Homily: The Second Sunday after the Epiphany [January 15, 2012] Christ Church Cranbrook

I had a sobering experience earlier this week. On January 1, Christ Church Cranbrook changed insurance providers to take advantage of the savings offered by participating in the national church’s denominational health plan. I needed to refill a prescription, so I called it in to CVS in Birmingham and went to pick it up. When I got there, I was charged not be the usual $6 co-pay but the full $88 cost of the prescription. The higher cost was due to our not having received our insurance cards yet. I was a little grumpy about this—it’s since been resolved—but at the time the young pharmacy assistant was trying to help me out. She looked at me and said, “Pardon me, sir, but can’t you get Medicare to pay for this?”

Now this was not the first time a young person has thought me older than I actually am. I routinely get senior tickets at movies even without asking for them. And this perception problem extends beyond the obviously text addicted and smart-phone distracted young. When people hear how old Kathy and I are, they always say to Kathy, “What? You couldn’t possibly be that age!” Then they turn to me and say, “You know, for your age you don’t look too bad.”

All this thinking about age this week helped me remember, with a shock, that today, January 15, is the 35^th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. Along with five other young deacons, I was ordained a priest on Saturday, January 15, 1977 at St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles. It was a beautiful 80-degree winter day in Southern California. The cathedral was packed because one of our number, Victoria Hatch, would be the one of the first women regularly ordained to the priesthood after the canonical change approved by the General Convention of 1976. There were protesters and bomb threats. The church was filled with plain-clothes policemen and FBI agents. Just another typical day in the Episcopal Church.

Now I bring up my ordination anniversary not because I’m fishing for gifts. (But just for your information, I’m a 44 long.) I bring it up because the memory of that event connects with two issues in our common life this weekend. One is the Gospel for today. The other is the holiday we observe tomorrow, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

I’ve always admired the way Jesus operates in today’s Gospel reading. He demonstrates a marked ability to read people and to treat them in ways appropriate to their personality. This passage shows the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. He wants to gather a group of companions around him, the group we will come to call his disciples. He spots Philip and simply says, “Follow me.” It seems Philip doesn’t need much persuasion, so Jesus doesn’t offer any.

Then Philip gets Nathanael to come and see Jesus, and this is where Jesus really goes into operation. He spots Nathanael and says, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Clearly he’s referring to Nathanael’s smart-alecky remarks about his home town (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”), but he also plays up to Nathanael’s vanity. As when someone who’s trying to butter you up tells you, “You are naturally smart, perceptive, good-natured, and generous. Everybody likes you.” How can you respond except to say, “Yes, that’s right, you’ve described me perfectly?”

And then as if this strategic flattery isn’t enough, Jesus trots out his superhuman abilities. Nathanael says, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answers, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Nathanael relents. “Rabbi,” he says, “you are the Son of God! You are the king of Israel!” Jesus, of course, gets the last word. "Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these." [John 1: 43-51]

What’s wonderful about this encounter, I think, is the way Jesus gets two very different people to follow him. One, Philip, responds simply by invitation. Another, Nathanael, takes a little bit of asking. But the point is that they both follow. As the prophet Samuel, in the first reading, says, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Something about God’s offer to come and follow is irresistible to those who are called.

And yet we live in a world where God’s call seems to many eminently resistible. One of the big mysteries to me is why some people follow God’s call to come into faith communities like this and why others seem perfectly content to live their lives without any visible reference to the divine. I don’t say that to be judgmental. I could not have lived my life without the church, and yet I know many folks for whom religion is simply a tiresome bother. This is a real mystery to me.

Some of us hear God’s call and follow. Others don’t. Answering that calling brings some burdens, but doing so is mostly a privilege and a gift. Philip got it right away. Nathanael took some persuading. They both spent their lives traveling with Jesus and then leading the community that gathered in his name. What kind of life could be better than that?

