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Pastor · Sunday Schedule · FBC
News
2000
CHRISTMAS AND HOME
I don't think the observance of Christmas
can be separated from a sense of home. We do whatever we can to make it
there by Christmas. A true Christmas is never someplace else. It is
wherever home is.
Sometimes this means we are torn, because home can be more than one place.
It might be wherever our parents are or it might be the home we have
started to establish, especially if we have young children.
Sometimes home is not a specific place but more of a feeling we recognize
in our soul or the presence of a particular person who gives us, a family
member or not, a sense of being at home.
I believe God covers every contingency so everyone might have this sense
of home on Christmas Eve and Christmas. It can happen in a soup kitchen as
well as a penthouse apartment on 5th Avenue.
I would like to believe as well, especially on Christmas Eve, that every
church has within it something of the embodiment of what it means to be at
home. It may not be all hugs and kisses from the people gathered; we might
even be a stranger to these other people, but on that night in the glow of
candlelight and the singing of the carols we know there is a way in which
we are home.
God is with us, Immanuel. In the heart, in the soul, even though we might
sit alone, we feel at home.
I think with all the festivities related to the holidays it can accentuate
a feeling of longing. No matter that we are surrounded with people we love
this longing still is there and often it is experienced as loneliness. I
believe this longing is the souls desire for God. And, on Christmas Eve in
worship for one brief moment that soul's desire is listened to and we let
ourselves be in the presence of the One who alone can fulfill that desire
of the heart.
We know what it means God came to earth because in that hour when we sing
the carols and take communion, we know what it means God is with us.
On that night of nights as I lead the worship in my mind are the memories
of all the churches I have served. I see them as plainly as when I was
their pastor. In my mind, as well, are the presence of friends I have
loved and loved ones now departed, including my parents.
It is not, however, sadness I feel, but comfort. In these memories I more
fully understand that God is always present, bringing me to Himself,
bringing me home.
The chorus of the old invitational hymn sings, "Come home, come home,
ye who are weary come home," and that is the plea and part of the
plea is to recognize that along with the home from whence we have come, is
the church as home. To be at church is to be at home. It is to be in the
place that serves no other purpose then that we might come to know God as
our Father and His Son as our bother. It is the eternal expression of the
temporal experience of knowing there is that place for us called home.
And confirming this truth is the message of Christmas that when Mary laid
Jesus in his bed of straw in the stable, He had made the earth His home.
Immanuel, God With Us, and where God is, There is home.
Dr. David W. Andersen
        
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