luke 2: 1-20

December 24, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image Ordinary Glory by Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman © a sanctified art | sanctifiedart.org

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/0gMud0SyFTk

My cheeky brother Roger sent me a picture of a kitchen several months ago. He asked “What do you think about a counter like that?’

I looked at it and said, “It reminds me of our old house.”

I meant the house where we lived from the time I was in fourth grade until I left for college. The house where Roger lived from first grade until sometime in high school when my parents moved to Saudi Arabia and he went to boarding school in Greece. It was a house where we did a lot of our growing up and the kitchen table was distinctive. Like the one in this picture, it was attached to the wall. Not at barstool height like many are today, but at normal kitchen table level. This picture reminded of that house, but our kitchen had a fake brick wall and oak cabinets.

So I asked him whose house this was and he kept sending me pictures of other rooms, until finally he sent me the front of the house, which I recognized as our old one. It’s been a few decades since we lived there. Some remodeling has happened. If I have a dream in which I am at home, it doesn’t matter how old I am in the dream, I am most often in this house.

Our Advent theme was Close to Home. Over the last month, we have talked about spiritual homesickness, that enduring yearning for God. We have talked about faith nurtured in homes and communities which creates peacemakers and justice-seekers. We have described sanctuary, the kind of welcome and belonging and safety that we hope everyone would experience in their own homes, but which some must unfortunately seek elsewhere.

All of that has led us to this night, to the center of the story. We know the story very well, but even so, like millions of others around the world today, we are here to hear it again, to feel it in the music, to wonder at it by candlelight, to once more find ourselves in the story of God coming to be at home among us.

Wanting to be home for Christmas or to be with people who accept and love you -- that’s a common theme in Christmas music and made-for-TV movies. Most of us felt it especially keenly last year when the pandemic kept us confined to our homes, but not necessarily in the home where we usually spend the holidays. And many of us are still feeling that this year. Family is still too far away. Or maybe we are at home, but home doesn’t feel like it used to. Maybe there’s an empty chair or an empty room, and a hole in your heart.

Home for the holidays is an interesting twist on the original story. It doesn’t really seem like anyone was at home on the first Christmas. The angels were talking with some shepherds, not in heaven where they apparently live. The shepherds are not at home – they’re in the fields with sheep. The magi, who will arrive in a sermon in a couple of weeks, are definitely not at home. They’re somewhere on the road from the East, probably on camelback. And of course, Mary and Joseph are not in their hometown, not even, it seems, in a decent motel.

None of that stopped God from being present then, or now. Christmas has always happened in the hearts of many in places far from home. It is happening even tonight in prison cells and hospital rooms, on battlefields, in emergency shelters, and in refugee camps. Maybe even at fast-food places. Here is one pastor’s description of one Christmas Eve at a McDonald’s.

. . .A family with three toddlers, jazzy with excitement,
are traveling to Maine in the drizzle of the holy evening. the littlest boy in red and green plaid Oshkosh runs in circles, strangling French fries in his hand. Tired of the car and already eager for presents and bed, his little sneakers tramp
like angel feet.

An older couple in a corner talk quietly about their daughter who’s been dead four Christmases now. They could have gone to their son-in-law’s house. His kind new wife invited them with her family, but it didn’t seem right. And this was the very brightest place – it looked like a star when they drove down the highway, and they knew there would be children here.

A divorced Dad with Budweiser on a black T-shirt jokes with his six year old daughter over milk shakes. A clumsily wrapped present perches on the molded plastic seat. He is trying to make the very best treat he can of their Christmas hour before bringing her back to her Mom’s house. Brown eyes shine at him and he thinks she is excited for later – for Santa and all – but she’s looking at him all over memorizing the gift.

The preacher is on her way to church to remember Bethlehem out loud for the folks who come to break bread and light little candles with paper circles on them that keep the wax from dripping on their hands as they sing “silent night.” Most of them have heard the story about the child before, and so has she. She has come here first, just to sit for a while and watch the christmas eve communion.”[1]

Christmas has always happened in the hearts of many in places far from home. Bidden or unbidden, Christ is present.

We know, from generations of Christmas pageants, that there must have been an innkeeper who pointed to the no vacancy sign and sent Mary and Joseph away. We know this because of that one verse which says that Mary laid Jesus in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.

The word that gets translated “inn” is the Greek word kataluma. At the risk of messing up all those pageants, I have to tell you that the best translation of kataluma is not “inn.” The best translation of kataluma is “guest room.” The one other time that kataluma occurs in Luke’s gospel is when Jesus sends his disciples to find a place to celebrate the Passover. Preparing for what we now call the Last Supper, Jesus told them to ask the homeowner for the use of the kataluma, the guest room or upper room. The kataluma was an extra room, added to a house for the purpose of providing space for guests.

When Luke says that there is no room in the kataluma, it means that the guest room is already full. Many people are traveling – it’s Christmas, I mean the census, after all, and providing hospitality for family members who had come home was just basic good manners in that culture. As is happening in many places tonight, some people will be sleeping on the sofa or an air mattress or in their childhood bunkbeds. So it was with Mary and Joseph, they were bunked down in whatever space was available.

Palestinian homes usually had two main areas – one large room used for cooking, eating and sleeping, and a second area, usually down a few steps, used for everything else. Into this lower level, the family cow, donkey and a few sheep were brought each night. In the morning, the animals were taken out into a courtyard, the area was cleaned and the house was ready for the day. Where there are animals, there are feeding troughs. Mary is simply being resourceful by putting Jesus in the manger, where he wouldn’t get stepped on in this very full house.

So, Jesus was not born in the stable of some cold, impersonal one star hotel, but rather in the back room of a home where aging aunts, cousins, and other random relatives may have doted on the new baby. God came into the world, into a family, with rituals and holiday traditions, and all of the quirks and characters that our families have.

That is what we celebrate tonight, that God came to share our humanness, our pain, our fear, our hopes and joys, and our love. God arrived as vulnerable and weak as any of us. He lived and dwelt among us. Of all the characters in the first Christmas story, perhaps it was God who was homeless; The One who left the divine realm to take on human flesh, was the furthest from home.

Let me close with The House of Christmas by G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton doesn’t seem to know about the idea of a guest room, but the poem is still true.

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall [we]come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And [we all] are at home.

Thanks be to God. Amen.