I hope that you find your way “home” for the holidays. Home may be with your spouse and children. Home may be with your parents. Home may be with my children and myself. Home may be with my new friends in the congregate living facility I just moved in to. Home may be in a new community where I don’t have family but found a church that has become my church home. Home may be with your best friend or someone else who is special. Jesus seems to say to us in the miracle of his birth that he wants us to be home.

This thought is expressed in a line from a song from Leonard Bernstein’s great musical of human strife, prejudice and gang warfare, “Westside Story”. Tony sings to Maria, “there’s a place for us, some where a place for us”. Even in a stable or in a hotel or out on the road under a star filled sky with angels singing or in a shepherd’s camp there is as place for us, a place we can call home. Even on the road or in a military camp or in a community bombarded by shells of war or wherever God has come into the world in Jesus Christ there is a place we can call home. Sometimes home is only, sadly, in our minds and heart and soul but at least, thank God, it can at least be there. 

Rather than focus only on the joy of Christmas, or the work it can take to get through the holidays because of family memories and experiences, both of which are real and not to be denied, but indeed embraced, realize that in this life God has given us as a gift, almost as great a gift as the gift of his Son, God says I have come to you and I will be there and you can rely on me. After the 9/11 tragedy many could not rely on the ultimate safety of building construction, or municipal services, or travel but for those of us in the Christian community we saw ways that God was at work bringing the presence of Christ to those in need. In an unsafe world God still claimed us all as His own. Just as he claimed a world in the early years of the “Common Era” when it is calculated that Jesus was born in Nazareth and so God did, in the most ultimate and yet mysterious way, come into the world. God does work in and through human flesh. Home is made more real by the people you love and who surround you, even as others hope and pray that you will surround them. 

Head home for Christmas. Be it here in Milford, be it as you travel to someplace special, be it even in your heart with memories or promises, with some phone calls or emails etc. thrown in. Find home and let yourself be there. That is God’s gift for us in Jesus Christ, who found a home, our home, and anew made it His home. Thanks be to God. Grace and Peace surround you and hold you in this Christmas and New Year’s season. 

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