The Second Sunday of Christmas-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
The Second Sunday of Christmas (Year B)
January 3, 2021
I didn’t get to go home for Christmas this year. Even though I am a woman grown with a home and family of my own. Even though my parents no longer live in a place where I also have lived with them. There’s something about being together in one place with my family of origin that will always be a going home. And I didn’t get to do that this year. Sure, it was the choice that I made, and I believe it was the right choice. But I didn’t get to go home for Christmas this year.
So it’s bittersweet for me that the readings for this Second Sunday of Christmas are about home. Joseph flees to Egypt upon the warnings of the angel in a dream and creates a home for his fledgling family in a foreign land. And then he returns to his homeland to make home in a new community of Nazareth based on the word from another dream. Scripture doesn’t tell us how long the holy family was exiled in Egypt, nor does it tell us what it was like for them to return home after being away.
But our Jeremiah reading is all about what it means to be in exile, what it means to be scattered, and the promise of God that God will bring all of God’s people home. “He who scattered Israel will gather him and will keep him as a shepherd a flock.” All throughout scripture we see these themes of exile and homecoming being experienced, promised, and fulfilled. The promise of homecoming by God is a promise of the reversal of both physical and spiritual exile; it is the gathering up of the scattered with the promise that their life shall be like a watered garden.
When I was talking about all this with some of my colleagues, one of them told me that former Presiding Bishop Katherine Jeffers-Shiori preached her first sermon at the National Cathedral as Presiding Bishop, and she asked the gathered congregation, who had come from all over the world to be there, “where is home for you?” Where is home for you?
My friend said that Bishop Katherine emphasized to her listeners that for us Christians, people of both exile and homecoming, for us, as followers of the “way of Christ” our home is always on the road. Which serves as a reminder that home is possibly not as static or as unchanging as we might think it to be.
All this reminded me of a podcast that David and I listened to years ago—an interview between Krista Tippett and the Irish priest and theologian John O’Donohue. In this interview, O’Donohue is talking about identity and he references reading the Medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart who said, “‘There is a place in the soul that neither time nor space nor no created thing can touch.’ And [O’Donohue goes on to say] I really thought that was amazing. And if you cash it out, what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”[i]
And in his book Anam Cara (which means Soul Friend), O’Donohue writes, “In everyone’s inner solitude, there is that bright and warm hearth.”
In both of these different ways, O’Donohue is saying that there is a place deep within each of us that has never been exiled. There is a place deep within each of us that is the home wherein God dwells, where we can always find our home.
In 2020, I spent more time at home than any other season in my adult life. And at the end of the year, I still managed to come out of it all feeling as if I were in exile. So, this week, I am thinking about the home that is God that can be found in my inner solitude, that bright and warm hearth. I’m trying to dip into the deeper waters of that solitude to discover the place where all that is scattered within me is brought home and reunited. I’m pondering what 2020 has taught me about exile and home, what gifts it has shared with me in the midst of its unexpected trauma. This week, I invite you to join me in pondering those things, or you may choose to reflect on this blessing by John O’Donohue:
At the End of the Year
The particular mind of the ocean
Filling the coastline’s longing
With such brief harvest
Of elegant, vanishing waves
Is like the mind of time
Opening us shapes of days.
As this year draws to its end,
We give thanks for the gifts it brought
And how they became inlaid within
Where neither time nor tide can touch them.
The days when the veil lifted
And the soul could see delight;
When a quiver caressed the heart
In the sheer exuberance of being here.
Surprises that came awake
In forgotten corners of old fields
Where expectation seemed to have quenched.
The slow, brooding times
When all was awkward
And the wave in the mind
Pierced every sore with salt.
The darkened days that stopped
The confidence of the dawn.
Days when beloved faces shone brighter
With light from beyond themselves;
And from the granite of some secret sorrow
A stream of buried tears loosened.
We bless this year for all we learned,
For all we loved and lost
And for the quiet way it brought us
Nearer to our invisible destination.[ii]
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