[Sung] “Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays/’Cause no matter how far away you roam/If you long for the sunshine and a friendly gaze/For the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home.” [End of singing]

Home sweet home! For the holidays! What a lovely thought! What a painful thought, for some. Even the Holy Family wasn’t home for the holidays at Jesus’ birth.

We call them the Holy Family: Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus. And with all the paintings and iconography of these three in their stable home with cattle lowing and shepherd visitors from out of town, our imaginations of the ideal family gathered for Christmas has been well formed. Where would Michelangelo or Norman Rockwell or James Dobson have been without the holy family in its stable home to guide the visions of domestic bliss? But does any family really match up to that?

Mary and Joe were married last year. Their first Christmas together was hardly the picture of family harmony. (I have altered details and adopted nativity names to protect their Wilshire relatives and to bend it more into a Christmas story.) Anyway, last year Mary was making plans to return home with her new husband to see her folks when Joe announced they would not be going. (Wonder how long it will take him to learn?!) They were married now, he reasoned, they had a home of their own, and they needed to start their own family traditions. Mary was crushed and had to break the news to her parents. Her father was not crushed; he wanted to crush his new son-in-law and break his neck. The patriarch got on the horn and called Joe. He reminded the boy about the little chat they had before the young man took his precious daughter away from him. Dear Old Daddy-in-Law had emphasized how important family is—his family is what he meant! Then he used the fateful phrase: We’re a close-knit family. Joe felt like he was slipping on a mohair sweater without a T-shirt—close knit! Mary’s father reminded Joe that he had promised to do whatever it took to provide for his daughter’s happiness, including making what Papa thought was a reasonable decision to spend Christmas at their house. Joe reminded him that how Mary’s happiness was provided for was her husband’s concern more than her father’s. Something about that “leaving and cleaving” bit in the Bible that turns up in wedding ceremonies. Which is true, but using the Bible to win an argument with your father-in-law, well, like I said, the boy hadn’t been married long.

Ever thought about the double entrendre in the phrase nuclear family? Sometimes when the nuclear family gets overheated, things get to the point of going nuclear. Been there, done that? Holidays bring enormous stress to many families. These are times when our ideals crash headlong into the reals, so to speak.

For instance, who hasn’t had to negotiate the Mary-and-Joe dilemma with families in early marriage? Or what about the clash of traditions, like whether you celebrate on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? Whether you have a real tree or artificial? Whether you put up lights all over the house and yard, with an inflatable snowman and a painted Santa with reindeer on the roof, or prefer a simpler, less-extravagant more spiritual approach— like my house, don’t you know?! And then there’s the awkwardness of Christmas after a divorce, Christmas after a death, Christmas after a remarriage, Christmas with a blended family, Christmas with the kid that brings his live-in girlfriend or her boyfriend home and expects bedroom privileges that violate the parental sense of right and wrong. Let’s see, now, how many more of these little family stresses can we come up with? I am sure you will tell me your stories later, but the point is, does anyone have an ideal traditional family? Can anyone measure up to the image of the holy family in its stable home?

Did Mary and Joseph? Think of this with me. The Holy Family was not a traditional family. God seems to have chosen a way of coming into the world that tested the sensibilities of traditional family advocates. You would think that God could have figured a way for Jesus to be conceived and born that did not provoke such a scandal. Remember that Nazareth was in the most religiously conservative part of the country—think East Texas! Even though in some places Jewish betrothal meant marriage to such an extent that intimate relations were permitted during the engagement period, it was not true in Galilee, where Mary and Joseph were. For Mary to turn up pregnant would mean nothing less than terrible embarrassment and the clear accusation that the couple had sinned. Mary even left town upon learning of her pregnancy. She went to visit her kinswoman Elizabeth and stayed three months with her until John the Baptist was born. Why do you think she did that? We aren’t told, but you have to wonder if she wanted to run away from the whispers and stares she feared back home.

And then there is Joseph. I love the way Matthew begins: Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place IN THIS WAY. It’s almost as if Matthew can anticipate what we might be thinking. He has to insist that even if we think it ought to have taken place in another way, we have to deal with reality: Jesus’ birth, the birth of the Savior of the world, the coming into flesh of almighty God, took place in a nontraditional way.

