When Jacob awoke from the dream he said, "Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it."
For the Christian the quintessential Christmas scene is the iconic image of the Bethlehem stable at night with a star shining above it. For the Hebrew heart and mind an equivalent image is the beautiful image of that ladder from heaven with the angels ascending and descending. "This is the house of God," Jacob said, "the gate of heaven" (Genesis 28:17).
Perhaps this is what all our deepest spiritual awakenings are: Catching sight or sound of a God who has been there all along, only we did not know it.
And it comes when it comes, as grace, always grace, because it comes into our emptiness, our brokenness, our waywardness. Perhaps it is only in such times when we are truly ready to see it and receive it. As Oscar Wilde is reported to have said late in his life: "How else but through a broken heart can the Lord Christ enter in!"
Centuries later the Hebrew people in the wilderness were reminded again of the grace of God’s presence when God said, Carry an extra tent and I’ll go with you.
II
Scan five hundred or so years later. Ezekiel the prophet is given a glimpse of this in a vision of the glory of God returning to the temple in Jerusalem. An angelic tour guide takes Ezekiel into the inner court of the temple, and Yahweh’s voice says:
"Mortal one, this is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet, where I will reside among the people of Israel forever" (Ezekiel 43:7).
And then half a millennium later there was John telling the story of Jesus and writing "In the beginning was the Word – daughter wisdom, the truth and mercy of God. . . . And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, tented among us, and we have beheld his glory, . . . full of grace and truth."
God was saying to us: Behold this one named Jesus. He is the place of my throne, the place of the soles of my feet, where my glory shines. In him I will be with you, travel with you, tabernacle with you, every step of the way till you reach home.
In a Christmas fantasy by Jostein Gaarder, (The Christmas Mystery) a girl sees a beautiful field of wild flowers and the angel tells her: Sometimes the glory of heaven spills over onto earth.
John tells us: In Jesus the glory of God has spilled over onto earth and into our lives in a way never seen before, nor since.
Last summer Cherrie and I went for an afternoon hike on the island of Iona. We reached a meadow shimmering with tiny yellow wildflowers. The way the sun and wind and flowers danced together, it was a moment of beauty and holiness I’ll never forget, a "thin place," as the Celtic Christians put it, a moment given us when the glory of heaven spilled over.
How much more do we see the glory of God, the beauty and truth and mercy and love of God spilling over in Jesus.
He is the God who tabernacles with us, who finds us in the "tent of meeting" and with whom we talk face to face, as with a friend.
III
But Christmas according to John is not yet through. He writes:
We too can become the glory of God.
We’re not yet like Jesus, we’re always racing to catch up to him, but as we race after him we are being changed into his likeness, into a human woman or man like him.
Sometimes we need to stop racing because we are racing in the wrong direction. What’s that line from Bonnie and Clyde when one of them says: "We’re not going anywhere; we’re just going."
When we do this, stop and let Jesus catch us, that second miracle of Christmas happens. The first miracle was the birth of Jesus into the world two thousand years ago. The second miracle is the birth of the Christ in us. Then we become a tent of meeting, a tabernacle of God; we become the soles of God’s feet.
W. H. Auden wrote in his Christmas oratorio: "Love Him in the World of the Flesh."1
That is how we love him who first loved us: In the world of the flesh, on basketball courts and in computer labs, in classrooms and hospital rooms, on the streets of Lakewood or Hurley or Ecuador, on your own street.
IV
When Christmas happens we discover that home is not just the home we remember; home is not the home we dream, the one we never had but hope one day to have; home happens here, on the journey.
In one of the stories collected in the NPR Story Project, a man tells the story his father told him from his own boyhood.2
It was the 1920's in Seattle. The family’s finances had taken a beating; his father’s business had collapsed.
They could afford only a Christmas tree. There were no presents around it. On Christmas Eve the children went to bed in pretty low spirits; their parents too, disappointed there was nothing to give their children.
When they got up the next morning there was a large mound of presents under the tree. They could hardly choke down breakfast fast enough to get to the tree and open the presents.
Mother opened her present first. There in the box was the old shawl she thought she had misplaced.
Father got his old ax with the broken handle. The boy’s sister got a pair of old slippers. One of his brothers opened up his present and got a favorite pair of wrinkled, patched trousers. The boy himself got a hat, the one he thought he’d left in a restaurant back in November.
Before long everyone was laughing so hard they could hardly pull the strings off their presents.
Who was responsible? It was Morris, his brother. For several months he had been secreting away old things he thought the family wouldn’t miss. Then on Christmas Eve after the family had gone to bed, he had wrapped them up and placed them under the tree.
As the father told him some years later: "It was one of the finest Christmases we ever had."
What that day reminded them was that Christmas was one another.
In Buechner’s novel Love Feast, Leo Bebb, an evangelist with a shady past, moves to Princeton, N.J., to evangelize the Pepsi generation and decides to throw a big Thanksgiving Dinner for everyone who will come. They put up flyers around town. When the day came the hall was filled with the most unlikely menagerie of people: Students who couldn’t make it home, bikers on Harleys, blue – haired ladies from the Daughters of the American Revolution, and more.
Leo Bebb stood up and told the crowd:
I think that’s what people find when they find Jesus. They find the home they’d longed for, maybe experienced in part but never in full; they find it now in each other – and in the love of God they never thought they’d have, not like that.
There’s an old rabbinic tale of a village that was beset by unhappiness and fractiousness. No one could get along. Old grudges stayed around like stains. No one liked one another very much.
Then one day a messenger came from God who said to them that the Messiah for whom they’d waited all their lives was in fact living among them and was one of them! They began to look for the Messiah in one another. Could Mary, could Jacob be the Messiah?
And as they searched they indeed began to see the Messiah in each other, the image of God in each other, the divine light in each other.
The community through those days was changed. As they opened their eyes to see Messiah in each other, the other things, the old things, didn’t matter so much any more.
Here is a miracle of Christmas: Home is not just something we remember – and thank God for every good memory – home is not just something we dream – and will one day have in fullness with God – home is now, on the journey, with God, and – can you faith it? – with one another.
1. Collective Poems, p. 308
2. I Thought My Father Was God, ed. Paul Auster (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 2001), p. 54.
3. Love Feast (New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 61.