Going home for Christmas
Going home! Back to those who remember our tantrums, who recall our first words, back to those who reduce all our achievements to a family trait - You talk just like your Uncle Jack! The day comes, however, for some of us, when we are the ones who host the incoming wanderers, who see the familiar family features in the newest toddler, who tell stories to children's children about the past, when they come home.
Luke gives us the fullest version of Jesus' birth. Then, in the third chapter, before he tells us what Jesus said and did, he stops the story and gives us a very long genealogy showing where Jesus belonged in the family history, taking his ancestors right back to Genesis. He explains why Joseph goes back to Bethlehem.
This narrative pattern is repeated many times in the Bible, recalling fathers and grandfathers, and occasionally grandmothers, setting down the limits of home, where people belonged.
In a sense, Joseph went home for Christmas! Although I have to say that the story suggests he had no relatives he knew in Bethlehem.
Human beings need to be able to go home, but the confusion of hundreds of years of mobility and migration mean that homes are sometimes very far away. Nor are we always sure where home really is. But many of us do go home - to parents - to brothers and sisters - to other people's noisy children. We should make the most of it if we can. Create new homecoming habits if we have lost them. Replace, if we have to, distant or lost kin with friendships that make a home for this Christmas. And make sure that your children and your wider kin know you would love to have them back.
Go home for Christmas and learn that talking like Uncle Jack can make the world seem a friendlier place. Jesus left his Father's home at Christmas - chose exile, unknown in his own world, for love of us. For his sake, let's come home for Christmas.
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