And shouldn’t that be some comfort to you in this season if things are not taking place in the way you think is right? I sometimes wonder if God intentionally brought all of this to pass in order to help us deal with the fact that, even though the ideal of the traditional family is worth pursuing, having an ideal traditional family is not the way God saves the world anyway. It is a wonderful thing when families relate in harmonious ways, keeping the bonds of love held tight, and at the same time allowing space for individual freedom and differences. But how many of those families do you know? Really? So while you pursue that the best you can, or while you make the best you can out of the family you have rather than the one you fantasize about, keep in mind that the birth of Jesus took place IN THIS WAY, not in that way!

Joseph had to adjust himself to this way of becoming a father. He had to deal with the unique way God was asking him to participate in the salvation story. He thought at first he would do the honorable thing and dismiss Mary from her betrothal quietly. He could have made a big stink about it: he had those two options, according to the customs of the day. He resolved to do the kindest thing possible, until the angel came to him and said that there was another way. This was the way things were going to be, and he could either work with God or against God in the matter. Well, the angel doesn’t actually put it that way, but that is essentially the way it is.

And isn’t that the way it is for all of us? When you get right down to it, what good does it do to sit around and point fingers, find fault, fix blame, and say how things should have been? It might make you feel a little more righteous yourself, but this is the way God works. This way. The way things are, not the way we wish they were. Maybe not even the way God wished they would have been. This way.

Here is a point we need to wrap our minds around. If you hold the brand of extreme Calvinism that says God is so in control of things; that everything that happens God makes happen, then you just scratch your head and go on, wondering what would possess God to make things happen in this way. But if you view God’s control—as I do—as the power of love more than the love of power, then things might sometimes happen outside of God’s intentions. While the Virgin Mary’s conception of Jesus was God’s strange will, it would have still felt to Joseph as nothing but strange, and certainly outside of anything he would have recognized as God’s will. When your daughter gets pregnant out of wedlock, you don’t have to reject her for being outside of God’s will or—short of angel visitation—bless her for being inside God’s will. There is another way. You can take the way of Joseph, who girds up his faith in God enough and his love for Mary enough, too, and simply does what must be done to make the best of the situation. You might even harbor hope that God has every intention of welcoming that child into the world and making that life so significant that it seemed part of the plan all along.

The same is true of every unwanted event. Divorce, death, unemployment, depression, illness, disappointment over a child or parent: these can be used by God in a Joseph sort of way. This is the way the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place. This is the way God’s will is going to work out in your life … now. This way. The way things are. Out of these events and no others.

Keep that in mind this Christmas when you gather with family … or don’t. Keep in mind that the Holy Family—for all the privilege they must have felt, Mary and Joseph, at being chosen by God to be the bearers of Immanuel, God with us, the very presence of God with us in the world—they nonetheless had to give up whatever dreams they had dreamed of being an ideal traditional family. We talk about the stable home in Bethlehem where Jesus was born, but the stable home he grew up in had to do with the way Mary and Joseph accepted the way things were. God was with them. That was all the mattered. And that is all that matters still for any of us who long for stable homes, especially at Christmastide.

Mother Teresa might just be the model saint of our Las Posadas Advent theme this year. She was an Albanian, born in Skopje, Macedonia, but sensed a call to serve the Lord at a young age. She ended up in Calcutta, India, where she opened a rescue mission for the poor and destitute that were seeking shelter. The street is the only home many children have in Calcutta. One evening Mother Teresa found a little boy sitting on the ground in the busy road where she lived. She bent down to talk to him, and seeing that he was all alone, she asked one of the Sisters of her order to take him into the children’s home. The boy smiled with delight as the Sisters fed him, bathed him, dressed him in clean, fresh clothes, and put him to bed.

The next day the Sisters frantically cried out to Mother Teresa that the boy had run away in the middle of the night. A search was begun immediately. The boy was found and brought back. The next night the same thing happened. They searched and found him again. This time Teresa said, “If he runs away again, please follow him and see where he goes.” That night he ran out again, but the Sister who followed him found him squatting in the dark by a little fire. He was with a woman who was cooking leftovers of food she had found on the ground.

“Why did you run away from our home?” the Sister asked the child. The boy explained that the woman beside him was his mother. This is my home, he said, smiling, because this is where my mother is. [Stories Told by Mother Teresa, comp. Edward Le Joly & Jaya Chaliha (Element Children’s Books: 1999),  p. 3.]

Not an ideal family. Not a stable home from one way of looking at things. But he didn’t need shelter overhead to be at home, because home is where the heart is. Home is where love is. And since God is love, a stable home is possible wherever God is.

My friends, no matter how unstable you think your home is at any time, maybe especially at this holiday season, God is with you. That is the meaning of Christmas: God is always with you!