photo by Fleur-Ange Lamothe / Flickr |
It’s Advent time. Early the Church set aside four Sundays to
get us ready for the birth of Jesus. They realized it took some time and
preparation for us in our crowded calendars to understand the mystery of
mysteries. God coming to us in flesh.
This Advent I’m going to focus on homecoming. I keep
remembering the Prodigal story. The boy who lost everything and wondered in his
misery if he might go home. Thomas Mann said of great literature: “It is..it
is...however much we say it was.” So the Prodigal is everybody’s story. We all
wander far away from what we intended back there. Somewhere along the way most
of us got lost. And, like the Prodigal we long to go home.
The old man in the nursing home tugged at my sleeve, “Take
me home...I want to go home.” It is a universal longing. In our dreams we keep
going back. To that place where it all started. Even now you can probably
remember what was in every room. Where your bed was. Where you kept your
clothes. How the kitchen looked. You can describe, even after all these years, that
special place.
Frederick, Buechner has said that: “I believe that what we
long for most in the home we knew is the peace and charity that, if we were
lucky, we first came to experience there, and I believe that it is that same
peace and charity we dream of finding once again in the home that the tide of
time draws us toward.”
Spend some time thinking of that tiny place most of the
world never knew existed back there. A manger and a star and a mother and
father and at the center of it all the one who makes it all possible.
I don’t think this is just wishful thinking, putting our
heads in the sand and ignoring the convulsions of our time. Ferguson. All those
frightened immigrants. The grief that seems to be everywhere. The pushing,
shoving and desperation of shoppers this season. The soldier in Iraq. The family in
their shell of a house in Afghanistan. And up and down the streets where we
live—there is a whole lot of pain.
It was that kind of a world that Jesus first came into. And
those Shepherds that traveled from afar...found at the end of their journey
more than they ever dreamed. And maybe, just maybe this Christmas we, like the
boy in the story or the scruffy shepherds, might arise and shake away the clutter of all our
too-muchness and go to our Father. The Prodigal dreamed of a homecoming. And so
do we all.
photo from St.James Church / / flickr |
Prayer for the First Sunday in Advent
"O God, thou who art 'untamed and perilous,' who dost 'deal in every form of danger, and many modes of death', strip us of our pretensions and vanities; expose to the strong his weakness, and to the wise his folly but set in our hearts an unconquerable hope, and in thine own way fulfill it. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen." --Paul Scherer
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