I'm the team and welcoming you all and say Merry Christmas to you all too. I am the most blessed guy to be able to be part of this team of super talented super dedicated people. It started working on tonight back in the fall and have been out for months and months. And so because I'd really like to keep this job, I want to remind you all of a couple things.
The first is just what the team reminded you of. These services are our Sunday services. So we have no services Christmas Sunday in two days. So don't show up.
The doors at the end will be locked. Instead you could go online and rewatch this service and enjoy it one more time. If you're part of Men in Hills, I want to encourage you to be faithful to our financial joint financial commitments here. Since we won't be meeting on Sunday, encourage you to go to mhcc.life and help us meet our financial commitments there.
If you're just joining us tonight because you were invited or wanted to come to the church on Christmas Eve, that does not apply to you. We're just happy that you're here tonight. Hope that you sense the love of God in this community and in this place. And then finally on a New Year's Day, it's going to be a special day.
One service, free breakfast and my mentor, Gary Burchin and I are. We're going to sit up here and I'm going to pick that man's brain for all of you. And he's going to share what a life lived to person in Christ looks like when you get it to your later years. So I encourage you to be here.
Even if you haven't been with us over the last few weeks, you've probably picked up from Piney and from others that our theme of this Christmas is Home for Christmas. I mean, that's where everybody wants to be, right? That's where the movies show songs, advertisements say none of them more famously, by the way, than Bing Crosby and his famous Home for Christmas released in 1943. You know, Bing Crosby actually didn't write the song.
It was written by a songwriting duo, one of which was a graduate of St. Lawrence University. And when he died, he left in his will that every time the song had played, a portion of the proceeds would go back to St. Lawrence University.
Just from 2000 to 2018, over a half a million dollars went to St. Lawrence University because of how famous this song is at this time of year. You really can put a price on how much people want to be home for Christmas. If you don't know the song well or the history of it, the thought was that it was written, it was to have been written by a young man, often wore a serviceman during a break in fighting during World War II.
Writing home to his family to declare his intention that he would indeed be home for Christmas. These really emotionally evocative lyrics. They were so powerful that during the war it became the most requested song at Christmas USO shows, both in Europe and in the Pacific Theatre. And in a yank, that was the GI magazine.
It said, quote, probably accomplished more from Bill Tarry-Merell than anyone else in that entire era with that song. Ironically though, despite the song's popularity with Americans at the front and at home, in the United Kingdom, the BBC banned the song from broadcast. The corporations management felt the lyrics might lower morale amongst the British troops. That's how powerful that shared emotion is.
Never underestimate the desire to be home. It's quite literally otherworldly. True story 1965, having set a record for the longest flight in the US-based program, the astronauts aboard Gemini 7 spacecraft were hurtling back towards Earth. Asked by the NASA Communication Personnel if they wanted any particular music to accompany them as they made their journey back to Earth.
Well, you guessed it, they said. We'd like to hear Bing Crosby's, Home for Christmas. See for many of us, especially if you're part of this church, being home for Christmas means being in this place right here with each other. I have been here every Christmas Eve for over 30 years.
Because at its core, our church, Men and Hills, we're not like a purveyor of religious goods and services. We are at our core, a family. We're a community of faith walking together. And so we thought that together as a family, we would do this Christmas, what a lot of families do, who are home for Christmas.
We would share some of our Christmas memories with one another. And so without any further ado, and with a big thank you to each and every one of you, over 60 of you that took the time to send your memories in, friends, welcome home for Christmas. Also as a new member of the team here at Men and Hills, if you see Renato walking around, give him a thank you, he's been working on video, not stop. And he's been such a blessing to us to be able to capture all of our shared memories and then kind of bring them together on Christmas Eve and share them with one another.
It's such a powerful emotion, right? I mean, it's so powerful, think about this. The United States Army and the United States Navy both released the song to the troops in their own ways during World War II and why for inspiration. It's such a powerful emotion, right?
That the United Kingdom banned the songs for their troops for fear of desperation. And I hope you feel it tonight, a little bit too, the desire for home. It's as deeply rooted in our hearts and souls as it is seemingly elusive for us. I mean, we all want to be home for Christmas.
Many of us will spend a lot of money, right, trying to make it just right to get all the feels, you know, to kind of keep up with the video. But, and I've lived through, you know, my share of Christmas Eve at this point. If we're honest, like even when you nail it and you get it exactly right, it's like it's still not exactly right. It's kind of like we're home for Christmas, but there's this lingering longing for something else.
As I reflected on on it, and again, I've had all the people around the table and I've had those perfect nights. There's this lingering feeling that there might be something more. And if pictures can say a thousand words, right, here's the joy of being home at Christmas. And about 24 hours later, little eight month old Landry was taken by her daddy to the doctors, and Landry's catching on what happens at the doctors.
