Dr. Scott McKee: Merry Christmas, everybody. Merry Christmas. It's a real honor to be celebrating this special night with all of you. When my kids were young, one of our favorite games was hide and seek. Hide and seek is a very simple game.
One person seeks, and everybody else hides. And the fun part is to be one of the hiders. The hard part is to be the seeker. To be the seeker, puts you in a humble position of having to look for people who are intentionally trying to evade you, and they're laughing at your inability to find them. The seeker, we don't even give the seeker a good job title.
What do we call the one who seeks? It. You're it, and nobody wants to be it. At the end the game, people yell, not it. Much more fun to be the one who hides.
The language of hide and seek varies from region to region, and even from neighborhood to neighborhood. But where we came from, the game ended when someone would yell out the words, Ali Ali Oxenfree. What does that mean? Ali, Ali, oxen free, and I think it's an old Latin phrase meaning, let the ox run wild. No, it's not.
It's I tried to research this, nobody really knows what those words mean. It's really gibberish. Wikipedia says it may come from the phrase, all ye, all ye, out in free. Those of you who are out, kick them in free now, penalty free. It's a reset.
It's the call of grace. You are safe now. You can come to the home base. You're safe at home. There's no word in the English language more provocative than this one little word home, which we're going to talk about this afternoon.
It can fill your heart, it can make you smile, it can make you cry, I don't care how old you are, I don't care how independent you may be, or how much you've achieved, that one little word touches the absolute deepest places of the human heart: home. And we think about home a lot this time of year. We sing songs like There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays. We sing, I'll be home for Christmas, and then one of the saddest lines in all Christmas music, I'll be home for Christmas if if only in my dreams. How sad is that?
There's something unnatural about not being home at Christmas. It's curious because other holidays, we try to be away to other places. People will fly halfway around the world, they will drive through snowstorms to be home for Christmas. It's all rather ironic when you when you read the Christmas account from the scriptures. When you read it carefully, you discover that nobody was really home that first Christmas.
Mary and Joseph weren't home. They were from Nazareth. They find themselves in Bethlehem. The shepherds weren't home. They had to work that night out in the fields.
The wise men from the East weren't home. They had traveled a great distance. In a very real way, Jesus, the Christmas child, was far from his home that night. The bible reminds us that Jesus voluntarily left all the splendors of his home in heaven to accomplish his mission on earth. Jesus was far from home that first Christmas.
What is it for you that makes some place home? I want you to think about the Christmases of your childhood. What was it that created a sense of home for you then? Well, if your home was like mine, you had a sense of belonging. You fit.
You knew your place with your siblings. You felt warmth and connection with your parents and grandparents. Home is about belonging to people who love you just because you are. Robert Frost captures this in his poem, The Hired Man. The husband says, home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.
The wife disagrees and says, I would say rather, home is the place you don't have to deserve. Home is grace. It's a sanctuary of grace. Secondly, I think what gave us a sense of home is a sense of security in the homes we grew up in. A true home is a safe place, familiar, predictable, full of traditions that gave us stability.
Maybe your family went out and cut down a Christmas tree every year as part of your tradition, hopefully with permission. Maybe your family was like mine, you gather around a plastic pole with color coded artificial limbs, and you assemble that Walmart Christmas tree together. Maybe you opened Christmas gifts Christmas Eve, maybe you did them at Christmas morning, but those traditions were a lot more important than we understood because they gave us a sense of security. In baseball, running bases makes you vulnerable. But once you get home, you're safe.
And when home is not safe, it's devastating. And some of you know the pain of that. A sense of belonging, a sense of security, and thirdly, a sense of optimism. Children who feel they belong and feel secure naturally feel hopeful. Life's gonna get better.
There's more freedom ahead, more fun ahead. The Christmas gifts I didn't get this year, I'll probably get next year. Optimism runs high in a well functioning home. But the real world changes our understanding of home. Relationships shift, economic realities set in, world problems increase.
Some of you thought this Christmas would be just like the last 10 Christmases, but there's somebody missing around your Christmas table this year. There's grief. There's the ache of loss. We're reminded how fragile relationships really are. Security gets shaken too.
Job security is a thing of the past. The stability of our youth was short lived. And optimism? It's easy to conclude that by next Christmas, we'll only have more homelessness, more crime, less love. The real world has a way of shattering our concept of home, and I suspect the pull that we feel at Christmas time toward home is really a yearning for the belonging, security, and optimism that we once knew.
Let's turn the corner now and consider another kind of home. Some of us stand before nativity scenes, and we wonder if the Christmas child might meet those needs, this time permanently and perfectly. And to those who are wondering that, listen carefully. The bible says God knows you. He knows your needs, and he knows that earthly relationships only fulfill your need for belonging in a partial way.
And so God says, I'm gonna arrange a way so that you can belong to me permanently. Through my son Jesus Christ, I will make a way for you to belong to me permanently. Through Jesus' redeeming work, repentant people become members of God's eternal family. And once adopted, you belong throughout life and into eternity, and nothing can break that bond. And many of us here tonight know what it is to belong to God in a permanent way.