So one thought this morning is about the Gospel story and about its mysterious, gracious implication that God has called each and all of us into fellowship with Jesus and each other. The other thought has to do with Martin Luther King, Jr. whose birthday is today and whose holiday we celebrate tomorrow. The six of us priestly ordinands chose January 15, 1977 as the day on which we wanted to be ordained precisely because it was King’s birthday. You may remember that there was a rather ugly debate going on then about whether or not it should be a holiday. In the intervening 35 years that debate has subsided, and King has become an American icon, but we should remember that there were those even in the late 1970s who thought King a dangerous subversive.

I love King’s writing, and I’ve taught several of his pieces in high school and college. As great as the “I Have a Dream” speech is, though, its over-use tends to obscure the sharpness of King’s intelligence and make him sound like a greeting card. The great Cornell West refers to this process as the “Santa Clausification of Martin Luther King”. Sentimentalizing King blunts some of his force; he had, after all, one of the great, prophetic minds of all time, especially in the Christian tradition. If one point this morning is God’s call to us to follow, the other point is that God is always calling us to follow toward some place specific. And Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and witness give us a good image of that specific place toward which Jesus asked Philip and Nathanael to go then and you and me to journey today.

One of King’s greatest achievements was the letter he wrote to the Birmingham, Alabama clergy when he was imprisoned in the Birmingham jail in April of 1963. The white clergy had criticized his methods, calling him that favorite phrase of the 1960s, an “outside agitator”, and he replied with a defense of civil disobedience grounded in a profound analysis of Christian history. The letter is usually referred to as “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Here is one bit of what he says near its end:

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. . . . We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. . . . If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. [Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, April 16, 1963]

Like Jesus, like Philip and Nathanael, like the prophet Samuel, Martin Luther King, Jr. answered God’s call to follow. Like them, King understood that the call was not only to follow but to go with God toward a specific place—the place Jesus called the “Kingdom of God”, a zone of blessedness, peace, compassion, and health, a place where we experience the world on God’s terms, a place where the blind see, the lame walk, the prisoners go free, and the poor have good news preached to them. King knew that the Kingdom of God was less about his own personal salvation than it was about building a world where wrongs are set right and all of God’s precious children can share in the abundant blessings God holds out to everyone.

God called Samuel and he answered. Jesus called Philip and Nathanael and they followed. God called Martin Luther King, Jr., and he gave himself up to a vision of America and humanity that continues to inspire and bless us today. A vision of justice, equality, compassion, and love. This vision is more than a dream. It’s a picture of how the world really, finally is. God calls you and me into this church and out into the world. Not everybody hears that call. But we do. Hearing it has brought us here. Living in response to it will bring us forward with God into God’s future. For that future, and for people like Martin Luther King, Jr. who see it and lead us toward it, we now proceed to give thanks. Amen.

The Rector's Monday Message: January 9, 2012

Epiphany and Resurrection

Last Friday, Kathy and I went to Chicago for the final service in the chapel at the old Evanston campus of Seabury (the seminary I served before coming to Christ Church) and for the blessing of the school’s new site near O’Hare airport in Chicago. As part of the liturgy in the new space, Bishop Jeffrey Lee of Chicago led us in a renewal of our Baptismal Covenant.

Normally I tend to space out when clergy make extemporaneous asides during the liturgy. (I’m enough of a traditional Episcopalian to want them just to read what it says in the prayer book without adding creative special material.) But Bishop Lee introduced the baptismal vow renewal in words that touched me then and that I’ve carried with me since. His words went something like this: “Since we have died with Christ and have risen to new life with him in Baptism, let us renew our Baptismal Covenant.”

Now on some level I have known what Jeff Lee said then on an intellectual level for years. After all, the prayer book Baptismal liturgy speaks of water in these words:

In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit. (Book of Common Prayer, p. 306)

Clearly, you can hear and even say aloud words many times without actually taking them in. The early Christians saw in the Jewish rite of washing in Baptism an analogy with the death and resurrection of Jesus. Just as Jesus died on the cross and was raised at the empty tomb, so the baptized person goes down into the water in a death to their old story and rises into a new risen life with Jesus in the here and now.

