“The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” When Phillips Brooks wrote "O Little Town of Bethlehem" in 1867, he surely could not have imagined how many people would be singing it more than a century later. He was a just a few years away from becoming rector of Trinity Church and would soon look out at faces like yours in this very room. Now that’s enough to inspire a Christmas carol! The church looks wonderful tonight and so do you. Your Christmas Eve faces are beautiful.
On Christmas Eve we come together like no other time in the year. We dress the church and ourselves in our very best for this occasion. We may see each other week after week, but on this night we shine in a special way. This is our homecoming: we come home to church on Christmas Eve. Some of you bring visiting family or friends who join us for our homecoming and we welcome you. Others of you are at Trinity for the first time and your presence is a gift. Perhaps the Holy Spirit is doing a new thing in your life and it has led you here: thanks be to God. Every year at Christmas parishioners who have moved away from Boston surprise us and return for this homecoming. Wherever you come from on Christmas Eve, welcome home to Trinity Church.
All across the country tonight, hearts and minds are turned toward home for Christmas.
The highways and airports are crowded with travelers headed for home. And even if we cannot get home in time or space, we think about it: what it was like or how it might have been. In the 20th century, society became more mobile than ever before in human history. So we invented new Christmas songs about going home. We began to sing words like: “Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays,” or “I’ll be home for Christmas...if only in my dreams.”
This night evokes a longing for home, even if it is only in our dreams. For many people, home is a happy place, a warm and loving place. For others it is a broken and disappointing place and perhaps for some it is very sad. A seat at the table may be empty for the first time this year, and this makes Christmas difficult. Home does not always meet our hopes and expectations. The memories may be warmer than the present reality. Whatever your experiences of home in the past and present, you can always count on this homecoming. Welcome home to Trinity Church on Christmas Eve.
Tonight we celebrate the birth of a child who is born far away from home. Mary and Joseph are required to leave home for the Roman census. Imagine how worried Mary is when she realizes the baby will come while she is away from home. Surely she would rather be in Nazareth with her parents and family.
But a home is created in an unexpected place in Bethlehem. A new family becomes a home. Wherever they go, whether it’s to Bethlehem for the census or to Egypt as refugees, or the carpenter’s shop in Nazareth, Mary and Joseph and Jesus together become a home. When the baby is born and his parents hold him for the first time, he is at home.
Christmas has always been a homecoming and not just ours.
The miracle of this night is that Christmas is God’s homecoming. This is a homecoming of cosmic proportions. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the Creator of the universe came home to creation. God chose to be with us, to live in the midst of the human community. God came to us in our own context, through our own experience, in the person of Jesus.
The Gospel of John says that “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” The original language is much more dramatic than the English. It literally says that Jesus became flesh and ‘pitched a tent among’ us. This is such an urgent homecoming that advance reservations are not required. God longs to be at home in humanity and will use whatever means are at hand. It could be a tent or a manger, or the uneven edges of our daily lives. God’s homecoming is the great mystery that we celebrate tonight: the infant Jesus represents God choosing to be with us, over and over again.
We come here now to be at home with God and one another. Tomorrow and in the days ahead we will have much to ponder in our hearts, just like Mary. We will think and pray about God’s tent pitched among us as we go about our work and live in our communities. We will look for signs of Christ’s presence in our lives. Christ is with us in the most unexpected places, so we will look for him there in the New Year. We may be surprised by the very human ways in which we experience the grown-up Jesus. He comes through the imperfect love we offer one another and in unexpected solace or joy. He comes when our deepest desires intersect with the needs of the world. He comes in the extraordinary and the commonplace moments in our lives.
Here in snowy Massachusetts we savor God’s homecoming in Jesus as we read the words of our poet, Mary Oliver. She writes:
Don’t worry, sooner or later I’ll be home.
Red-cheeked from the roused wind,
I’ll stand in the doorway
stamping my boots and slapping my hands,
my shoulders
covered with stars.
In the days to come we will look for Jesus here among us, his shoulders covered with stars.
Our homecoming tonight also leads us to ponder how others long for home. Many people in this country are losing their homes this winter through mortgage foreclosures. Other children and adults have no home at all and sleep on our streets tonight in Boston. Around the globe, refugees pitch fragile tents at the edge of war zones. When God comes home to us in the birth of Jesus at Christmas, we are compelled to ponder these things in our hearts all year round.
Tonight is the night of all nights as we celebrate God’s homecoming through the birth of Jesus. Just as every homecoming has a banquet, this one is no exception. We gather around this table and share a meal. It is an ancient and simple meal, a taste of bread and a sip of wine. Yet like this homecoming, it is a meal of cosmic proportions. This is a gift from the infant who grew up. It is from Jesus himself, who asks that we remember him every time we come home to share this bread and this cup.
So, welcome home tonight. Welcome to the stable, welcome to the table, welcome to the place that will always be home, where Christ is born among us, over and over again. Amen.
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