Welcome to all of you on this Christmas Eve. Some of you are visiting St. Andrew’s for the very first time, and we are honored to have you here with us. Some of you have called this place your church home for a long time, and it is good to see so many loved and familiar faces. And some of you are family members from far and near, coming to Greensboro for Christmas, and we especially welcome you home tonight. In the best sense possible, however, we’re all home tonight – here in this place where together we joyfully welcome the One who makes our homecoming complete.

As in all yearly homecomings, we gather tonight both the same and different than last year. Another layer of life has been added since last year. We’re older: maybe thinner or fatter or taller or shorter than last year. Maybe we’re in better health than last year or maybe we’re worse off. Another layer of experience has been added since last year. After all, we’ve lived some half a million moments in the year past.

Some of those moments this past year have been filled with joy, others with sorrow, some with love, some with loneliness; some with anger, and some with peace. Some of our moments have been full of pain, others full of pleasure. Some of our moments have been mindless with grief, and some have been overflowing with gratitude.

Along the way since our last Christmas Homecoming, there have been, for each of us, moments when we’ve laughed with delight or when we’ve cried in despair. We’ve been worried and tense and stressed to the max, or perhaps we’ve let it all go and found a measure of peace. We’ve celebrated birthdays and graduations and weddings and exciting milestones of all kinds. And we’ve also hurt and grieved through the heartache of headlines, hurricanes, hospitals, and gravesides.

We’ve seen endings of all kinds and beginnings of all kinds. Some of us have experienced for ourselves the desolation of Good Friday; and some of us feel raised to the new life of Easter Day. We feel the weight and fullness of all the moments and all the emotions of our lives most especially on Christmas Eve, I think. We bring all of who we are, all of where we’ve been, and all of what we are becoming to this yearly feast of remembrance. We are most humbly aware of our humanity on this night of nights.

All these moments of ours, all these emotions, all these experiences – all this LIFE – we bring with us tonight in witness and in wonder and with wildly thankful hearts that God is with us – Emmanuel. In our own homecoming here tonight, we witness in wonder that the Almighty God came home to us and to be with us in the flesh and blood of a human baby named Jesus. In our homecoming tonight, we celebrate God’s homecoming. What love Almighty God has for us that he would come as one of us! The All Mighty and All Powerful God becomes All Lowly and All Vulnerable – just like us – so that we might reach out to receive in person the best and truest and most faithful love we’ll ever know.

But to appreciate the Incarnation in all this fullness, we have to go behind and beyond what is familiar to grasp the real nature of God’s homecoming, to let it hit us with all its gritty reality. And so, come with me now as we move beyond the lovely and familiar words of Luke’s account of the Nativity, beyond the candles and cards and carols and customs of Christmas, beyond the pretty trees and all the trappings, beyond the parties and presents, and beyond even the fun and feasting to the real truth of God’s homecoming. It isn’t a pretty story and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. No amount of shading or coloring can erase its grim reality.

The reality of the homecoming story is the pure exhaustion of a young Jewish girl after hours of painful labor, the squalor of a stable standing in as delivery room, and the helplessness of the adopted father to do much more than hold her hand, pray for guidance and get out his knife to cut the umbilical cord. The reality of the homecoming story of Jesus is the utter loneliness of Mary and Joseph feeling far from family or any kind of help and support, the rank smells of the stable, the bands of homespun cloth serving as diaper, clothes, and blanket, all three, and the awkward, tentative first try at breastfeeding. As a holy night, it wasn’t calm and comfortable; still or peaceful – it was hard, it hurt, it was noisy, smelly, gritty and grimy. It was scary, frightening, fearful and lonely. God’s homecoming was as human as ours.

And I think that is what God intended. Jesus came into our world, our circumstances, our setting, our reality, and our flesh to live life with us. Emmanuel: God With Us. God’s love for us knows no limits – that is not only the gospel truth; it is the gospel. God breaks the limits of biological birth in his Incarnation; and God breaks the limits of biological death in his Resurrection. God does all that not because he can, but because he passionately loves us. God in Christ wants to be in the midst of life – the good of it and the bad – with us. God in Christ is the ever-present light – shining in the midst of all our moments – the dark and the bright moments.

The good news of Christmas is that “God became a human being. That means that God descended into this world, our world. Jesus was not born into some fairy tale, some peaceful starry night where there was no pain or sorrow or suffering. This holy night was not holy because it was otherworldly or idyllic – it was holy because he was here.”

God loves us. He offers that love as pure gift – we don’t have to wait to receive it – we don’t have to wait to earn it or deserve it - it is ours simply because he chooses to give it to us. There are no strings tied to his gift, no complicated tape and wrapping paper obscuring his gift. God’s gift of love in the form of his Son, Jesus, is a gift that stays with us; a precious gift but also an everyday gift. God’s gift of love is not just an emotion (as in “I love you”), but a loving presence that is within us.

God loves us not just from the outside looking at us, but loves us from the inside, in our very heart of hearts. And the final surprise about God’s gift of love is that it is a gift that can be exchanged - we can pass it along to others. God’s gift of love only deepens and magnifies as we share that love with others. There are so many people – so many – desperately needing the gift of love. The gift of love we’re given at Christmas is ours to keep and ours to share.

And so in our homecoming this Christmas Eve 2005, as all the moments of the past year bubble up in emotions both painful and joyful, we thank God with all that is in us, that he is with us. Not a moment has gone by for us in this last year when he has not been with us – surrounding us, filling us, healing us, comforting us, guiding us, forgiving us, and most of all, loving us. On this holy night, we remember that all nights are holy, all days are holy, and all moments are holy because he is here.

Amen.