HOME FOR CHRISTMAS John M. Buchanan
Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11 Broad Street Presbyterian Church

December 3, 1978 (Communion) Columbus, Ohio

Attending a class reunion, T have discovered, is one of life's more sobering
experiences, The State Champion half-miler has gained seventy-five pounds, the
heartthrob halfback is bald, the homecoming queen is a plump grandmother, the
brilliant but eccentric outcast is a millionaire and the class President, of all
things, a clergyman in Columbus, For about an hour it's wonderful: all the out-
rageous stories of adolescence are paraded and celebrated and we laugh until we
ery - which is what we do, authentically if privately, sometime in the middle of the
second hour, It is to know deeply, existentially, that you can't go home again, And
it is to discover that deep inside there is a long forgotten need to do what we have
just learned we cannot do,

To talk about going home is to talk about a very powerful dynamic in the human
spirit, Alex Haley exposed it with the dramatic saga of Roots, When his years of
research took him finally to a remote African village, - and when after days of
listening to the Griot recite the history of the tribe he finally heard the story
of Kunta Kinte and wept because he knew he was home, Haley touched something deep
inside every one of us, [It surprised us to discover that it was there, Without
prompting, my own children wept last summer as we drove away from the Kearney faim
in County Donegal, Treland, from where their great grandparents had emigrated to
America, They had discovered something about themselves and the honesty and in-
tensity of it surprised me.

There is more to aostalgia, of course, than mushy sentimentality, Some of it
is that, and it has been so thoroughly exploited that a social critic was quite
right when he observed that "nostalgia isn’t what it used to be".

But it's there as a powerful motif in literature and music: our brother from
Belfast, Donald Fraser, was touched by Londonderry Air, because it meant home to hin,
“When Johnny Cowes Marchin Home Ayain, Hurrah, Hurrah":'"'Five hundred miles, five
hundred miles, Lord I'm five hundred miles away from home'':; and of course, "I'1i
Be Home for Christmas",

In the 1920's and 30's, Thowas Wolfe probed the motif in several of the best
American novels ever written, Look Homeward Angel and You Can't Go Home Again,
Commenting on Wolfe's work Rollo May writes that in the 20's and 30's American
literature began to express a "pronounced sense of loneliness, the quality of per-
sistent searching - frantically and compulsively pursued but always frustrated,"
Wolfe wrote a Lot about the conflicts which grow out of the mother-child relation-
ship and concluded, rather dismally, as his title announces, that it is impossible
to go home, And from the perspective of his psychiatric experience May observes
that "neurotic -...lety occurs when patients are unable to accept the psychological
meaning of not cine heme azain,'' (The Meaning of Anxiety,p,4).

The expericnce of homesickness is, as nearly as I can tell, a universal one,
I have come to appreciate very much the insight of Reuel Howe when he suggested that
the deepest homesickness of all comes to those who know what a home is; that the
pain of loneliness is sharpest for those who know what it is to be loved, and that
there is a deep homesickness beneath the surface for all of us ~ a sense that we
are separated from something very important, I have come to appreciate more and
more that there is something about Christmas that releases all of that for most of
us, We will go home for Christmas, if net literally, at least metaphorically. We

~ De

will remember the past, and be warmed by memories of love even though we know that
we cannot go back and that to go back would not be very satisfying in any case, We
will preserve the precious family traditions with great care, It is much more than
nostalgia or sentimentality, Home is more than the place, the time, the situation
to which we can never return, Home, I am concluding, is a metaphor: it is the
sense that all is well: it is the sense that through the wilderness of our lives,
love and beauty and safety are still there, Home is, if you will, a metaphor for
salvation, and homesickness - a sense of incompleteness and longing called out of
us by God himself,

The text for the day throuzhout the Christian world, Isaiah 40, the herald of
Christmas, is the announcement of a homecoming. George Frederick Handel introduces
the Messiah with a tenor aria based on the text, and for me, at least, the trip home
for Christmas bezins sometimes over the Thanksgiving weekend when — retrieve the
record from the stack and Llisten...'|Comfort ye, my people, says your God; speak
tenderly to Jerusalem,,,her warfare is ended, her iniquity pardoned,.In the
wilderness prepare the way of the Lord - Every valley shall be lifted up, every
mountain and bill will be made low.,,the slory of the Lord shall be revealed, and
all flesh shall see it together,"

For me, at least, there are no more magnificent nor poignant images in the
Bible than these. Babylon had defeated Judah, leveled Jerusalem and carried off the
cream of society into house arrest, For a generation the Jews had lived as exiles
in Babylon, ‘The literature of the time tells the story of their pain and homesick-
ness, My favorite is 4 folk song written by one of them and incorporated in the
Bible as Psaim 137:

"By the waters of Babylon

there we sat down and wept,

when we remembered Zion,

On the willows there

we hung up our lyres,

For there our captors

required of us songs,

and our tormentors, mirth, saying,

‘Sine us one of the songs of Zion’,

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?"

