What are you really looking forward to about Christmas this year?

What is it that you're really looking forward to about Christmas this year?

Maybe it's the food. Maybe it's the roast dinners or the mince pies.

Maybe it's the music, the Christmas markets.

Maybe it's spending time with family and friends that this season gives you like nothing else does.

A childhood Christmas memory

One of my most vivid memories of Christmases as a child is being sat making this fantastic reindeer centrepiece for the Christmas dinner table.

I'd seen it on Blue Peter and was absolutely committed to making it happen.

But again, because I'm not that artistically skilled, it was actually my grandparents who ended up making most of it!

But I was having a lovely time throwing glitter everywhere, making this Christmas centrepiece for the Christmas table.

As we were sat around the table making it, we became slowly and slowly more aware that we were being surrounded by a small flood in my parents' kitchen.

It turns out that the dishwasher was leaking.

In this mad frenzy, people started running around with towels and mops and buckets to try and stop the flood becoming worse.

I think for me that kind of embodies something about Christmas.

You have these wonderful nostalgic moments that you remember.

But actually, often Christmas is just quite stressful.

Things go wrong.

Things that we don't look forward to about Christmas.

There always seem to be those unexpected plot twists in there, where the dishwasher floods, or the turkey doesn't cook, or the kids get ill.

Maybe for you it's the thought of that really awkward family member that you're going to have to endure for the Christmas holidays.

Or maybe actually it's just the disproportionate amount of time that we all spend on Christmas, and in a moment later it's Boxing Day.

But maybe actually, for some of us, it's things that are more painful than that that we're not looking forward to about Christmas this year.

Family members who won't be there.

The absence of friends.

Maybe there are tensions and wounds that run really deep that you know are going to resurface.

Maybe you're actually really far away from home this Christmas.

Or the thought of going back there, after all you've seen and experienced, is just too much.

Christmas throws up so many of these emotions and memories for us, doesn't it?

Maybe because it's such a significant marker in the year.

Christmas doesn't always work out

We can all look back.

A few years ago, a couple of days before Christmas, I got a phone call from my mum saying that my gran, the same gran who had helped with that reindeer craft years earlier, was being rushed into hospital, and that it didn't look good.

Just a couple of days later we heard that she had cancer.

Christmas for me that year looked like dropping everything, getting on the train to Edinburgh and going to see her as quickly as possible.

I suspect for all of us, whatever our backgrounds, we can all relate to some of this.

The utter joy that Christmas can bring.

But the inescapable reality that Christmas doesn't always work out how we hope or plan.

Things do go wrong.

Families are messy.

And ovens and dishwashers are way beyond our control.

The longing for home

We often have Christmas as an ideal, don't we?

I guess maybe it's because Christmas is often the time that people go back home.

There's something about this idea of going home, isn't there, that we all love and long for.

We want that long journey home to be worth it.

We want the food and the warmth that we're met with at the surface to be deeply grounded in love and acceptance.

There's something within us all that longs simply to be walking through the door, get hugs from your family, be handed a hot drink in front of a fire, knowing that actually whatever your day, or your week, or even your year has been like, here is the place you're going to be welcomed and accepted for who you are.

Maya Angelou, a brilliant American poet and civil rights activist, said this:

"The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned."

I think that's particularly true at Christmas, isn't it?

We so want this to be true.

Just for a day.

Just for a season.

Maybe that's why it hurts so much when we are far from home, or the reality just doesn't meet our expectations.

When it's fine, but it's not picture perfect.

Where it's home, but actually home really hurts, and you're all too aware of the tension and the pain that is coming.

Carl Nelson, who's another author, said this:

"Christmas is a time when you get homesick even when you're home."

I love that quote because I think it's such a wonderful way to describe how we often feel.

Not to take anything away from the brilliant Christmas moments, but all of it does beg the question, doesn't it?

Why, even with those moments at Christmas, for so many of us do we actually feel a bit homesick even when we're at home?

What is it that our hopes and dreams of home bring out within us that then just fall short?

Why is it that we long for something more?

Something that is a better home that gives us the welcome and the acceptance and the security that we're after?

What if there really was a home that met those cries and expectations of our hearts?

A deeper longing

C. S. Lewis, who I guess many of us will be familiar with from his Narnia books amongst other things, famously said this:

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists."

He gives examples like feeling hungry, there's food.

A duckling wants to swim, there's water.

And he says:

"If I find myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

Actually this desire for home, this deep sense of home, is real and in all of us.

What does it point to?

Could it be that the answer is found outside of ourselves, in something else?

Jesus' story

This isn't just a question or a longing that we encounter today in the twenty-first century, but one that's been there throughout the centuries.

Thousands of years ago a Middle Eastern teacher addressed this in front of a crowd made up of people like you and me, and people nothing like you and me.

A real mixed bag of characters were listening to stories that he would tell to reveal something about life and those big questions and desires.

This teacher is someone that we encounter a lot at this time of year.

Perhaps through kids' nativity plays.

Or a Christmas card.

Maybe we're just wired into thinking that the nativity story about Jesus is just another nice kids' story, used for some cute photos with the kids and a well-deserved holiday.

But history would actually suggest differently.

Whatever your take on Jesus and his life, the historical evidence for it is overwhelming and not actually argued by any serious historian, Christian or not.

Jesus existed.

He existed as a baby.

And later as a man.

As a teacher he would tell these stories to make massive claims.

Claims that were actually really revolutionary in his day.

The story of the father and two sons

As he gathers this crowd, let me just briefly summarise one of the stories he tells.

Whatever your position, why not just listen in and see how these ideas we've been talking about so far, of welcome, of home, of safety, are told here.

So it's a story of a father and two sons...

(Continue with the remainder of the story exactly as written, breaking it into short paragraphs after each natural scene: the younger son leaving, feeding pigs, preparing his speech, the father running, the embrace, the celebration.)

The invitation

So Jesus tells the story, I think, to show you something significant of who he is and what he's about.

That was his point.

He is someone who loves to welcome people even in their mess.

He is someone who runs towards us.

Prepared to take on shame for us.

To get covered in our mess.

And someone who will do something about it.

Someone who is ready to welcome us as we're ready to turn and come back to him.

Someone who offers us actually the truest, deepest, most secure home that we crave and long for.

So let me encourage you tonight.

If you've never seriously considered Jesus as a man, Jesus and his teachings, why not this Christmas season investigate it for yourself?

I believe Jesus is more than able to take your best questions.

So come and ask them of him.

Why not investigate whether this offer of true, real home that actually we all long for, and this season just wells up in us, why not investigate whether there's something about Jesus that could meet it?

If you came with a friend tonight to this event, I'm sure they'd love to share that story with you.

Why not ask them what difference knowing Jesus makes to them?

Or if you're here and you're not sure who to talk to, I'd love to chat to you afterwards.

This script is taken from a video produced by Andrea Dalton.