If not, you’ll be in good company
“Are you going home for Christmas?”
What question has been more frequent in this December season? It’s not uncommon for someone to ask it of me, then I remind them that I am a minister with four Christmas Eve candlelight services, and they say, “Oh yes — I guess you’re staying in Dallas.”
Thankfully, Dallas has long been my home, so I can say honestly that I am going home for Christmas!
“Are you going home for Christmas?”
It’s still a wistful question, since many people will not be home for the holidays. There are those who live too far away, or those who can’t scramble together enough money for plane fares. Of course we remember those serving our country in faraway places like Afghanistan or any one of many lonely posts around the world. Many still remember the song that came out during the dark days of World War II: “I’ll be home for Christmas/ You can count on me/ I’ll be home for Christmas/ If only in my dreams.”
“Are you going home for Christmas?”
Frederick Buechner, who is a minister and author, has written that in mid-December 1953 he was in church one Sunday, listening to a sermon by Dr. George Buttrick at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. Dr. Buttrick had related some comments overheard in the narthex the Sunday before about people’s Christmas travel plans. And when, in his sermon, Buttrick asked, “Are you going home for Christmas?” Buechner says the question was asked with such a sense of longing that tears leapt to his eyes.
Home. What is it really that we mean by that word? Is it a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting, all in soft greens and reds, crackling fires on the hearth, wide-eyed children taking in their first glance of Christmas morning? Is it the “Home Sweet Home” cross-stitched into our dearest family memories, or the ones we wish we could have had? Is it Dorothy in Oz, clicking her heels together and chanting, “There’s no place like home, …”
The danger of so many of these images is that they will leave us disappointed by the reality of the holidays.
Perhaps there is another way to think of Christmas. Maybe the point is that these are days when we remember that, wherever we are on Dec. 25, God will be there with us. And, according to my Bible, God began that journey toward us by not being home at Christmas. After all, the first Christmas found him far away from home, in a makeshift crib in an animals’ feed trough. It was about as far away from home as one can get.
So if you are not getting home for the season ahead, perhaps it will help just a little to know that wherever the holidays find you, you will not be spending them alone because it’s really all about “God with us” — a God who left home to be with us.
