Country Road
December 24th, 2023
Year B; Christmas Eve
Isaiah 9: 2-7
Psalm 96
Luke 2: 1-14
Homily by Rev. Megan Limburg
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
It was September 1990, late in the afternoon, the sun was just setting, and I was riding on a bus. With the light of day fading, shadows were gathering in the bus, but still, pools of light shone. I was in Russia, in Moscow, on a mission trip for the Diocese of Virginia, as well as the Dioceses of Washington DC and of Maryland.
The group on the bus was made up of 25 Americans and Europeans, and 25 Russians, all young folks, many teen-agers, and a few of us adults in our twenties. A hopeful time then, President Reagan and President Gorbachev, working together, Glasnost, a new openness between our countries. Hard to believe there was such a brief and beautiful time of hope, as Russia now assaults their neighbors in Ukraine.
But wherever there is a flicker of hope, the church is called to be there, and the church was.
The Episcopal Church worked with the Russian Orthodox Church to bring together young people from the United States, Europe and Russia to learn more about one another, to learn we are not faceless enemies but children of God, together. We were guests of the Russian Orthodox Church , and had been together for a few weeks by the time we sat on that bus as daylight faded. We had spent time in the countryside outside of Moscow, working on a project together, doing the first repairs on an old Orthodox Monastery, just returned to the church.
Our time together had been filled with lots of conversations, work, sightseeing, and laughter.
We Americans knew little Russian, but some of our European and Russian friends were more bi-lingual and tri-lingual. And we had learned a little Russian before the trip and though we had no internet or cell phones to help us in 1990, we did all carry quick translation dictionaries to help us communicate. And we quickly learned to use a bridge language between us, many knew German or French, so conversations could happen through two translations. But most of all, because we all had in common being human, we managed to communicate, with words, gestures, laughter, and music.
Yes, music. If you get a group of teens and twenty-somethings together inevitably someone plays the guitar, and singing breaks out!
And our Russian friends, even if they could not speak English well, could sing the words to popular American songs. So in that bus as twilight fell, a voice started off, suggesting the next song to all of us, a male voice, with a strong Russian accent singing out:
“Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze
Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia
Mountain mamma, take me home
Country roads.”
Russians who knew no English, knew every word of John Denver’s 1970 iconic hit, perhaps because it was a song we all understood, a yearning for home. Everyone on our trip knew that song, and it connected us together.
We were so far from Virginia and felt that song keenly, but all 50 of us felt that song even more keenly in the universal sense, that place we miss, that place of welcome, love, compassion, and acceptance.
Now our childhood home may never have been those things, and yet we humans, all over the world, yearn for that place, and we are restless until we find the road home, and find our own place of welcome, love, compassion, and acceptance.
And as so many in our world tonight, December 24 2023, are refugees, on the run as home has been lost, destroyed, or conquered, this old song echoes even louder across our planet than it did in 1970, and in 1990.
In a little while we will sing another song that so many know. After communion we will put the lights down and light candles from the altar. And sing those old words, familiar too and so dear. And all of us prodigal sons and prodigal daughters, looking for that road home, perhaps will find it in the last verse, the path for us, for all of us.
Silent night, Holy night,
Son of God, Love's pure light
Radiant beams from thy holy face,
With the dawn of redeeming grace,
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth.
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth.
“With the dawn of redeeming grace…”
The child born this night so long ago, born in a stable, without a home, offers us the only home for our restless selves.
Jesus, the embodiment of redeeming grace, that place of love and welcome and acceptance and joy, ours with Jesus. And of course, that is the call, the work, the reason for the church to exist, for St. Mary’s Whitechapel to exist, for Trinity to exist.
First and only, we are called to be that place of welcome and acceptance and compassion and love. We are called to model ourselves after that stable, filled with light, offering God’s love, a gift unearned and undeserved for me, for you, for the stranger, for all.
Radiant beams from thy holy face,
With the dawn of redeeming grace,
Take me home, this night, country roads.
Amen.