Home for the Holidays
January 4, 2015 | Patrick Preheim
Going home isn’t always easy, and the holiday season has the potential to remind us of that. I am happy for you if your family plantation resembles the ordered rows of well manicured trees which we find at the Lakeshore nursery. Too many of our families, though, would use the “Crooked Trees” as an arborial metaphor: corkscrew trunks, unruly limbs, knots everywhere you look, massive warts. Going home should be easy, but that isn’t always the case.
Our ongoing pilgrimage through the bible continues with Ezra & Nehemiah this first Sunday of 2015, and both Ezra and Nehemiah lead groups of Jewish exiles home. They are returning from Babylon back to Jerusalem, and going home wasn’t easy. They had expectations of re-establishing worship routines centred on a rebuilt temple, but the family who stayed in the community weren’t so keen to rebuild the temple with all the negative attention it had drawn. Those coming home had expectations of reaffirming Jewish distinctiveness over against the ethnicities of the land, but those who had remained in Palestine had opened their arms and families to the Gentiles. Those returning to the Holy Land had expectations of being received as returning heroes, but the locals had some suspicion of these Jewish Babylonians with their literal interpretation of the five books of Moses. Devotion, distinctive living, tradition were and still are important in keeping spiritually healthy. But they must serve love, not vice-versa. Rabbi Jesus son of Joseph warned about making an idol of the temple, warned about Gentile exclusion, warned about the danger of preferring literalism to love—but his warnings were some 400-500 years after Ezra & Nehemiah
Today is Epiphany Sunday which is the day on the church calendar which marks the coming of the magi to visit baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph. The magi, while not geographical from Palestine, came home to the Holy Land. They were spiritualists who could see across faith traditions and recognized something significant in the birth of Jesus. Worship in Jerusalem was for them no different than worshipping in Persia. And paying homage to Jesus in Jerusalem should have been easy, but it wasn’t. They faced accusing questions from the King. Scribal and priestly ignorance hampered their quest. Dreams troubled their sleep. A slaughter of innocents followed in their wake. You would think worship in the Holy Land would be easier than this, but it wasn’t. No, going home isn’t always easy.
The word of grace is that even if going home isn’t easy, God is present there. God awaits our return home be it to the Holy Land, to our past, to a faith where we once dwelt. God seeks peace among his children, seeks peace in our families, seeks peace for our fractured faith. It is true that God is with us where we are at and with us on the way and will meet us when we arrive at our next destination. Going to the spiritual Holy Land in our lives has more to do with what the journey will do for us than to find God in a particular place. So, let us with courage journey to those lands we call holy knowing that God joins us in our quests and eagerly awaits the transformation which going home can bring. Amen.
