This is the third Sunday of Advent. We’re still waiting. Why? We come back here every year knowing full well that Christmas is right around the corner. What’s the big deal? We’ve learned somewhere along the way that sometimes the smallest things are the big deal. The big deal is that everybody will be home. And as we travel by planes, trains and automobiles we remember. Not all good of course. But not all bad either.
We come back home to touch the base. To get reconnected with each other. To find back home what we never ever found any place else. Even in those old houses where it all happened now gone. Yet the places come alive in our dreams and our memories. Maybe these really are the ties that bind.
I remember a story Robert McAfee Brown told. But I can’t locate the story.* He wrote all the kids were home for Christmas. And they came from far and wide. And some not so far.
John with his live-in. Barry still struggling with his divorce and missing his two kids. Joe that worried us to death for so long. How many times in recovery. How many lapses. Yet it looks more promising than it has in a long time. Joe missed so many Christmases somewhere else. But this Christmas he is here and we are all glad. And then there's is Mary, brilliant with her PhD and wishing she could find somebody.
So we, Mama and Papa are so glad to have everybody again under the same roof. Robert Brown said that on Christmas Eve they all gathered in the living room around the crèche of Jesus in the manger and Joseph and Mary. Brown writes that here we all are home. And this holy night we hunker down by these figures that have changed it all.
I don’t remember what Brown said after that except it was cold and the wind blew. And even at Christmas there is a world heartbreak and meanness out there. But this father said we still do what we always have done. This, he reminded his family that standing there with the fire flickering and that holy couple with their tiny baby was the centerpiece of it all.
And we keep too keep coming back year after year. Knowing that whatever sadness and wrongness there is outside these doors we come back to remember again this tiny little candle of hope. Nothing can extinguish it's power. And hopefully after the tree sags and the turkey is no more and most of our family members pack their bags and head for home. But somehow in our own ways we remember those old words that some of us learned at Sunday School: "the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot put it out."
*This story from the late theologian Robert McAfee Brown I read in one of his books which I cannot find. So I have taken liberties with his children and the family itself. They all came. They were there for Christmas and they gathered around the creche on Christmas Eve.
--Roger Lovette /rogerlovette.blogspot.com
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