Christmas Hope for Exiles and Wanderers

“I think I’m homesick,” I said to my daughter one day. It felt strange to say as we were, in fact, standing in our home. Home was no longer really home though. We weren’t there to stay. We were only there to grab a few things after smoke detectors had alerted us to a fire in our home a few weeks prior. Thus began the season of displacement we find ourselves in. 

I’ve found it hard to get into the Christmas spirit knowing we won’t be in our own home this year. We managed to salvage our most precious Christmas items (would burn a thousand three hundred dollar trees in exchange for my children’s baby handprint ornaments), but it still doesn’t feel very Christmas-y.  

As far as trials go though, it’s really not so very bad. Our rental house is nice. It has a bigger pantry, a bigger yard, and a kitchen island I’m considering trying to pack up and take with us when we leave. And yet…it’s just not home. A vague sense of unrest hangs over most of our days, a deep knowing that we’re not really where we are supposed to be. I can’t quite shake the feeling. It feels…like exile. 

Exile is really part of all our stories though isn’t it? Whether we realize it or not, none of us are really where we belong. This world we call home isn’t really the world we were made for. And we’re not really who we were made to be in it. 

It’s been said that we’re all a little homesick for heaven. 

Do you feel it? 

We feel it in the daily struggles of life, the “vandalism of shalom” as it’s been coined, the broken dishwasher or the sliding van door that won’t open, the never-ending squabbles of our children and our own often less than gracious responses. We feel it in the friend’s devastating diagnosis or the tragic headlines. We feel the weight of exile. We feel the struggle of wandering. We feel the soul-wearying drain of prolonged homesickness. 

And this is really the story of scripture. It’s a story of exile. It’s a story of wanderers and sojourners. It’s a tale of a people’s long and twisting journey to get back home. 

Adam and Eve, banished with a flaming sword. 

Abraham, promised a land he never received.

The Hebrews, under the chains of Egypt.

God’s people, delivered, yet still wandering in the desert.

Israel and Judah, exiled from the Promised Land. 

And through it all, always till shut out from Eden by a curtain. 

This story tells us that for all mankind’s striving, they could never get home on their own. They too, were dogged by restlessness, by a deep knowledge that they were not yet where they belonged. Even when they were closest to home, they were never quite there, destined to be shut out of home forever. Until…something disrupted the script. Until, someone rewrote the story. 

Home came to them. 

The only way out of their exile would be home entering into their exile. And that’s just what Jesus did. The incarnation means that holiness made its home among the cursed so that he might bring the cursed home. 

Yahweh, a name too sacred to be spoken by our tainted lips, became God with Us. He subjected himself to our curse so that he might defeat our curse. He has lived and hurt and died, not merely pardoning us from afar, but entering fully into our exile. Yes, this ground we tread is cursed still but now holiness has been here, sowing seeds of redemption and paving the way back home. For now, they may seem to lie dormant as in winter, or barely shoot up, as in first, fledgling moments of spring, but someday…someday, they will burst into full bloom. They will chase the curse forever. All will be made new. 

But…we’re not there yet, are we? We know the end of the story, but we’re actually still here in the middle, lingering in exile. Yet still, everything has changed. As Peter tells us, we’re no longer just exiles. We are “elect exiles,” elected, chosen, “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father,” to be “born again to a living hope” (1 Peter 1:1). We are sojourners, but we are not nomads. We have a destination and we have assurance we will get there. 

So, for now, like Adam and Eve, we grieve the exile of the fall. Like Abraham, we sigh, wondering when the promise shall be fulfilled. Like the Israelites, we groan in this desert. Yet we also, like them, remember we are heirs of a promise. Like them, we look forward by faith “to a city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God,” (Hebrews 11:10). Like them, we acknowledge that we are strangers and exiles on earth, seeking a homeland. Like them, we long for a better country. 

Unlike them, we know exactly how we shall get there, by the blood of Jesus who came down to tear the curtain and bring us back from exile. We know the end of the story. 

Christ shall come for us again…and we shall come back home.