When we Christians talk about resurrection, we usually use the term to refer to life after death. But, as Bishop Lee’s words suggested, the primary meaning of resurrection for Christians has always assumed a present reality first: we have died and been reborn in this life. For you and me followers of Jesus, before resurrection suggests life beyond death it is first about new life before death. We have died with Jesus in his death. We have been raised with Jesus in his resurrection. We shall be like him. We are offered new life now.

Yesterday was the first Sunday after the Epiphany, also known as the Baptism of our Lord. On that day we remember Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist, and we reaffirm our own baptismal covenant. If Baptism is about our dying with Jesus and rising to new life now, what might the outlines of that new life look like?

The Baptismal Covenant gives us some clues about the qualities of risen life. It poses five questions to help us frame and describe it:

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?

Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

Resurrected life in the here and now bears the characteristics implied by the questions above. Resurrected life is grounded and faithful. It is marked by continual repentance and forgiveness. Resurrected life is open about its commitments. It sees God in all people. Resurrected life respects the dignity of every person.

We talk about resurrection at Easter and at funerals, and it is appropriate that we do so. A part of the Christian hope is the proclamation that Jesus’s resurrection means ongoing life in God for him and us. But resurrection talk is important at Epiphany, too, because the season enacts the manifestation, the “epiphany”, of God’s glory in the human community and world. God’s glory has been manifested in Jesus and in us. And we manifest God’s glory whenever we step into and enact resurrected living in the here and now.

Christ is risen. We shall be too. We already are. Let’s live that way.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: January 2, 2012

Thoughts at the Turn of the Year

I have ambivalent feelings about New Year’s. On the one hand, it is kind of exciting to see the ball drop, the clock and calendar turn over, and to start a year all over again. On the other, the whole event seems artificial. The whole idea of the calendar itself seems so arbitrary. The world we greet on January 1 always looks very much like the world we as we left it on December 31.

New Year’s Day is set aside as a holiday in our culture principally because the 17^th century Calvinist Presbyterian Scots made it one. Calvinist, “Reformed” Christians were suspicious of Anglican holidays, especially Christmas. Therefore, the Scots Presbyterians (along with the New England Puritans) refused to celebrate the holiday. But they knew they needed some sort of winter festival to replace it, and so they developed New Year’s Day as a Protestant alternative to what they considered the “Papist” festivities of Christmas.

In our culture, New Year’s has developed principally into an occasion for thinking about change. Just as the year changes, we think, so might our lives. And somehow in our culture “change” seems to center on ideas of self-improvement. We might, of course, use New Year’s to think about social, cultural change. But in our world, New Year’s resolutions almost always focus on a change in personal habits. Beginning January 1, I’ll exercise and pray more; eat, drink, and smoke less. Gyms are always really crowded the first week in January. They tend to clear out by Martin Luther Jr. King Day.

So I’m a bit skeptical about New Year’s in many respects. Still, there is an important aspect to the holiday I think we can all appreciate. While it may not always be an occasion for life-changing resolution, New Year’s is an opportunity to reflect on what the poet A.R. Ammons called the “ongoing flux” that makes up our lives.

In 1965, A. R. Ammons published a book-length poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year. The lines in the poem are quite short. That’s because Ammons wrote the poem by typing it on a roll of adding-machine tape. Tape for the Turn of the Year is a verse journal that reflects on the change occurring between one year and another. For Ammons, human life is lived in the tension between freedom and constraint. (Hence the short lines enforced by the use of a narrow tape. Hence also the free verse written without the fetters of meter or rhyme.) For us, the calendar is a conventional way to impose order (days, weeks, months, hours) on something which is essentially fluid: time itself. By marking off time in the rigid arbitrary way we do, we’re essentially trying to channel a river or bottle lightning. In some sense trying to control and contain time is a fool’s errand. Time will relentlessly flow no matter how we try to constrain it. But we can’t help ourselves. Year after year, even though we know better, still we try to get the better of time.

