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They say one can never really go home again - that to go home is to find that all has changed, that everything has become very different from how you remember it. Some leave home in the first place because there has been so much pain. Frankly, they are leaving the home environment where they should have been loved and nurtured but that has not been true. They're escaping, simply running away. There may be tears and crying; there may be a cold and steely resolve born of frustration, fear and hatred.
Sometimes when people get away and think about home, they pine for the place and people they have known. I have had the experience of living far away from where I was born and raised. I loved the people I met and got to know and I loved the people and the geography; but on my days off from work, I felt that I really did not belong there. I missed home. I missed the land - the more familiar water nearby, the Muskoka rocks - missed trees big enough to hug and that changed into beautiful colours each autumn. I missed family and friends - my roots and the culture and history with which I was most familiar and which, I confess, up-until then I had taken for granted.
Sometimes we escape, seeking to be free, to try new things, to explore what we feel is important when, perhaps, people nearby do not.
There's a certain romance for many in the idea of 'home.'
“Home is the place, wrote Robert Frost, "where when you get there, they have to take you in.” Home is often a place of memories - hopefully, warm rich memories, of Christmas and birthday rituals, of familiar dear ones gathered and of how we interacted around family tables and meals.
Often upon returning home, we return home we act like we did when we were children. Our spouse notices that our voice changes as we interact again as in former years with parents and siblings and old friends. We remember the stories, the family times, and there is a certain comfort in that. We may feel like a little boy or little girl in again, when alone with our parents once more, with time to talk and reflect and ask questions. We may also feel ourselves closer to and more understanding of our parents with age and with such visits.
Coming home in Scripture.
Coming home in Scripture sometimes depicts the return of the backslider or prodigal. The person returns in repentance and perhaps also with trepidition about how they'll be treated, whether they'll be taken or welcomed. In the Old Testament story of Ruth, she with Naomi returns home to Bethlehem from their time away in the land of Moab. Naomi returns with a bitter spirit, saying, “The Almighty has dealt harshly with me.“
In a later story, Israel's soon-to-be king, David, returns close to his home in Bethlehem after a time of exile among the Philistines, and he longs for a drink of water from a familiar Bethlehem well from which no doubt he has drunk many times before, as a boy and young man. The 'drink' for which he longs is more than desire about physical thirst for also there is an emotional and spiritual longing in his words.
We sometimes forget that for Joseph, the husband of Mary in the Christmas Story, returning to Bethlehem was a homecoming too. How well he knew the streets, the little alleys, the sloping, sheep-covered hills surrounding this little village of Judea. Coming home brings its own memories to life, against the background of dreams and disappointments perhaps unfulfilled while there - and while away too . . . 'the hopes and fears of all the years.'
“Look Mary, there's where I used to play, by that little stream. It's a torrent when the rains come.”
What is a home? – those pictures on the walls, a garden, the well, the barn and out- buildings, the house which now seems so small. Home means security, a place where our 'emotional tanks' can be replenished, a place to be ourselves again, a place of quiet confidence, peace and rest - of solace. It's a place to reflect, to re-assemble plans and goals, recapture dreams, a place to leave from and a place to get back to. But ultimately, the goal is to get back home again.
The house is not the home. Some people have houses bigger than they can possibly furnish even for best outward appearances; the long end-game they have chosen not yet making up for the fact that they can not yet adequately feed their children.
Homes can be places of tragedy, of abuse or incest, places where beatings and alcohol over-consumption is rampant, where there adultery and mistrust, where people merely live together, without love. The home can be wonderful – as a place to establish great rituals, a place to nurture, comfort and encourage, a place of rest at the end of long days, a place for hospitality and welcome in ministry to others. Karen Maina reminded us some years ago in her book Open Heart, Open Home of the wonderful privilege it is to open our home to others. Inviting others gives opportunity for welcome and witness, to introduce our Savior and Friend to our other family and friends. Home can become the very gate of heaven. Where there is no room in the Inn, we can make space - a room in our house, so that Jesus can say to us on the great day: “I was a stranger but you took me in.”
Heaven is home.
There is within us a great longing for Heaven and Home. There is the 'weight of the glory' we feel and much that is wonderful awaiting people of faith. There is our desire to see and be united with loved ones who've gone before, that we have loved and lost a while. Of course, a renewed Creation will be our ultimate Home, for we are not escapists who long for some disembodied and ethereal state. But still, there is that place even now, prepared for those who love the Lord.
Joseph had no idea that Mary’s baby was to be the Savior of the world, the Lord of glory. He did all the right things in faith and obedience, in response to the message of the Angels. But how could he have understood fully the significance of those wonderful events which at one level were no more extraordinary than any mother’s birth pangs, and then the crying, kicking little Bundle, the smell of the straw and the animals, the rough wood grain of a manger.
Sometimes it seems so strange, the Christmas Story, with interwoven strains of the natural with the supernatural. What is myth and what is fantasy and Christmas? What is the Story and what is merely a kind of romance? However it may really seem or be, by faith we too dare to obey and to affirm that this is our Savior and our Lord who is come - the One who brings us Home and then One we come Home to. This little baby grew to be a man who died on a cross and was raised again, and we too have seen and received the Lord of Glory, as God comes to dwell in our lives and homes, and we in God.
Homecoming for Joseph helped make possible are being able to come Home too. it happens as the Babe of Bethlehem is born anew in us, experienced in our lives. For - where meek souls will receive Him, still the dear Christ enters in.
