Home for Christmas
“I’ll be home for Christmas.”
“There’s no place like home for the holidays, because no matter how far away you roam, when you pine for the sunshine of a friendly face, for the holidays, you can’t beat home sweet home.”
When I was a girl, I would sing through an old Christmas album leftover from my parents’ early marriage. I particularly liked these two songs, which I would sing along with Bing Crosby and Perry Como, as I watched the black vinyl record spin around the turntable. As a child, being home for Christmas meant Christmas traditions: decorated sugar cookies, cutting down the tree, snuggling with grandparents, big family game sessions, and eating gingerbread. My brother and I never actually spent Christmas at our own home while we were growing up. We woke up every Dec. 25 in my grandparents’ house.
I’m partial to having Christmas in my own home because of the flood of beautiful memories of my kids running downstairs on Christmas morning, astounded at the sight of all the presents under the tree. As an adult, Christmas at home happens wherever my people are, whenever we assemble. Currently, it’s Christmas morning.
I love our traditions, but as my kids have grown up, moved away, and gotten married, we’ve been amending many traditions and creating new ones to accommodate families and schedules. I care more about watching my kids enjoy one another than I do making cookies or buying the right gifts.
Christmas at home a place of wonder and joy because of family love.
It’s not Hallmark.
Yes, they tell stories about estranged family members going home for Christmas, meeting old flames, or inheriting castles. They forgive past hurts. They all wear red and green in every scene. Somebody’s on their way to marriage by the end of the movie. One big happy family.
I’m not talking about that kind of home for Christmas.
The blending of home and Christmas originates with the first Christmas and the birth of Christ. I don’t think we can overlook the importance of the original family (God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and their presence at that first Christmas.
Of course, Jesus was there, too. (We’ve got “Jesus is the Reason for Season” somewhere in our Christmas décor.)
But here’s the mind-blowing part: Jesus didn’t leave his family to be our Savior. He brought His family with Him to earth, joined a human family, and then invited anyone who believed on Him to become family with His Father and Spirit and ultimately live in His eternal home.
Christmas wasn’t a moving-away. It was a moving-towards.
God knew all along how much we need to feel at home with Him, and that we would never feel at home anywhere without Him.
John describes the act of Jesus’ incarnation like this: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1, 3-4, 14).
Jesus didn’t come to leave. He came to stay.
This theme appears throughout the whole Bible. God constantly reminds us that He is present for us. Moses heard God’s promise to dwell and recorded it in Leviticus 26:12; four different Scriptural authors repeated the same words in Jeremiah 32:2, Ezekiel 37:27, and 2 Corinthians 6:16: “My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
God has already decided to dwell with us.
He’s a parent. He doesn’t want to miss anything. We wants to be present for everything in our lives, the good and the bad.
But we get confused, distracted, angry, hurt, and even rebellious. We think God is a million miles away because He’s not answering our prayers or He doesn’t understand our pain.
But He actually does. The Bible is filled with verses to assure us that God is present, God loves us, God understands our pain. His presence and empathy creates a beautiful by-product of the incarnation: Jesus gets us because He was human. And He can redeem anything in our lives because He is God.
Jesus dwells within is, if we’ve asked Him to, so that we will never be away from HOME.
That’s Christmas. That’s home.
“This is how God showed his love among us. He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit.” (1 John 4:9-13)
