On Coming Home

January 2, 2005 (Second Sunday after Christmas)

By The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland

- Jeremiah 31:7-14
- Psalm 84
- Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
- Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

The prophet Jeremiah tells a story of joyous return in today's reading. The God of Israel will gather the scattered members of that nation and bring them home. On straight and level paths they will travel, alongside brooks of water so they will not grow thirsty. Even the blind and the lame, pregnant women and those with small children, shall return in safety. Jeremiah's vision is a happy one, as God's people are brought home to God, returned to the place where they belong at last.

The Gospel account tells another story of return. Jeremiah's people had been exiled to Babylon, conquered and scattered by a foreign power that sought to subdue them. Mary and Joseph fled from Herod the Great, local client King of the Roman Empire who's paranoid grip on his little kingdom made him a danger to anyone he thought a threat to his rule. The Holy Family goes to Egypt and waits, returning when Herod has died. Did they know they were reenacting the Exodus, the original flight from Egypt? Matthew certainly did when he told the story. The parallels would have been obvious for his readers. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus return home from exile.

Both of these stories are about coming home. On the surface, Jeremiah tells the story of the Israelites returning to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon. On the surface, Matthew tells the story of the Holy Family's flight from Herod and eventual return to Nazareth. On another, deeper level, both of these stories are about returning to God-about coming home from a place of exile to the place where God dwells.

These stories must have had incredible power when they were first told. Certainly the Jewish story is one of perpetual exile and return. Jesus' first followers would surely have been gripped by the power of the story of his exile and return from Egypt. They are powerful stories today as well.

One reason why these words carry the weight that they do, even for our ears so long after the events, is that we can relate both to the surface story and to the underlying theme of return. In one way or another all of us can relate to a story of returning home. It may be a memory of some long ago Christmas when great obstacles or distances were overcome to be at the family home for the holiday. It may be a feeling experienced upon visiting a childhood hometown after many years away. It may be a quite literal return to the country of your birth after years or decades in a foreign land. One way or another I imagine that we can all relate to a story of coming home.

In the same way, I think we can all relate to the deeper story in today's lessons. Coming home need not be a physical reality, though that is the important surface story that binds us to our world. Coming home to God-returning from whatever exile we endure to the loving presence of God-is a spiritual story every bit as common and powerful as the stories of physical returns home.

Exile for the Israelites was not just a movement from their homeland to another part of the world. It was a spiritual dislocation as well. In that time and place-for those people-the God of Israel dwelt in Jerusalem. They could not be wholly connected to their spiritual lives so far from the home of their God.

Jesus too, with his family, was torn away from the place he was born. Partly to avoid a physical threat, but also to reenact that ancient flight to freedom that all Jews would have recognized as being the story of their emancipation at God's hands. Like all of what Matthew has to say about Jesus' early life, this story foretells the complete fulfillment of God's promise in the life of Jesus.

Imagine what it must have felt like. After long exile the Israelites are allowed to come home. After a dangerous journey, Mary and Joseph bring their firstborn son back to the town they left when he was still unborn. It must have seemed like the world was new. It must have felt like anything was possible. It must have felt like New Year's Day.

I'm not one who stays up late on New Year's Eve. I am usually asleep when the ball drops, usually sound asleep so that the fireworks don't wake me. My favorite part of New Year's is the morning. I love to wake early on New Year's day, to go out for a jog or a walk. Everything is so quiet and still. You can almost believe that everything is really starting again, that it is not just the calendar that has changed, but the world itself that has been reset and is quietly beginning once more.

I also love New Year's resolutions. It doesn't matter to me that most of them fail or are given up on by February. It is simply human nature to run out of enthusiasm like that. It is also human nature to try and reinvent ourselves. On New Year's Day, is seems completely possible to change anything we want about ourselves. Everything else is new again, why not us?
For God, I think, every day must be like New Year's Day. It is only one day per year that we, the mortal created, can see the amazing newness of a new day. God must be able to see that every day. Isn't every day new for God? Couldn't God make a New Year's resolution on any day, and thus change the world? Isn't creation itself sustained because every morning God feels the way I do on New Year's Day? That the world is new, and good, and rightly begins again?

New Year's Day isn't really new. It happens every year in a great, repeating cycle. It is not a new day we come to on January first, but a beginning day. On this one day each year we collectively imagine that the world is new, and that we have the power to change it and ourselves. Really this is true everyday, but that is much more difficult to imagine.

Perhaps here too there is a surface story and a deeper one. The story of New Year's Day is one of physical renewal and new beginning. The deeper, spiritual story is again one of return to God. At the beginning of the new year we can see how far we've gone. We can see, in this moment of collective imagination, how far into exile we have strayed. And now it is time to come home. The Babylonian Empire has crumbled. Herod the Great is dead. Come home now. Come back to where God is and be joyous.