Issue 561
Everybody wants a place to call home. Such a place will feel warm when it’s cold outside, dry when it’s wet, cool when it’s hot. Home is a place of security, safety, and love. It is at home where you eat, rest, relax and welcome friends or family.
If you don’t have such a place, if it has been destroyed or if the security and safety has been blasted out of your hands you will seek another place. You will travel with as much as you can carry and seek the dream of home.
History is full of stories concerning individuals, groups or masses who uproot, travel and relocate. Israel, the USA, Pakistan, these are countries founded on the relocation of millions seeking a homeland.
History, however, is not so full of stories of peoples going the other way. Of course individuals uprooted themselves for various reasons but the trend is usually to move from deprivation and danger to seek plenty and security.
The Christmas Story is one of reverse migration. The Son of Man comes from the perfect home. A place of unimaginable joy, overwhelming plenty, impregnable security and total satisfaction. Voluntarily he chooses to leave his home and migrate from light to dark, from status to emptiness, from power to service. He is the Migrant Messiah.
He was not ultimately welcomed. From very early on he was persecuted, despised and later rejected. His motives were suspected, he was demonized by many, hounded, misunderstood and opposed. People built mental and spiritual walls to try to block his path. He slept rough, traveled light and lived simply.
But he did not come to make us feel at home on this planet. He did not come to find a home for himself here. Quite the opposite. He came to stir a restlessness in your soul, such that you do not feel at home here. He came to invite you to his home, to travel a path so challenging that it would lead you to the very rooms of his unimaginable home.
The Son of Man arriving on the earth as a baby, so obviously from somewhere else, comes to your heart with a question; “Do you feel at home here?” His warnings advise you not to get too comfortable here, not to seek security here or accumulate too much baggage.
When the Christmas Son of Man says “I am the way” he wants you to join that way which leads to a different kind of home. This is not just a sweet, sentimental, seasonal reflection. When you deal this week, why do you seek to deal honestly, with integrity, avoiding greed and injustice? Because you are not at home with these things. The path to your Father is not paved with selfishness but service.
Everything about his approach to life spoke of giving, not grasping, making yourself nothing not something, humility rather than pride. But he calls us to follow his approach even if it costs. Each year will create challenges to Christians to recognize this Messiah is security, is safety, is your resting place.
If you feel completely at home in this world culture, then that is a warning in your soul. The Son of Man from heaven past has arrived in Christmas present to point the way to true home.
In fact, He is the way home.
Work well.
Geoff Shattock
BIBLE SECTION
John 14:5-7
5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”
Philippians 2:5-8
5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; 7 rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross!
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Work well
Geoff Shattock
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