God Is Home

 

It is a snow day and school is cancelled. It is the kind of snowstorm that it is unsuitable to play outside. By mid-day kids are bored and restless. It is the kind of day perfect for the building a blanket fort. For those unfamiliar, a blanket fort is constructed using blankets and couch cushions, with chairs or other furniture being used as a frame for the fabric. The homemade fort is a temporary tent where a child can crawl inside and hide from the world. It is a place of reprieve: to read a book, play with dolls, have a snack, daydream or take a nap. The child imagines a home and for a moment disappears into the safety of their cozy created space.

The storm raging outside is forgotten. Other siblings, if not part of the build, are not seen, neither are the adults in the house. Whatever is going on outside the blankets and sheets, for a few moments, doesn’t penetrate the fort. Whether a real or imagined safety, the occupant experiences (however briefly) a cozy peace, - home- and a renewed hope that peace exists no matter the chaos around. I love ‘the home’ of blanket forts.

 

Through Advent the congregation has reflected on the theme of home. We reflected through a devotion series titled, “Recipes of Home.” and as we lit the candle for the four Sundays of Advent considered: Heart as home. Earth as home. Kindom as home. Love as home.

 

Christmas Eve service, in this space, feels like I have stepped into a blanket fort. It is cozy and warm. I can momentarily forget hassles, stresses, fears, and be wrapped in hope-filled scripture, joyful singing, loving companionship, peaceful blessing. Everything outside fades away for a moment.

This evening the holy family steps into a created safe space, hidden from whatever monstrosities push from beyond. The stable is like a blanket fort, cocooning Jesus, Joseph, and Mary – along with a few others. It is a miracle moment where hope is renewed that God has chosen this moment to remind the people they are not alone, the promised kindom will come, and has come… it has come, but not and never as expected.

 

Inside the stable, insulated with hay and warmed by the body heat of animals, a precious moment is experienced.  God’s purposeful-action comes to fruition, making HOME for God-self in human flesh. Choosing to be incarnate - born in the innocence and vulnerability of a baby, God’s first moments are enfolded in the arms of family and the hope-filled, in a created cozy space in a stable. The reality is the stable, like a blanket fort, is a temporary hiding place, sheltering a baby who is born into upheaval.

Outside, the stable sits in the midst of occupied territory. The ruler of the occupied territory, Herod the Great, is a tyrant and bloodthirsty ruler who with treasonous allegiance to the occupying empire rules his people fueled by an unsatiated ambition. The occupied territory is one of violence and corruption, servitude and exploitation, along with taxes, displacement, unjust systems, and marginalization.

As tonight breaks into the dawn of tomorrow, the holy family leaves the stable becoming refugees as they flee the tyranny of Herod, to go to a foreign land, seeking safe-haven in Egypt. Years later upon return to Judea they are displaced people settling in a village a long way from the family’s original home.

 

Earlier today the sun rose over the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank; a place where for the past few years no public Christian Christmas celebrations have taken place. As people read the news this am in Aljazeera, they read an opinion piece by theologian Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, Palestinian pastor of Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church in Ramallah, West Bank. He wrote, “Christmas is not a Western story – it is a Palestinian one. Christmas is a story of empire, injustice and the vulnerability of ordinary people caught in its path.” Later in the article he continues, “Western Christians forget that Bethlehem is real, they disconnect from their spiritual roots. And when they forget that Bethlehem is real, they also forget the story of Christmas is real.”… “To remember Bethlehem is to remember that God stands with the oppressed – and that the followers of Jesus are called to do the same.”

 

The Christmas story, a stable in Bethlehem, is a not a cozy story but a lived experience, repeated over and over again. The Christmas story – God’s incarnation- is a story lived by generations of Levantine people who have and do long for justice and believe that God was and is not distant but among them. For centuries people who proclaim with steadfastness, with sumud, the radical statement about where God chooses to dwell- God makes God’s home in vulnerability, suffering, upheaval, in poverty, and most assuredly “among those with no power but to hope.”

 

Tonight, there are those in occupied territory, displaced, refugees, constrained by check-points, mothers about to give birth, who are creating a fort made of blankets, a stable so to speak – a place to temporarily step aside and hide for a moment, to be embraced and filled once more with an experience of hope, joy, love, and peace that the world can not give.

 

Perhaps for a moment we can open our hearts and rest in these temporary stables. Sending prayers and intentions of peace and love, with those gathering in temporary homes – living the very real Christmas story gathered around the manager of God incarnate. We hold faith in a radical God who chooses to dwell at home in human flesh, experiencing the incarnate with our siblings in the warmth of Hope Lutheran church in Ramallah, West Bank Palestine; embracing the incarnate with siblings in Christmas Lutheran Church, Bethlehem; encountering the incarnate with siblings in the Evangelical Lutheran church of St. Catherine in Dnipro, Ukraine; and exalting the incarnate with siblings gathered in Kenya’s Turkana Kalobeyel settlement and Ethiopia’s Tigray Shimelba Refugee Camp.

 

‘Internet Monk,’ Michael Spencer once said, “without the incarnation, Christianity isn’t even a very good story, and most sadly, it means nothing. ‘Be nice to one another’ is not a message that can give my life meaning, assure me of love beyond brokenness, and break open the dark doors of death with the key of hope.”  

The beauty of tonight is the receiving of a ‘blanket fort moment.’ In a created cozy space, made with the resources at hand, a miraculous moment happens, together we remember Bethlehem – a very real and experienced story- where God chooses to make God’s home in human flesh; incarnate. God is birthed in a moment in the middle of the world’s brokenness and upheaval. But in that one moment are the hopes and dreams of all the years.

 

Heart as home. Earth as home. Kindom as home. Love as home.

In our ‘blanket fort’ this evening, we are cozy, but we do not deceive ourselves that all is calm, merry, and bright. Outside these walls, in our daily lives, in our human bodies, in our broken relationships, in broken systems, and the upheaval of tariffs, wars, climate change, … in all our vulnerabilities, in suffering, in oppression the world over, it would be easy enough to throw up our hands and give up – but we haven’t. We have chosen to show up for each other tonight, and in solidarity with siblings around the world and with creation to celebrate a genesis of something new and yet older than the beginning of time. We lay our hopes and dreams in a moment in a stable, in blanket forts, where Emmanuel – God-with-us, is being birthed.

I can’t explain it or understand it –

In my heart I experience this incarnation when I step aside, in a moment when the world’s noise is hushed,

… like this moment… with you … with the Christ child … for a moment I am completely and unexpectedly surprised, overwhelmed, all is right with the world.  

 Among us, God is home.