Advent 14: Leaving Home

Advent has been on the mind early this year, primarily because of my participation in the Advent guide Our Savior Come, but also because this year's life events have been pointing us consistently towards the incarnation. This was written about a month ago in light of one of those life events, and it didn't quite get to the guide in time. So here it is, a few months early, reminding us that the incarnation is worth pondering all year long.

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To say the least, a cross-cultural transition comes with bumps in the road. Sure, there are the highs of discovering yet another immense and breathtaking park or garden. Or the moments when you remind yourself, for real this time, that “Oh yeah, I am living in Paris. I am LIVING in PARIS.” The moments when you are driving down the French autoroute and you all of a sudden realize it feels every bit as familiar as I-78 through the Lehigh Valley.

But there are lows too, and most of ours have come in missing our “old home” with family and friends. Having a three-year-old can be helpful, because he’s not refined enough to filter his thoughts and words. He can do nothing but spit out whatever comes to mind. And in so doing he becomes a sort of mouthpiece for us, putting our feelings into words and saying what we often feel is too blunt to express.

There are moments where we feel mad, lost, or confused in this little plan of God’s. When the three-year-old says, “Can’t like God!” we know enough of the story to ultimately disagree, but yet can often empathize with and echo the sentiment.

One of these breakdowns, for lack of a better word, happened one Sunday as we were already stressfully running late to get to church. It was significant enough and affecting all of us that the executive decision was made to have church as a family in the living room.

I took the kid’s storybook Bible and turned to the story of someone else moving from his old home. The story of a man leaving the glories of heaven and the perfect, loving fellowship of the trinity to become a helpless baby lying in a smelly cattle shed. The Christmas Story.

My friend Pastor Carl is usually pretty tactful and sensitive to the people in the congregation around him, not usually stepping on toes, but I love when he is bold enough to lament the common Sunday school Christmas celebration of giving baby Jesus a happy birthday cake. For this poor baby leaving that home for this one, there is nothing happy about this birthday. There is something much more serious about this event than just a cute and cuddly little infant being born. This isn’t really the stuff of icing and candles and streamers and party hats.

No, this is laying aside the rights of heaven and being stuck cold and lonely in the back streets of Bethlehem, to a live a life of obscurity ending in a seemingly premature death on a cross. In any other case we’d hear: “Don’t you have any idea who I am?! Or where I’ve come from?! Or what I’ve left behind?!”

So, I told my kid the story about this kid, leaving his old home that was infinitely better than Hellertown for a new home that was considerably worse than France, and doing it all for us, the people he loves.

And I wonder just how often Jesus missed that old home. Every day? Every moment? We don’t think of that too often, as though he was pleased and happy to hang out with all of us here on this broken planet, and sorry when time was cut short.

There are many moments I believe his missing home is evident, but one is the most poignant. So we turned the pages that morning in the living room to the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus cries more and with more intensity than we have ever cried for our old home. I hear him saying, “I’m weary, and I really don’t want to do this, Dad. Get me out of here. Let this pass.” It sounds familiar, like a three year old wailing, “Can’t like this!”

But, to our benefit, he didn’t get his wish. Instead, when he gets it off his chest he can conclude, “Not my will…but yours.”

And this is the Christmas story. A grand act of obedience. An act of leaving an old home for a new one, crummy albeit temporary, for love, for justice, for ransom, for rescue, for us, the people he loves.

“Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

We can thank God for the plan of sending his son and thank Jesus for his obedience at more cost than we can comprehend. And we must also realize there are real implications for us who say we are following him, including a willingness to leave behind old homes. At the very least, we no longer find our residence and citizenship on this earth, but as aliens and strangers we wander, looking forward to a city whose architect is the Lord. For people missing home and weary sojourners, be they three year olds or their parents, this is just one more way in which Jesus sympathizes with our weakness.