Makes you feel like you're at home no matter where you are. God says also, I know your need for security. I know the world is uncertain. He says, fear not. Over 360 times in the Bible, God says, fear not.
I will never leave you. I will never forsake you. Call upon me in turbulent times, and I will answer. More than promises, God gives us his presence, and many of us have felt it in deep valleys, in heartbreak, a sustaining presence that gives us strange sense of security even when life is falling apart. When you grow to feel secure in God's care, it feels like being home.
Life with God restores optimism too. Jesus reminded people with my father, all things are possible. God is bigger than any problem that you face. He is stronger than any force set against you, and you belong to him. You are secure in his care, and with his power, you can look to the future with faith and optimism.
The kind of optimism that makes you feel like you're home. Look at the irony tonight, will you? The son of God leaves his home. He's born as a homeless person in a temporary shelter, he identifies with the homeless his whole life long, he's buried in a borrowed grave, and yet, through his death and resurrection, he enables all wandering people to recapture a sense of home in this life, A sense of belonging, a sense of security, a sense of optimism, and beyond that, he promises a permanent home in heaven forever. Anybody here ever run away from home?
I did once, I was five years old, and I had to get out. I told my best friend I'm going to run away from home, and he said, I will miss you, and I said, I'll miss you too. And I got a I don't know why I thought you had this, I got a big stick and a handkerchief, and I put some snacks in my handkerchief, and I tied it on the end of the stick. I actually saw something that made me think that's how you run away. And I left.
I left home, I ran away. I didn't get very far because I wasn't allowed to cross the street. I made it about halfway around the block, and then I got hungry, and I went home for dinner. And this is my problem. I I wanna be at home, and I wanna be away from home.
I want God, and I don't want God. I wanna be safe and loved, but I want to disobey. I want to seek God, and I want to hide from God. All around us, there's this cosmic game of hide and seek. Sometimes we think of ourselves as seekers or searchers, and that can be true of us, but it's not the full truth about us.
We are not only seekers, we are hiders. Hiding has to do with our tendency to wanna run from God, to avoid facing the truth about ourselves, to avoid being confronted with what we are becoming. The bible says we, like sheep, have all gone astray. All of us have run from God's plan. Sin always seeks to hide.
We are all runaways. Jesus, in what may be his most unforgettable story, tells the story of a father and a broken home and a son who runs away. And for a long time, this child knows that he doesn't want to be at home, and that he realized how miserable he is, and he's afraid that home won't take him back. So he says to himself, I'm gonna try to go back to my father, but I know that I can't go back as a son, so I will go back as a servant. I'll go back on the the good works plan.
I'll go back on the earn my way back in plan. Because home is the place where when you go there, they have to take you in. That's the father. But what the son doesn't know is that the father every day gets up and scans the horizon, waiting and hoping for the son to return home. Maybe today's the day.
Maybe today's the day my son will come home. And when the father sees his son in a great distance, the father runs out and throws his arms around him. I would say rather, home is what you don't deserve. And the word for that is grace. Maybe God brought you here tonight to invite you to seek him, to pursue him, or maybe God brought you here to remind you that God has been pursuing you for a very long time with love, with patience, but God has been seeking, and you have been hiding.
And hiding takes many different forms. And maybe tonight, you will hear God say to you, it's time to come home. Stop your running. Stop your hiding. It's safe.
No one will chase you. No one will tag you. Ali Ali, oxen free. It's time to come home. Allow me to phrase it as a question.
How many of you are really at home for Christmas in the ultimate sense? We wanna give you an opportunity now to come home tonight. Would you all bow your heads for a moment of prayer? I'm gonna give you a minute to pray to God, and I'll kinda prompt you on this. This is just between you and God.
If you're at home with God, if you've already made that decision, you might want to take a moment right now in silent prayer to say thank you God. I'm so grateful to remember right now where my true home is. Maybe there's somebody in your life you want to pray for right now. Somebody who's a long, long way from home, and your heart kinda aches for them, and you want to say to God, God, that's my son, that's my daughter, that's my neighbor, that's my friend, that's my dad. God, would you bring them home?
Maybe you do not know for sure right now whether you are at home with God, and you can know that. You just tell God right now, God, I wanna be at home. I'm so tired of being anxious, and alone, and afraid, and guilty, and regretful. I'm a runaway. I have sinned.
I I wanna come home today. I wanna receive your forgiveness, and your love, and your life. I wanna ask you God to come into my life, and I know I'm gonna mess up. I know I'm gonna make mistakes. I need you to forgive me as we go.
Be my God. Be my savior. Be my forgiver from one day to the next, and that one day God, the trumpet sounds, I'm gonna go home with you, and I'm gonna be at home with you forever. God, on this Christmas night, we thank you for the gift of light and life. We thank you for the privilege of celebrating together the birth of your son, our savior.
May the message of Christmas call us home. This we pray in the name of the Christmas child, Jesus. Amen.