In Tape for the Turn of the Year, A. R. Ammons asks us to think about how each of us finds a way to live in the now, perched as we are between the future (January, change) and the past (December, tradition). So New Year’s is also about the tension between change and tradition. As Ammons says,

we must keep the
tradition &
modify it
so we stay resilient to
change:
too traditional is a loss of
change: too changing is
loss of meaning & memory:

This is an important insight not only for the life of faith communities and bodies politic (we need to be both open to the future and mindful of the past). It is also vital guidance for us as individual people trying to navigate the flow of time. We each have histories, families, communities to which we are accountable. But we are also each individually free and unique. So our lives need both to respect tradition and to celebrate our unique selves. The desires for changelessness and total freedom are illusions. We stand with one foot on each shore as the river of time flows by.

Ammons wrote only a few book-length poems. Most of his output consisted of very short verses. Near the end of Tape for the Turn of the Year he compares himself to both forms and decides in favor of the latter:

Ideally

I’d be like a short poem:

that’s a fine way

to be: a poem at a

time: but all day

life itself is bending,

weaving, changing,

adapting, failing,

succeeding.

Instead of making New Year’s resolutions, we might follow A. R. Ammons’ lead and use this time of year to think about the “ongoing flux” of time and how we each navigate it. Christianity takes time seriously. And while contemplating the long sweep of God’s time perhaps shows the futility of our arbitrary markings off of years and months, it is still important for each of us to stay mindful of how precious our own allotted time really is. This ongoing flux of time may be abundant, but for each of us it is finite. As the Evening Gatha of Buddhism admonishes us, “Do Not Squander Your Life.”

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: December 26, 2011

The Week after Christmas

One thing that really irks me about holidays is the way our culture marks them. We have an obsessive run-up and then they seem to disappear almost before they’re over. When I was working at churches in Los Angeles, I always noticed how the music stations would play Christmas music beginning around Halloween and then, as I was driving home from the Christmas Day service (at about noon), poof! Christmas would be declared over and they would start singing about New Year’s.

In our prevailing culture, the phrase “Christmas Season” usually describes the period between Black Friday morning and Christmas Day at noon. The church’s liturgical calendar, though, has a different way of understanding the time between late November and early January. The four weeks leading up to Christmas are called “Advent”, a time of hopeful, watchful preparation for the birth of Jesus. The Christmas season properly lasts from December 25 through January 5—otherwise known as the “Twelve Days of Christmas”. On January 6 we celebrate the Epiphany, the manifestation of Jesus’s glory to the three magi. Taken together, the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany trimester gives us a time not only to prepare for the holiday but also time to enjoy it.

Once at a church meeting, a colleague of mine proposed that we establish a “rapid response” team so that our parish could quickly enlist in the service of whatever hot issue seemed important that day. Another colleague countered that what we really needed was a “pause and reflect” team instead. The suggestion was not well-received.

Somehow, perversely, we have turned Advent from a time of watchful waiting into a time of anxious preparation. And then we’ve taken the holiday we’re waiting and preparing for and cut it short before it even begins. In so doing, our culture has given us a perfect epitome of how it fretfully does things. Rather than bask in the beauty and wonder of Christmas for a full twelve days, we’re off to the next thing (New Year’s Eve, the parades and bowl games, resolutions) without ever pausing to take in what it is we’re experiencing in the first place.

Christmas is not really Jesus’s birthday. Nobody knows the date of his actual birth. It is something much bigger: an observance of his birth as a celebration of the wonder of the incarnation, Christianity’s proclamation and belief that God has come into human flesh and experience. The incarnation is a big idea, and it has gigantic consequences. It means that our life and experience matter because God participates in them. It means that the God we pray to is a God who knows what it is to be us. It means that every human person is precious because each one bears, uniquely, the human face of God.

One of the things I tried to do this Advent was actually to experience Advent, to listen to what its readings said about being in exile, (lost, alienated) and then to hear the slow dawning of the promise that some One was on the way to be with us in a new and hopeful way. One of the things I’m going to try to do this Christmas is actually to experience Christmas—not for a few hours on December 24 and 25, but all the way up to and including the Epiphany on January 6. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” says John’s Gospel, “full of grace and truth”. That’s a big, empowering, liberating fact to try to take in. I can only attempt to get it by making the space and time for it, giving myself over to it, and attending to what I hear and see and feel as I do so.