That touches me deeply every time I read it, Te's the African slave singing,
"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Comin’ for to Carry Me Home. [If you get there before
I do, tell all of ry friends, I'm comin' along too," It's the Scottish Highlander
in an English pricen sip .ng, "You take the high road, and I'll take the low road
and I'll be in c_utlané u‘tore ye," It's a group of Polish Jews huddled at Auschwitz
intoning old words ~ “The Lord is my Shepherd, I'll not want." It's Alexander
Sheharansky >eyinnin? his term in a Russian prison by announcing to the Court,
"Next year in jerusalem", Or ic's you and I sitting quietly by the tree, letting
the mind run free and going homme,

In Babylon the Jews were homesick - for home, for the place, the land promised
and conquered and tamed, the temple, the people, Life was inconceivable apart from
the place, But that is not the whole story. What the exiled Jews sensed in Babylon
was not just that there was a wilderness of desert between themselves and home, but
more significantly that in Babylon they were cut off from God, cut off from love

- 3 +

and salvation, A generation of silence was their hell. Everything was not OK at
all: everything was upside down and wrong and hopeless, Their longing for home vas,
in theological terms,a need to hear a word of love and salvation from God,

And so this letter - which is what the passage is - from some literate genius
living in the rubble of Jerusalem - to those in Babylon, was a Gospel of Hope, God
is coming, God is coming te take you across the desert. You're soing home! ‘The
imagery was magnificent: there were no reads till a generation or so later, An
Rastern Potentate sent battalions of men ahead of him to fill in the holes and trim
the bumps - literally to prepare his wa, through the desert. That's what was about
to happen, the prophet announced, And that's exactly what did happen after the
Persians defeated the Babylonians and sent the Jews home.

More :injportantly, however, that incredible proposition, made in. the sixth
century BG, that God is coming dramatically into history; that His coming will result
in His people goin, home: that their journey through the wilderness on His highway
would be the promise of their salvation - all of that, we see now, is the fore-
shadowing of a later event: a birth, this time, a coming of God in the flesh, a
coming of God which was really an invitation sent to everybody to a homecoming,

To hear the words and music is to be called home, emotionally, nostalgically,
But far more important, it is to be led by Him across whatever wilderness our lives
have become: it is to know that in the middle of Life we have a home: it is to
sense again that ail is well, that battles are worth fighting, that love is worth
giving, that justice aid peace are still there, that death has died itself in the
quiet birth of a baby,

Te is no coincidence that one of the most important stories Jesus told
Was about a homecoming; a wilderness of miles, a young man turning his attention
back to home, a long journey, and then a father ~ seeing him from a distance, and
running down the road to welcome him: a story of a father and son embracing, a
glorious reunion and a very happy family celebration,

Home, theologically, is not just the place, It is the reunion with the Father
who waits for us, and in Advent - comes running down the road to met us, Home
for Christmas - is net the trip to New York or Pennsylvania or California - but the
moment, When in the story of a baby's birth wa fail the strong arms of our Father's
embrace telling us that all is well: that we are safe: that life is good ~ that we
are home azain,

And it begins for us ‘ocay at His table, a festive, family meal, the host of
which is none otlic: than Ja! our Father,

Howard Thavman weste a poen: Christras Returns, which I would offer as your

invitation bot.. :o ta. .e this mr.oing and to the Homecoming which is the Advent
of our Lord's Birth;

~ be

Christmas returns, as it alvays does, with its assurance
that life is good.
It is the time of lift to the spirit,
When the mind feels its way into the commonplace,
Anc senses the wonder of simple things: an evergreen tree,
Familiar carols, merry Laughter,
It is the time of illumination,
Vhen candles burn, and old dreams
Find their youth avain,
It is the time of pause,
When forgotten joys come back to mind, and past
dedications renew their claim,
Ye is the time of harvest for the heart,
When faith reaches out to mantle all high endeavor,
And love whispers its magic word to everything that breathes,
Christmas returns, as it always does, with its assurance that
life is good,

God our Father; there are busy days ahead for us. We are grateful for their
beauty and spontaneous joy, Help us to sense, in the midst of it ail, your
moving toward us in love: through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen,