HOME FOR THE HOLY-DAYS
December 3, 2023 - January 7, 2024
They say that “home” is the most evocative word in the English language. Poet Christian Wiman, edited a collection of poems called Home, writing in the introduction that home is “a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god.”
Jesus’s own life is a tale of perpetually leaving home – forsaking the glories of heaven, departing Nazareth in utero, fleeing Judea for Egypt as a child refugee, estranged from his ancestral land by imperial occupation, flung from inhabited Judea into the wilderness, forever itinerant – even as he sends those whom he has healed back to their homes to be reconciled with their beloveds.
What is home, then, to we who follow him? And especially those of us who are estranged from home and family, or at least from the comfort we used to imagine should come from home and family?
No place to lay his head. It’s a hard reality about Jesus, that from the very first “Come and see” to his earliest disciples, he never promised stability to his followers. His homelessness becomes definitional for us, this uneasy sense of “not-at-homeness,” the dislocation of our citizenship in God’s empire rather than U.S. America. And maybe the consumer Christmas frenzy heightens our sense of not-belonging?
Bethlehem. This is the kind of story your parents would tell about your birth – the water breaking too early, the frantic rush to the hospital in a snowstorm, a night spent in a waiting room because the L&D suites are full and the contractions are still too far apart... What does it mean, that our biographies begin before we even arrive? What does it mean, that Jesus shares this vulnerability in common with us?
Egypt. The circumstances of Jesus’s birth swirl with violence, and push his family to the desperate status of refugee. When we call ourselves “spiritual refugees,” this is what we mean: we deserved the home we had, but were forced out of its comforts by threat. Jesus lived this life, too.
The Jordan, and the Wilderness Beyond. Finally, we arrive at Mark’s “birth story” – which is not about the care that an infant passively receives, but about an adult who chooses to begin again, deliberately, with a new identity as God’s Son. Our baptisms afford us this same privilege, to choose our “yes” to God’s gift. The best Christmas present ever? (But that wilderness...)
Galilee. Jesus hits his stride in his home territory – at the height of his powers, he calls disciples, exorcises demons, heals diseases, and preaches his heart out. It’s a good New Year’s theme: what does it look like when you’re firing on all cylinders, doing exactly what you were baptized to do? When your life is working in some way that you, and your beloveds, can recognize?
Judea. Jesus’s sense of self requires that he turn toward Jerusalem – toward the concentration of religious and political power that will steal his life and threaten his followers. In what sense is this destiny his “home”? In Christian iconography, he has lived on the cross for 2,000 years...