Now that the holiday frenzy is over, the time to pause and reflect has come. Take advantage of these twelve days to reflect on what Christmas can mean in your life and world. God has come into and blessed our experience. Who we are and what we do has meaning and purpose. The Word has become flesh and now lives among and within us. Merry Christmas, indeed!

Gary Hall

Homily: December 24, 2011 [Christmas Eve]

December has been a busy time for us, so Kathy and I have not had a chance to see the new Muppet movie yet. But one night last week a cable channel showed the 1984 classic, The Muppets Take Manhattan, and we decided that we’d watch that to prepare ourselves for the newest film. It you remember The Muppets Take Manhattan you’ll recall that it ends with Kermit marrying Miss Piggy in a festive church wedding service. As the camera panned around at all the guest Muppets filling the church, you couldn’t help noticing the big gathering of Sesame Street characters at the back of the room. Suddenly, surprising even myself, I cried out to Kathy, “Look! Everybody’s there! Even Ernie and Bert!”
Kathy took my hand. “It’s only a movie, dear,” she said. I tell this story as an example of what this season does to people, even to bookish clerics like me. I am of course too old to have grown up with Sesame Street; Howdy Doody, Kookla Fran and Ollie, and Miss Frances were more my early childhood style. But Ernie, Bert, the Count, Oscar, Cookie Monster, and Big Bird were prominent in our house when our son was little, and seeing them again made me feel as if I was in the presence of old, loved friends. I might not have cried out in joy had this been the Fourth of July. But because I saw it in the days preceding Christmas, some childlike part of me felt free to express itself.
So Christmas brings out our childlike qualities. It shows what a real intellectual I am that, whenever I think of Christmas, the first image that comes to mind is Snoopy’s doghouse. If you remember another great cinematic classic, A Charlie Brown Christmas, you’ll recall that in that story Snoopy wins the neighborhood lights and display competition by decorating his doghouse with flashing lights, colorful ornaments, and a big red star. To Charlie Brown, Snoopy’s doghouse seems like a garish sell-out of the holiday. To me, that decorated doghouse has always served as a vibrant image of home—especially when Snoopy and Woodstock are asleep on the roof.
Home, in a sense, is what Christmas is really about. In Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas, our scripture readings have been not about home but about its opposite. They’ve been about the absence of home, also known as exile. For the past few weeks in church we’ve heard stories of ancient Jews and early Christians expelled and adrift from all they love and hold sacred. Now tonight in the Gospel reading from Luke, Christmas arrives with the timeless, familiar story of Mary and Joseph, going themselves in a kind of exile from their home village of Nazareth in the north to their ancestral town of Bethlehem in the south to be enrolled in the Roman census. As Luke’s Gospel puts it,

All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. [Luke 2.3-7]