Here's what happens when you're not at home for Christmas, right? Like, all just captured in the face. In the last few weeks, I've been trying, if you've been part of the Church of an introduction to this German word, that captures that feeling. We don't have a word for it in the English language, but it does exist in the German.
And that word is zenzukt. It's a sense of deep, inconsolable longing of yearning, the feeling of a tensely missing something, even when you're not quite sure what it is. Zenzukt is a disorienting longing. At Christmas time, I believe we come the closest.
I think to Naili down, what that longing is for. I think it's a deep-seated desire to be home. Now, if you were here a couple of weeks ago, I shared with my own personal journey trying to get back to the place where I'm from. I went back to the home of my youth.
It's still there, but it's not the same. I was home, but things have changed so much. My room still got the 70s paneling up, but it wasn't the same. My beautiful mother was still home, but even my beautiful mother wasn't the same.
Father time remains undefeated. My mom now has to write a chairlift to get downstairs to my room. I will admit, I couldn't help but wonder what I could have done with those two extra minutes of warning about her coming down the stairs that that chair takes. My medals, my trophies, all the acknowledgments of my somewhat meager childhood accomplishments that used to adorn the walls.
Those things that used to give me my identity. They're gone, just like my Farrah Fawcett poster. It's like I'm home. I mean, I'm there, but I'm not home.
So next I went to the old ball field where we spent every afternoon as kids in the fall, it was football in the spring, it was baseball. I showed you a picture. Somebody put a house up on it. And then in the pursuit of that ultimate feeling of home, that feeling that social scientists, psychologists, they say what it is that you're longing for is home.
That feeling of home is properly oriented. When you feel properly oriented in space and time, it's a predictable and secure place. Well, I went to try to go to the place that was that for me. By far the most growing up, my grandmother's house in South Plainfield.
As I drove down there, I began to get all the fields. I had Christmas radio on and I was picturing, looking in the window and seeing where my grandfather sat in the chair. I knew where it would be in the living room. My grandma in the kitchen, she was always in the kitchen, always taking care of someone or something.
And some of you know what happened when I pulled up outside of my grandmother's house. This is what was there. Not my grandma's house down and put a strip of huff. I even got out and walked around.
Thought maybe if I got to the backyard, I could get that sense, that kind of feeling and healing I was looking for. I think it wasn't there. In some very real sense, I felt a little disoriented. Like a homeless guy.
I actually felt, I could tell you what it felt like. I mean the substitute, the substitute homes we tried to create for ourselves. Trying to get that feeler kind of squelched a little bit. Being whole and secure.
A find a place where we're fully known, and even though we're fully known, we're fully loved. Those other substitute homes, they just don't hold up. I mean think about it. Houses go away, people change, relationships fail, trophies tarnish.
All these counterfeit homes. They never satisfy. And the truth is, they never even last. It's interesting.
Even the song, right? Bing Karel Crosby, Mr. Home for Christmas Himself. No one more famous for those words or that longing, and yet even his home was really not what most of us are longing for.
You might know quite famously or maybe infamously in his 1977 interview with Barbara Walters. He shared with her what he would do if his daughter or son didn't comply with his moral rules. And look, he had good biblical moral rules and values. I agree with them.
His answer though. After acknowledging that he was a strict disciplinarian and kind of harshly saying that his favorite tool of the trade was the backside of a hairbrush. He said that if they didn't do what he told them to do, well then, that would be it. The most remembered quote from the interview related to what he would say to his daughter if she were to go against his wishes.
Quote, if any of them did that, I would never speak to them ever again, and it would be a loha on a steel guitar. That was the line everybody remembered. Take your things, he said, and get out, and I would never talk to her or see her again. And Barbara Walters was a little court off guard, and so she followed up.
She said, even your young teenage daughter, his daughter, you love, and he looked better and said, yeah. His kids would later go on to chronicle the pain and the challenges of growing up in that home. Two of them eventually took their lives. Everybody's looking for home.
Everybody. And while the social scientists and the psychologists, the singers, the songwriters, the poets, the storytellers, while they try to figure out why, the Christmas story gives a very clear and compelling answer. That answer can be found almost every page of the ancient scriptures, and it's this. Man was created by God on purpose with a purpose, and man was created specifically for a home.
A home that's been lost. And as a result, if you read the scriptures from front to back, you'll come to realize it is nothing but one long story of man and exile. Just always trying to find his way back home, and along the way, way too often settling for cheap, ill-fitting suitors and substitutes. Some of you know those ancient stories, right?
