Homeward Bound

Listen to these song lyrics. (They do have some relevance to today’s lessons.) For some of you I expect they will bring a nostalgic smile.

I’m sittin in the railway station
Got a ticket for my destination
On a tour of one night stands
My suitcase and guitar in hand
And every stop is neatly planned
For a poet and a one man band.

Homeward bound
I wish I was
Homeward bound
Home, where my thoughts escaping
Home, where my music’s playing
Home, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me.

I graduated from high school in 1976. I grew up with the music of Simon and Garfunkel. At least some of you, I know, immediately recognized those words. What memories or associations did they evoke? In your own life or that of your children? Mostly good? Nostalgia usually brings a smile.

It’s going home that I want to talk about, being homeward bound. Advent is a journey homeward. And on this Third Sunday of Advent we are almost there.

How would you describe home? What images, metaphors, memories would you use to describe home? To use a cliché, for you what is it that makes a house a home?

For Simon and Garfunkel home is where familiar music plays. Home is where someone who loves you waits for your return. Home is a place of light shining in the darkness; a place of warmth and comfort providing sanctuary from winter’s snow. It strikes me that Advent and Christmas are times when those of us who do absolutely no other seasonal decorating spend hours on home decorating. This is a time of year when we focus on home. This is the holiday, more than any other, that people go home for.

Especially during this holiday season, I think much of what we associate with "home" or "homecoming" are our own personal traditions. The things that make home feel like home, at least in this season, are our familiar rituals, repeated traditions. It is returning to the familiar that evokes the feeling of homecoming. These sorts of homecomings can be a great blessing of the Advent and Christmas seasons. Even if you live alone, as I do, putting up the tree and decorating it according to my own traditions feels like a homecoming. Or maybe you have your own familiar routines that make you feel at home during this season: from shopping on Black Friday, to participating in a sing-along Messiah. An annual gathering with family or friends whom you love. Attending the midnight service. Participating in the same Christmas pageant year after year after year. Cherish these traditions and deep sense of homecoming they provide. Build them, create them if you don’t have them, sustain them, enact them year after year… especially if you share your home with others. They are the season’s gift and blessing for you. They are powerful sources of individual comfort and they provide strong connections between the people who share them.

Cherish and celebrate the familiar traditions of the holiday season, and give thanks for the sense of homecoming and connection they bring. And yet… as much as these traditions can bring into our lives, they do not bring the Savior. Do not ask or expect too much of these human traditions. It’s an easy trap to fall into this time of year. To expect holiday traditions to be universally and totally effective tonics for all that ails humankind. To imagine that if we just get all of the traditional trappings right, everything else will be right, too.

But in the real world going home for the holidays and coming home to Jesus are really two very different things. It is not the traditions that bring the savior’s birth. We should not expect or insist that they do.

For one thing, Jesus comes to all, but traditions are not universal; they vary from person to person, culture to culture, generation to generation. What is effective for one is meaningless for another. For my generation, Simon and Garfunkel may evoke feelings of nostalgia. They may sing the song that expresses our yearning for homecoming. An older, greater generation would much rather hear Bing Crosby sing "I’ll Be Home for Christmas." It is that song that resonates in their hearts with Christmas homecoming. I must respectfully say that Bing Crosby doesn’t do much for me. No particular nostalgic warmth or sense of connection or homecoming. And what are the songs that evoke a sense of yearning for homecoming for the generations (plural) younger than I? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not either Bing Crosby or Simon and Garfunkel. Traditions are not universally effective even in generating warmth and nostalgia.

And they certainly do not bring the Savior. Knowing the Savior’s birth in your heart is more than a feeling of nostalgia; more than a connection to a cherished holiday tradition.

And remember, too, that even the traditions that we cherish most can fail us or even tragically turn against us. A tradition once shared later defaced by divorce or a bitter child. Or a tradition once shared that becomes a source of pain because the one who shared it is lost. As richly as our human traditions can bring us home, bind us to home, create a home… they do not bring the savior’s birth.

God does that. The savior’s birth is God’s gift, offered to all of every generation and perspective. Offered to all in the midst of every life situation, not dependent upon any ritual or tradition.

And if we tend to expect too much of our human traditions, we also seem to expect too little of God. Listen to God’s promise in Isaiah.

Here is your God. He will come and save you.

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes.

A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people; no traveller, not even fools, shall go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

It is a promise beyond our wildest expectations. An exuberance of renewal. A new sort of homecoming. Not a return to the familiar, but a welcoming into a new creation, a world transformed. We are being invited to a place where God dwells literally among us and God’s presence and love and power transforms our world. Even the dark and imperfect places, especially the places of hurt and emptiness, where we desperately need God will be made new in joy. God is welcoming us into God’s own world. And we are almost there.

So much of our image of homecoming this time of year is wrapped up in return, returning to the familiar. And those sorts of homecomings can be a rich blessing of this season. But what God unconditionally offers us is so much more. It can be hard to imagine this new home that God is preparing. Read Isaiah. Over and over these next nine days of Advent. Read Isaiah. In the midst of other traditions, or not. In the midst of joy, or not. Hear God’s promise in God’s own Word. Hear it, and know it spoken to you.

In our corporate worship, we don’t often hear the Collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas; most years there isn’t a Second Sunday after Christmas. But it speaks of the Christmas gift given to us. "O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity." Our home is a life shared with the divine life of God.

We are on the road home. And, as Isaiah says, the road is smooth and straight. God has cleared it and wiped away all impediments and eliminated all dangers (unlike the roads outside today). It is God’s desire, God’s act, that nothing stand in the way of our journey home to God. It is smooth sailing, a straight shot, superhighway, downhill… By God’s grace even fools can coast the rest of the way. We are homeward bound, and we are almost there.