December 19, 1999
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
Announcing the Arrival of Flight 159
The excitement kept me from deep sleep Friday night. In only a few hours, I knew I would be making my way like thousands of others to the airport or other transportation centers to wait for their loved ones to come home. Traffic was heavier than usual for a typical Saturday morning. But these days before Christmas don’t comply with normal patterns of life. People are busy—going and coming to complete all of their chores before the holidays. With only a few days away, there’s no time to lose.
At the airport, there were many signs that tell you what will be happening. On the TV monitors, all the flights were listed telling thousands of us when the long-awaited planes will come in. At Gate 80, it was peculiar to still see people carrying cards with names of strangers to meet. I wonder why would anyone be traveling to unfamiliar places where people don’t know your name at Christmas time.
When the ground crew announced the arrival of United 159, I saw families running toward the tinted windows to see the big plane roll in. As each passenger got off the plane, people hugged and kissed and welcomed their loved ones home for Christmas. It wasn’t long before I got to do the same in welcoming Lauren home for Christmas.
Coming home for Christmas is probably the most nostalgic and sentimental journey anyone can take. Whatever one might be doing or how important it might be, when Christmas comes along, you drop everything and make your way home. Even Ebenezer Scrooge eventually gave time off for Bob Cratchet to go home on Christmas.
Israel’s Homecoming
Today’s text is the joyful announcement of homecoming. Israel has been languishing in exile. Like TV monitors mounted high up on the walls announcing the arrival of each plane, the prophet gets up on a high mountain so all can hear and joyfully shouts the call to return home. Listen to the words of Isaiah again:
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who
announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation,
who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”
The messenger is the one who runs with exuberance all the way from Babylon to Jerusalem in order to carry the “good news” that Yahweh has decisively defeated the powers of Babylon. The feet of the runner are said to be “beautiful” because the runner runs lightly and exuberantly with good news to share. You can tell from a great distance when someone is bringing good news to share: the body language is bursting with exciting news.
Perched on the ruined walls of Jerusalem are sentinels, partly to protect and partly to await messengers from afar. They are at their observation posts, eagerly watching to see if any messengers come from the north to report the outcome of the conflict between Yahweh and Babylon. The sentinels watch intensely. Then they start shouting the news to the waiting inhabitants of ruined Jerusalem. The sentinels are beside themselves with joy because they have seen the messenger at a distance. They can see his beautiful feet, maybe clicking his heels, and they know that the news is good. They shout to the people:
“Yahweh has won; we are free; exile is over!”
The sentinels, however, see more than the messenger coming, they also see Yahweh coming in majesty and glory. Yahweh is coming to reclaim Jerusalem as his own. “For in plain sight they see the return of the Lord to Zion.”
In this season of Christmas, we too are watching intensely. We are like the sentinels stationed at the observation towers of our lives eagerly watching to see if any messengers would come to tell us that it’s okay to come home. We are waiting once again for the coming of the Christ Child to reclaim our lives as his own.
There Is Room for Us
Although we know and try to believe that God wants us to come home, sometimes we are still not sure whether there’s enough room for us. We see our lives are like the “ruins of Jerusalem.” We may have given up all expectations of well-being. We may think that we are not good enough because we still need restoration. So we wait outside, stationed at our observation towers, not yet ready to come in.
A local church’s annual children’s Christmas pageant went well. Mary and Joseph came into Bethlehem, on cue. There they were met by the nine-year-old innkeeper who dutifully informed them that, though he would love to help them out if he could, there was, again this year, “no room in the inn.” “Sorry. No vacancy, like the sign says out front.
But then the nine-year-old innkeeper looked again at Mary and Joseph, who really did look tired from their journey, and he blurted out, “But there’s a great motel with free cable just around the corner from the church!”
And the pageant was in shambles. That’s not the way the story of Mary, Joseph, and the innkeeper is supposed to go. Or is it?
We all know by heart how the story goes. Mary and Joseph come to Bethlehem for the government’s enrollment and there, because with everyone from out-of-town, there is no room at the inn, so Mary is forced to give birth to Jesus in a cow stall.
But scholar, Kenneth Bailey points out that what our Bibles translate as “inn” is, in the Greek, kataluma, which means “guest room” not hotel or inn.
Luke says that there was no room for Mary and Joseph in the kataluma, no more room in the family “guest room” so they had to be placed elsewhere in the home.
In the typical Mid-Eastern home, says Bailey, there is a designated room for overnight visitors. It would be unthinkable, according to eastern hospitality, for out-of-town relatives to be sent to an inn by their family. Mary and Joseph were among relatives.
They were back in Bethlehem because Joseph was “of the house and lineage of David.” The problem was, there were undoubtedly many relatives back for the government’s enrollment.
And as you can imagine, being a young couple with Mary about to have the baby at any moment, they were late in arriving home. By the time Mary and Joseph arrived, the guest room, the kataluma, was filled. So the next best place in the family home would have been the outer room where the family’s animals were brought in for safe keeping during the night. That’s where the manger was, the feed trough for the animals, in this outer room.
All of this puts the story of that first Christmas in a bit different light. Jesus was not born in the stable of some cold, impersonal hotel, but rather born in the front room of a home where doting aunts, uncles, and other random relatives fussed over the newborn baby.
Some of you have made incredible effort to be home for Christmas. You have flown US Air. You have suffered the indignities of Highway 5. Some of you who are home for Christmas will sleep on the fold-out sofa bed with the bar running right through the middle of the two inch foam mattress in the living room or curled up in a sleeping bag elsewhere, because there’s no appropriate place for you in the guest room. An uncle or auntie from another part of the state has taken the guest room before you got there.
