Thoughts on Sunday's Sermon

Two disclaimers: one, in an unusual move, we are not following the Advent lectionary texts this year. We're reading through Luke 1 consecutively, so this week we pick up with the Magnificat. And two, the following by no means constitutes an actual sermon. Hey - it's only Thursday! Just some leanings.

Paired with the Magnificat is Hannah's song in 1 Samuel. The two women echo one another; or, more accurately time-wise, Mary echoes Hannah. One woman who has waited a lifetime to bear a child, the other who is barely a child herself.

What I will not preach on is the secret sisterhood between myself and Hannah. My husband and I are trying to conceive our first child, and we have been at this for a year. While I am not quite in the same league as Sarah (nor is my husband "as good as dead," as Paul so kindly describes Abraham), I know the waiting...and the waiting is more than hard. It raises questions that have no answers. It causes pain that has no cure. It breaks my heart almost beyond repair. It makes me anxious beyond words of comfort. And - most heartbreaking and yet life-giving of all - it does not quench hope. I doubt I have yet waited as long as Hannah. But I know a bit of her grief.

What I will preach on, I think, is something less private and more commonly known this season. A few weeks ago, my congregation held its annual Christmas hymnsing/talent show/reason to eat chocolate in disturbing quantities. (Though a self-described Advent Nazi, I find this Sunday afternoon event takes the edge off of the "no Christmas carols on Sunday mornings during Advent" rule). One soloist sang a piece called, "Going Home for Christmas," and yes - it was every bit as sappy as its title suggests. But I was sitting next to a woman I know to be undergoing a devastating divorce, and watching a woman across the aisle whose husband recently died, and thinking about a friend whose father died at the age of 58 on All Saints' Day, and thinking, "why the hell are we listening to this song at church? What about people for whom home is painful, or non-existent, or life-draining, or horrible in some other way? What about those for whom 'going home' suggests pain beyond measure? Shouldn't this worship space be a place of honesty, where we do not pretend that home is always Norman-Rockwellian?"

The desire to 'go home' at Christmas is indeed strong. Living some 300 miles away from my own family, I understand it. Yet Hannah and Mary do not sing about keeping the dear traditions, about returning to places of calm and peace, about Mother at the cookstove and stockings on the mantel. Their songs are of reversal, of turning the world upside-down, of disturbing the calm and breaking the traditions.

I'm not sure where this is going, entirely, except that "going home for Christmas" does not seem to be much of a biblical idea. My grandmother - I did not know this for years - always hated the song, "I'll Be Home For Christmas." She hated it because it came out during World War II, during which her brother was serving in France. She hated it because she did not know if her brother would ever come home for Christmas, and the song did not comfort her; it taunted her with an assurance she did not have.

God's ideas about "home for Christmas" are quite different than ours. Perhaps, if God indeed is our home, we ought to rethink the whole thing.