Published in the December 2025 Edition
By The Rev. Mark F. Phillips, Minister, First & Franklin Presbyterian Church, Baltimore
Are you going home for Christmas?” That seems to be a big question at this time of year. A few days before Christmas last year, while I was at the grocery store, I heard some version of that question asked repeatedly as I walked through the store. A cashier glanced at a bagger, “So, are you going home for Christmas next week?” Two older couples met up in the dairy section: “Hey, Charlie and Doreen! Are your kids coming home for Christmas?” I was quickly passing by two women who were chatting by the Pop-Tart display and although I had no idea exactly what they were talking about, the two words I did catch as I zipped by were “Christmas” and “home.”
Are you going home for Christmas? Home. What is it really that we mean by that word? What do retailers and the postal service want to conjure by the word “home”? Is it a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting, all soft colors, crackling fires on the hearth, wide-eyed children whose eyes sparkle in the light of the Christmas tree? Is that home? Is it the sense of “Home sweet home” counted-cross stitched and framed over the mantle, or Dorothy clicking her heels together three times and saying, ” There’s no place like home”? Is that home?
I do not know where you’re going to be for Christmas this year or what you’re expecting when you get there, but I want to suggest to you today that there is in our human hearts a true sense that there is a place where we belong and that somehow we got separated from it a long time ago, and we miss it. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it so well, “We sense that that place misses us, too,” and because we cannot find our way there, the place comes to us, and it turns out not to be a place at all. It turns out to be a person: Emmanuel, the one who came to be with us forever. For me, Christmas is where God—for reasons of love and grace—comes to us, embraces us, and welcomes us unconditionally and gladly, saying, “I’m so happy you’re home. My light, love, mercy, and gift of new life are all for you. Just for you.”
Several years ago, on the day before Christmas Eve, I delivered a few bags of groceries to a man who had called our church. I’ll confess that I felt an uneasiness driving to this section of town alone in the late afternoon. I wondered what I was getting into. I arrived at the dilapidated home and knocked on the door. A young fellow, who looked by the lines on his face, older than his thirty or so years, opened the door. His teeth were spaced unevenly in his mouth, some of them missing in the back, and a jagged scar on his face betrayed some kind of barroom brawl more than the careful work of a surgeon’s repair. It was snowing and was quite cold, so he invited me in off of the front porch. He asked me about our church. He wondered where it was located, and he told me that he attends the twelve-step program that met in our building on Thursday nights. In his front hallway hung a plague that reminded him of his slogan for living, “Easy Does It.” “I pray every day, Reverend,” he said. “You know, the Serenity Prayer?” “Yes, I know it,” I said, fearing that he was going to ask me to say it with him right there in his dingy front hallway. “God, grant me the serenity to accept...” “Here, I got it on a card,” he said, shoving it in my hand. It was tattered and torn. I returned it to him appreciatively and said, “Why don’t you keep this for yourself or someone else.”
I carried the groceries into his kitchen and helped him somewhat unpack the bags. As I turned to leave, I wished him rather casually, “Merry Christmas.” He came right back with, “Oh, no problem there, Reverend; I’m going home for Christmas this year! Gonna be at my mother’s house. I haven’t been there in seventeen years. So I know I’m going to have a Merry Christmas.” And then, as an afterthought, without knowing anything about me, he said, “Hope you get there too.” I paused for a second, and there must have been a quizzical look on my face as I said, “Excuse me?” And he answered, “Home ... home for Christmas. I hope you get there too. Will you get there?”
Maybe that’s the question before all of us - “Will you make it home for Christmas this year?” I hope you will get there too.