Rather than to send you to the Fairmount, the family loves you so much and is so delighted to have everyone home for Christmas that they are giving you the honor of sleeping on the floor in the playroom.
When God Incarnate, Jesus, was most frail and vulnerable, a baby, he was cared for in the context of a home, safe in the blessings of a family. When we are most vulnerable and are in need of acceptance, we return home where we too can find doting aunties and uncles fussing over us.
Homelessness
Although we all yearn for a place we can call home, some of us find it difficult to come home. There are hundreds of homeless people in our city alone who have either lost their homes because of some misfortune or have lost their way home. According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors report released last Friday, homelessness in U.S. cities is rising at its fastest pace in five years even as the nation’s economy surges toward a record nine years of expansion. The percentage of homeless families with children has jumped one-quarter since 1985. This is a national disgrace for a country of such prosperity to allow people to become homeless.
And then there are some of us here who may have a house but not a home. “There’s no place like home for the holidays,” is not just a trite song, it’s also true—very, very true. We long to belong. We want someplace where we fit. Like the TV show, “Cheers,” you want “someplace where everyone knows your name.” Some of us here may need to take some serious time to pray about how our home life can improve. Christian Mogenstern puts in this way, “Home is not where you live, but where they understand you.” Or, of course, Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.”
Home can also include being with our church family. Just like baby Jesus came home where his doting aunties and uncles understood him before he and his parents would be forced to flee for their lives as refugees from the wrath of King Herod, we can come home too. In the harsh and cold world out there, we are welcome to come home to the church where we understand you as a child of God who need the grace and saving love of Jesus Christ.
But we know that Christmas, as Luke tells it, is not just about Mary and Joseph coming home, safe in the stable even if it’s not in the kataluma. It’s not even about your coming home for Christmas.
It’s about God, Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Prince of Peace, Savior coming home. We couldn’t get to God, so God got to us. God got to us coming among us in this mundane, ordinary family story we cherish as the nativity. The incarnation could have easily been this little “God with us” sleeping on the fold-out sofa bed downstairs in the playroom. Our God came out of the cold to dwell among us. That’s the joy of Christmas.
Meaning of Christmas
Once upon a cold Christmas Eve, a man sat in reflective silence before the flames flickering in the fireplace, thinking about the meaning of Christmas. “There’s no point to a God who became human,” he mused. “Why would an all-powerful God want to share even one of his precious moments with the likes of us? And even if he did, why would God choose to be born in a stable? No way! The whole thing is absurd! I’m sure that if God really wanted to come down to earth, he would have chosen some other way.”
Suddenly, the man was roused from his musings by a strange sound outside. He sprang to the window and leaned on the sash. Outside he saw a gaggle of snow geese frantically honking and wildly flapping their wings amid the deep snow and frigid cold. They seemed dazed and confused. Apparently, due to exhaustion, they had dropped out of a larger flock migrating to a warmer climate.
Moved to compassion, the man bundled up and went outside. He tried to “shoo” the shivering geese into the warm garage, but the more he “shooed,” the more the geese
panicked. “If they only realized that I’m trying to save them,” he thought to himself. “How can I make them understand my concern for their well-being?”
Then a thought came to him: “If for just a minute, I could become one of them, if I could become a snow goose and communicate with them in their own language, then they would know what I’m trying to do.”
In a flash of inspiration, he remembered it was Christmas Eve. A warm smile crossed his face. The Christmas story no longer seemed absurd. He visualized an ordinary-looking infant lying in a manger in a stable in Bethlehem. He understood the answer to his questions of faith: God became one-like-us to tell us in human terms, that we can understand, that he loves us, that he loves us right now, and that he is concerned with our well-being.
There are not many religions I know of which could tolerate this much domesticating of the divine. Most faiths are scandalized by our faith in God who takes on our flesh and is born among us, one of us, in a manger of the family’s kataluma, as a baby, no less. When we sing, “I’ll be home for Christmas,” we mean us. When Luke hears this tune, he hears Messiah, Emmanuel, God-with-us proclaiming, “I’ll be at your home for Christmas.”
So why are so many of us here today? Moving right into the middle of your family with its problems, secrets, sin, and stillness; the love and laughter, the homecoming reunions, and the little joys of your homes, there comes this God. And even though we may feel so overly stressed out and overwhelmed with things to do that the “guest rooms” in our lives are filled to capacity, this God, Emmanuel, still moves right in and decides to stay on your fold-out sofa bed because there’s no more room in the kataluma.
The last chapter of the Bible tells of God coming to us so that we can find home with God,
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them… (Rev. 21:3)
I think that’s why you and I are here. We are here to once again hear and be reassured that God wants us to come home and it’s okay to do so. We are here to hear the prophet Isaiah announce
“The Lord has bared his holy arm
before the eyes of all the nations;
and all the ends of the earth shall see
the salvation of our God.
The messenger climbing up on this high mountain announces peace and good news that it’s time to come home to Yahweh. Everybody sees it! Everybody notices! Everyone recognizes that Yahweh has now weighed in on behalf of Israel.
Can you see the messenger coming? Do you hear the sentinels shouting? It’s time for you and for me to come home for Christmas!
So if you are sleeping on that fold-out sofa bed with the bar in the middle or curled up in a sleeping bag somewhere in the corner of the room or like the Chinese would do it, have 4 or 5 people all sleeping on the same bed, just remember that your family loves you so much and is so delighted to have you home for Christmas that they wouldn’t even think about sending you to the Fairmount.
So let us get up on our beautiful feet and sing with joy that Jesus Christ is King of Kings, Lord of Lords and that he shall reign forever and ever. Hallelujah! Hallelujah!