“Hearth and Home” – December 13, 2009
“Hearth and Home”
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
December 13, 2009
At no other season does the mere mention of “home” evoke such intense feeling as it does during these holidays. Tree lights twinkling through a window, kindled menorahs casting their glow through another window just down the street, and the magic of singular candles glowing through every window of so many homes. One imagines doors opening and some warm smiling love of a person so glad to see us, welcoming us into the inside of where those candles flicker, into the inside where firelight beckons and seasonal aromas stretch memories into longing.
Hearth and home, heart and hearth call us into a state of sublime belonging. “Home,” writes Dwight Young,
“…is much more than a building or a piece of ground. It’s an emotion, a deep-rooted sense of welcome and permanence and belonging. ….Some people have a home from childhood; others spend a lifetime looking for it.”
Home is the truest form of sanctuary. Its locale lies somewhere between the reality of your front door and the farthest limits of our sorrowful imagining.
The irony of the holidays upon us—Christmas and Hanukkah—lies in the delicate balance each evokes between home and homelessness.
Take Hanukkah, for example. It all stemmed from an imperial edict almost two centuries before the Common Era. Alexander the Great had cast his imperial arm across the Near East; in the spirit of imperial behavior, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Hellenistic ruler of the Syrian outpost, forbade upon penalty of death the practice of all local religions, Judaism among them. To seal the deal, the sacred temple in Jerusalem was defiled by pagan rites.
The story goes that over three years time a band of insurgent brothers known as the Maccabees resisted and triumphed. The year was 169 BCE. It took another three years to prepare the temple for re-dedication. While the historic specifics weave around a celebrated miracle of light, the legend endures that there was only enough oil for a single day, yet the oil that was kindled burned for eight long days—a miracle of light! The spiritually homeless were at long last at home.
As for Christmas, so appealing is the manger scene, that we quickly forget. We forget that Jesus’ parents entered the stable as a last resort on a night when so many sought shelter, all occasioned by an unwelcome edict. As we read in the Gospel According to Luke:
“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augusts that all the world should be enrolled…And all went to enrolled, each to his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house of lineage of David, to be enrolled with Mary his betrothed, who was with child.” (Luke 2:1, 3-5)
The Gospel According to Matthew tells the story of the wise men, led by a star to the newborn babe, summoned by Herod to find the child and report back, arriving at the manger, then warned in a dream to avoid Herod. Joseph also dreamt. He dreamt of an angel warning him to take his young family and flee to Egypt, and from Egypt to Israel, where they settled in Nazareth, the town from which Joseph and Mary had first set forth on their legendary journey. (Matthew 2:1-23)
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The realities of these holidays are rife with oppression and resistance and fear and flight. Yet there is a pervasive peace that hovers, the peace of hope that there is a space that is sacred. Perhaps that space is a temple newly dedicated. Perhaps that space is the respite of a hay-strewn barn. Perhaps that space is the renewal of spirit that comes with a legend of light lasting beyond expectation. Perhaps that space is the renewal of hope that comes with a child holding in the fullness of his being the power to transform us all with a gospel of love, the only means by which any of us might know the grace of hearth and home.
So tell me, what are your hopes at this time? What do you long for? Where do you find hearth and home?
Sources:
The Gospel According to Matthew and The Gospel According to Luke, in The Bible (Revised Standard Version).
Dwight Young, “Be It Ever So Humble,” Preservation, The Magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, November-December 2004, http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2004/november-december/nd04backpage.html.
