I like technology. I was a dedicated Windows PC desktop and laptop computer user, and had a Samsung Galaxy 5 cell phone until seven years ago. Beverly and our daughters had gotten iPhones and they were able to communicate so much easier together with FaceTime and messaging. I was feeling somewhat left out of those family systems and had the encouragement of an avid Apple computer user in the congregation to move into the Apple universe. I made the move to a MacBook Pro at the end of 2014 and have not looked back. I still use that laptop and now use an iPhone 12 Pro, an iPad Pro (which replaced my iPad Air 2), and Apple Watch.
As fun as technology is, there are obvious limitations, like the one in the picture. In July, I had finished lunch with a friend at a restaurant in Saranac. When I looked at the maps application on my phone, I got the message in the picture, “Can’t find a way there.” There was no way my phone knew to get from my location to Home. Mind you, I had used the maps application to get to the lunch with my friend. Now, it could not find the way back.
This was obviously a low-risk endeavor. But depending on what Home represents for you, this could be a despairing message: You can’t find a way home from your location.
Getting home for the holidays is a powerful social and emotional and spiritual motivation in us. We want to be in relationships, communities, congregations, and places where we belong.
In our Advent worship series, Songs to See Us Through, we are exploring how to get home for Christmas through music and allowing our lives to be songs to God in the world. At this year’s Michigan Annual Conference, Rev. Anna Moon preached that “Jesus teaches us to sing the Lord’s song and let our lives be songs to the Lord as we have marks of Jesus Christ, so others will know that we are his disciples.”
What we may discover in our efforts to get home for Christmas is that God meets us on the way in Jesus.
The wonderful affirmation of God’s home-making action in Jesus is found in Ephesians:
I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong (Ephesians 3:16-17).
In the culminating book of the Bible there is this revelation:
I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, “Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them” (Revelation 21:30).
Before the lunch with my friend I had not been in Saranac before. Which meant I was not able to return home by strong memory. I kept driving until the signal picked up again and it routed me a different way home.
Rev. Dr. Jennifer Browne is the current Michigan Conference Clergy Assistant to the Bishop. In her latest article, “May We All Feel at Home,” she reflects on how many different religious traditions (spiritual homes) she has been part of throughout her life. Here is her conclusion:
Several years after I officially said goodbye to the denomination of my birth and found myself adopted by a new family of faith, I learned that my maternal grandfather, whom I had only known to be a university professor and dean, originally moved from Wisconsin to southern California to attend seminary … as an aspiring Methodist pastor. He and my grandmother met at the Epworth League, the Methodist college ministry that preceded what’s now called the Wesley Foundation. I shared DNA with Methodists going back generations and generations. When I made the last jump from the United Church of Christ to the United Methodist Church I was returning to the church of my ancestors. I was adopted by the people who’d shaped the lives of my grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. How lovely to be home! How blessed both to choose it and to be born to it! May everyone have the chance to do and be the same (Rev. Dr. Jennifer Browne, https://michiganumc.org/may-we-all-feel-at-home/).
On our ways home this Christmas let’s remember that we both choose and are chosen to belong to God in Jesus Christ no matter our location.