The scriptures say that once we've been exiled from the Garden of Eden, the home that got it created for us and created us for, because of our desire to be God for ourselves. God did not leave the men and women he loved in exile, though. He did not say, be gone. I'm done with you.
I mean, he could have. Somebody'd argue he should have, but he'd have. You see, God never chose to play a loha on a steel guitar over any of you. He's not done with us.
Instead, if you read the Bible, you'll see from Aaron to Moses, God time and time again, he just keeps raising up prophets and priests to lead his people. This people with this deep ache, longing for home, he's always pulling them away from their captivity and their captors and always leading them into a new land of promise. But time after time, sin, this deeply-seeded brokenness in all of us, which, where we often so often just won't let God be God, it tries to, we try to rest control of our lives away from him to be ourselves God. Sin, when it comes into its full fruition, it does what it always does.
It separates us. It separates us from God. It separates us from one another. It separates us from home.
You know this. You've experienced it. Some of you tonight are separated from those you love or from home because of the power of sin in our lives. Somebody lied.
Relationships were broken. Somebody cheated. Someone stole. There's anger issues.
Unforgiveness. Sin always does what he does, and it always separates us. One from another, one from God and one from home. It's what's behind the reason that some of you won't be home tonight, or maybe can't go home tonight.
But tonight, a little over 2,000 years ago, that first Christmas night, the people of God found themselves in an all-too-familiar situation. Actually, not that different than the one we find ourselves in tonight. I mean, they were home, at least sort of. They lived in the land that had been promised to them by God through Abraham and then again by Moses all those years ago.
They were home, yet they weren't home. They weren't truly home because their towns and their cities were once again ruled by the latest conquerors. This time the great empire of Rome. And while they were home, they longed for home.
And on that night, some 2,000 years ago, God again reflused to play Aloha on this steel guitar for his people. In fact, Matthew, a tax collector working for the Roman oppressors, a traitor to his own people. Jesus would eventually call him to himself. Here's what Matthew writes.
He says, this is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about. His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph, her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace. He added mine to divorce her quietly.
But after he considered this, an angel the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what's conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. But you will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. He will save his people from their sins. He will fix and cure what it is that separates them from God and from one another.
What separates us from home and from life itself. He will save their people from their sins. He goes on, he says, all of this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the Prophet. The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means God with us.
Friends, don't you see? This is the story of Christmas. The ache that you feel for home is real. There's actually a law underlying your longing, and it's this.
This is not the home any one of us were created for. Sin has separated us from our true home. And Matthew here, he quotes an Old Testament prophet Isaiah, who had prophesied of Immanuel, God with us. That would lead us there.
This is why at Christmas time we often sing, O come O come, Immanuel, and ransom captive Israel. Through all of their history, the Israelites had long for this promised Messiah to come and to ransom them, to pay the price due for them, so that they might be allowed to go home. All the Old Testament prophets long for his arrival, but you see they had two fundamental misunderstandings. The first was that he was coming just to ransom and lead them home, the Israelites.
And then the other was that the promised Savior would be a symbolic Immanuel. A great leader, of course, in the mold of Abraham and Moses, who would of course free them and lead them. His existence among them would make them feel closer to God, maybe make them feel as if God was with them a little bit more, but he would be a figurehead. And Matthew comes along and says, no, the promise has not figuratively come true.
God, actually God, has come to be with you. Which, and you might not understand this, but for the Jewish people, they were the hardest people on earth to convince of this fact. It was beyond their comprehension. I would argue it was almost to them sacrilegious to say such a thing.
The Eastern religions, they then and now believe that God was present in everything, so they could have accepted this. The Greeks and the Romans, their religious and cultural narratives are replete with God-like figures, Zeus and Apollos. So they might have expected this. But the Israelites, the Israelites, they refuse to even spell God's name yet alone, say it.
God is unapproachable. He's unknowable. Yet Jesus Christ, who fulfilled all of these ancient prophecies, not figuratively, but literally. Jesus Christ, by the way he lived, the death he would die, and by his resurrection, evidence by hundreds and hundreds of people, Jesus managed to convince tens, hundreds, and then thousands of Israelites.
People like Matthew and Peter and John and Paul, despite the fact that it was sacrilegious, Jesus somehow convinced him that he was literally God in the flesh, and he had come to be their home. You see, you can search the world over. All other religions will tell you quite powerfully that God has sent prophets or sages. They will tell you how to live.
They'll lay out the laws that must be kept in order to please God, or it's the harebrush and a spheogotaraloha. The prophets come to tell you that they would say, how to find your way back to him, how you can connect him. These are the steps to enlightenment or the paths to righteousness. But guys, the story of Christmas, the cradle of Christmas cries out that God has not sent someone to tell you how to save yourself, but he has sent someone to save you.