There are many reasons this story always speaks so directly to us, but chief among them, I believe, is the way it plays on our notions of home. Mary and Joseph are on the road. When the time comes for Mary to give birth, she and Joseph go first to an inn and then to the inn’s outbuildings where she gives birth and lays the child Jesus in a manger. The beauty of the scene, of course, comes from the way Mary and Joseph manage to make a home in the barn with the new baby and the attending shepherds. We respond year after year to this story because it figures for us the picture of what we all really long for: we all long for home, for the security of the mother, the father, the infant together under one (even if modest) roof. The manger scene figures for us the perfect picture of human security. It is our shared ideal image of what it means to belong. It is our epitome of home.
If Christmas is about anything, it is about home. And by “home” I mean neither our houses nor our nuclear families—though they too can give us authentic intimations of home. Instead, by “home” I mean where we all deeply, finally belong. And if there are any people who need a home, it is those of us who live in the consumerist, materialist, individualistic world of the 21st century. The values that drive this world are not the values of the manger scene. So to the extent we respond to the values of the stable in Bethlehem, we are aliens in our own world. We are all in exile, whether we admit it or not. Exile is a biblical metaphor that speaks to people of faith in every moment. We, like the ancient Israelites and early Christians, live in rocky, uncertain, hard-hearted times. We, like the ancient Israelites and early Christians, respond to and long for God’s values of peace and justice and humility and compassion—values that are honored in public discourse but seem to be missing from our actual experience of life.
But if the image of exile speaks to us, so do God’s promises of restoration and renewal. As did the ancient Israelites and early Christians, so have we also felt the touch of the miraculous vision of life’s possibilities that God offers us in the Christmas story. To be a person of faith or a seeker is, in the 21st century, to be an exile in one’s own native territory. But it’s also to claim the hope for dimensions and possibilities to our life more joyous and hopeful than anything our culture has to offer. To come to church on Christmas Eve is to declare that each of us here deeply longs to connect with the source of our being, to return home. To come to church tonight is also to proclaim that we see something in the manger scene which tells us that life can give us more than the “wearisome possibilities” [Walter Brueggemann’s phrase in Cadences of Home] the world usually has to offer.
Christmas is about home, and it’s about the new possibilities for living that God tonight holds out to us. Frederick Buechner says, “We carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons us. “[Fredrick Buechner, The Longing for Home, p. 110] That wholeness is most perfectly shown in the life and ministry of Jesus. The child whose birth we celebrate tonight will become the man, Jesus of Nazareth, a healer, preacher, and teacher whose life will be dedicated to proclaiming the Kingdom of God. He makes that proclamation to his fellow exiles: to the poor, the sick, the lonely, the mourners, the oppressed, the outcast. Jesus heals people. He gathers them around his table. He opposes the killing structures of his day by saying that everybody, regardless of social distinction, has a place in his community. Jesus builds around him a disparate group of people who, together, can be at home with each other in the new world of possibility that Jesus’s presence creates. The things that Jesus does look to the world outside his presence like impossibilities, and so they are called miracles: healing the sick, feeding the 5,000, raising Lazarus from the dead, casting out demons, restoring the sight of a man born blind. To those inside this new home of his presence, what Jesus does is make God’s “impossibilities” for life, joy, and wholeness possible and available. When you step into the Kingdom of God, you step into a new world of hope and freedom and joy, and you step out of dependence on the bad ideas or false allegiances our culture usually wraps in tinsel expecting our grateful thanks.
I believe that all of us here tonight have come because this picture of a woman, a child, a man gathered around a manger says something true to our shared deep, exilic longing for home. At bottom, each of us knows that what we want for Christmas is not yet another thing. At bottom, each of us knows that what we really want for Christmas is a sense of being at home, a sense that we are living life in alignment with that “vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons us”. The home we see realized in the Bethlehem stable is the true home that will abide.
Time passes: not even Kermit’s and Miss Piggy’s marriage could last. We are all mortal and fragile, so even Snoopy’s doghouse will finally fall silent and Woodstock will fly away. For Christians home is never, finally, about preserving an ideal moment or recovering the past. Our true home lies not behind but ahead of us. Our true home is the place we are going with God, each other and Jesus, and we experience our true home now whenever we refuse the “wearisome possibilities” on offer around us and say yes to the life-changing blessings made real in the ministry and resurrection of Jesus then and now in the community that gathers in his name.
Whoever you are, wherever you are in your life and faith; whatever losses you have experienced; whatever longings you feel: tonight, in this place, you and I are here, together, home. What makes this our home is not that it's an institutional church or a beautiful building. What makes this our home is the story of Mary and Joseph and the infant Jesus gathered together, brought out of exile and into the warmth of a sheltering stable. We, with them, are open and alive to the miraculous possibilities for love and blessing and life and hope that God offers us always, and especially tonight. This Eucharistic meal we share together is the sign that what we long for is within our reach, that we can experience it as we gather around this table in God’s loving embrace and are fed with the bread and wine of thanksgiving and hope. Exile is over. You really can come home. In fact, you’re already here. Amen.