He didn't send instructions, he didn't even send a guide. He came himself. The arc of the biblical canon is that we have turned our backs on God and in our exile and longing for home. We keep settling for idle after idle, but God has not played a loha on the spheogotar for anyone, for any nation, for any tribe, for any background.
The incarnation means that God has actually landed here amongst his people, with us. And don't you see that he hasn't come as the strict disciplinarian as someone have you believe, as most would have expected. There is not a belt in his hand nor a whip, there is not a hairbrush or a sword. He has not come to smite sinners.
If that was the case, who amongst us would stand? His hands would become known not for the weapons they would fashion, but for the nails that would be fashioned in them. To satisfy the justice that love requires, there is no perfect love without perfect justice. God loves you way too much to let the sin that has so hurt you go unpunished.
But instead of administering it upon those like you and I who participate in it, Emmanuel, God with us, joins us in the muck and the mire and willingly takes what we do to plow this path of forgiveness and grace to ransom us and bring us home. And to well and to well, it turns out it's not a place, it's to a person. Jesus said he was the way, many of you know that, but he added that he was the truth in the life. It turns out that that home is not a place, you can't get there.
Home is a person. The Psalmist declared it long ago, right? Lord, you have been our home, our dwelling place throughout all generations. Jesus is both the way home and our home.
Home is not a place. Home is a fully human and fully God present today with us. What would it look like for you to find your way back tonight? It's actually fairly simple.
You just have to stop settling for substitutes and follow. The Scriptures on occasion after occasion, they call us to live as soul journers, right? As one's on a journey away from home, not yet to where we're going. Where to live is resident aliens, not home, but with our eyes and our hearts set there.
Christmas Eve is a powerful reminder of this truth. You are not made to settle here. Don't build your home here. Jesus will come to take you to his father's house.
Think about it, right? Just picture this in your mind for one second when the okay? The Christmas Eve scene, many of you have a manger at home. Picture it in your mind for a second, right?
Get it in there. Now I want you to consider this as you think about it. Is it not ironic that on the night in our culture where it is most idyllic to be home, that first Christmas, no one in that scene, no one in that story is home, no one. Mary and Joseph, you know, on the road, they not only left their families and friends.
This unmarried couple, this pregnant virgin, they had left their identities and reputations behind too. Everybody was going to be talking, but they moved on. They went, trusting and believing what God had said. And they picked up their tents and they followed the shepherds.
Same thing, right? They leave their sheeps, their jobs, their identities, their security back in the field. Why? Because they trust and believe what's been proclaimed to them about a child and a manger.
That it was good news to all mankind, even shepherds. Wiesman. Same thing. And it was no short journey.
The truth is it likely took them a couple of years before they cut the Jesus. In the first century, they packed up all they had and they headed out. Sojourners for a couple of years in a primitive world likely going without food or water. Oftentimes, probably in danger, their journey came at great cost and it was even, the cost was even greater than the gold and the frankincense and the mare.
And why? Because they believed what the star proclaimed. A savior to the world. And then, there was Jesus who left his home.
And what a home it was. At the side of his father. And think of the cost. I mean, the impenetrable becomes vulnerable.
The untouchable winds up tortureable. The beautiful becomes scarred. The omnipotent becomes an infant. The alpha, the alpha, the omega becomes finite.
The truth became deniable. The darling of all creation to be jeered and crucified. And he did it all for one reason. You.
Out of love for you. To bring you home. And he asks you to do nothing that he has not already done for you. At so much of a greater cost, you just have to tonight.
You have to do what everyone in that major seat it. Simply believe. And trust. And go.
Be willing to leave behind this cheap substitute homes and follow. Literally, make Christ your home. You were here last week. We talked about what it meant to live as sojourners.
And it's a little blip of time that we find ourselves in, right? And if you remember, I set up a tent on the stage as a visual. It was to help us remember that that's the way we live. And I got thinking about it this week.
John, again, another Jewish man trained from his earliest days. Not even to save the word God. Here's how he described it. It must have driven him crazy to think it.
Here's how he described Jesus' incarnation. Here's how he described Christmas. The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. In the Greek, it literally says he pitched his tent among us.
I like how the message says it. The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. He came to do it all with us. To live with us in relationship.
Friends, this Christ was Eve. He hasn't sent you away. Now instead he's left his home to be ours. He's left his home to bring us the wandering home.
It's no wonder the angels who were in on all of it. When they came to a sudden realization cried out, Hallelujah. Christ is born. He's not good news to just the Jews.
He is good news to all who hear. Hope and peace to all mankind. His kingdom has drawn near. Immanuel is come.
And I need you to know this, this Christmas. He's come for you. Now this Christmas. This Christmas.
Pick up your tents, friends. Let's go home.