Coming Home for Christmas Collection

Virginia Methodists for a New Thing is grateful for the folx at UM Discipleship Ministries for the Advent resources that inspired us to expand on their Coming Home series. Following is a Coming Home story for each week of Advent, written by a United Methodist in Virginia.

December 1

I have never doubted who I am and even more so, whose I am. From a young age, I had always been taught that God loved me for my authentic self, for all my flaws and imperfections. In recent years, as I have grown more comfortable with every piece of myself, including my sexual orientation identifying as bi, I can’t help but dwell on this notion of coming home. It’s one thing to come out, but another to come home. Neither are easy. Neither do not involve some degree of anxiety or fear. For many, it can be a profoundly beautiful and reassuring moment, but for some of us, there will always be those in our lives who begin to distance themselves. I think of both coming out and coming home as dynamic and theological moments. I say this as someone who has not come out to everyone, but who also recognizes that I’m making my way home every day. For me, coming out has been an experience of holding precious the image God has imprinted on my life. 

It’s the recognition that God has searched my heart and called me beloved. If I didn’t believe this, I probably would not have responded to a call in the life of the church in the first place. Which brings me to coming home… I find myself in a peculiar space because I believe I can come home to the Church, but I don’t feel I can be welcomed home…yet. The church is both a fragile and vulnerable place to be when you live in a narrative that will wax poetic for you to come home all the time because they don’t want to be called hateful, but once you walk through the door past a “sacred worth” façade and under the harmful and sanitized arch of the failed and hypocritical “Open hearts…”, you soon discover that you are not welcome home because you are “incompatible.” Not to mention, our denomination has projected a narrative onto this space that a lot of times feels debilitating. And while I can only speak as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, we collectively cannot remain ignorant to the intersectional effects that come with how this space to which we all belong has been defined for us. 

We can’t come home to the Church, until the Church repents of what it has so long called “home” on its own terms. A home they like to cater to their own needs, wants, and people. I have been grateful to have come home to my parents and sister; they affirm me, they see me, and they love me for me. I knew it was time to come home to myself and to the Church when a movement of the Holy Spirit was present when our Conference stood in holy resistance to the events of February 2019. My tears that day were raw, but filled with hope. And I have that faith that one day I can feel welcomed home by the Church. This faith is rooted in the one who comes home. 

We like to make Advent about us, tossing around language of journeying and approaching the manger; however, I would challenge us to shift away from this and toward an understanding that it is Christ who comes home to us. The incarnation, Christ’s in-breaking into chaos, welcomes me—welcomes us—home in a world, dare I say a Church, that is unwelcome. Might we challenge the Church—the United Methodist Church—to view the Advent narrative as one in which the loving and embracing welcome of Christ overwhelmed all that the world calls unwelcome. Christ comes home to a couple living in fear of being shamed, who are refused welcome. Christ comes home to a meager cattle trough and barn labeled dirty and insignificant. When I look at Advent, I experience a Christ who welcomes me home without shame, with a place to rest my head and heart, and tells me I matter. Christ will continue to come home, but will the Church welcome us home as they have welcomed Christ home?

December 8

Christmas has always been a holiday that makes me think of the joy of being at home. I think of my grandmother's pie, my dad's Christmas carols, my uncle's outdoor lights. Memories of home make me smile and look forward to being there again for the Christmas holidays. 

But I'm a cis-gendered ally of our LGBTQ+ siblings. Questions like I find in this group help me to think about realities and experiences that are different than my own. Others may have special family traditions, but what if the joy of those familiar experiences comes at the expense of having to hide parts or all of their identity in order to be welcome at home. 

I'm connected to a church that has a strong relationship with a nearby college campus. Every year near Christmas time, when I interact with students who worship with us, I also ask questions assuming they are all excited and eager to be home. "Exams will soon be over and you can go home to the joy of Christmas!" Until now, it hasn't occurred to me that maybe "going home" and the "joy of home" isn't possible for some of our LGBTQ+ siblings. 

How had I never thought of this? I'm fairly well educated, why hadn't I realized this long ago? Why did I assume everyone's experience was the same as mine? I know better than that. At first, as I read this prompt, I was so upset with myself.

Then, I read the prompt to the very end. You all asked, "Where do you find solace and comfort when home is not a welcoming place?" I am inspired to something new! This isn't a year to just hand a Christmas card to the students I interact with. This isn't a year to say words of cheer assuming that everyone can't wait to go home. This is a year that when I see students worshiping with us, I will ask, "What are your Christmas plans?" As the student shares, if there's any hint that maybe home is not a fully welcoming and joyful place, then I will follow up with, "How can I add some joy to your Christmas?" Maybe that means a visit together to a local coffee shop to treat them to a warm cup of coffee and welcoming conversation. Maybe that means offering our unused spare bedroom in case the student doesn't want to go home after dormitories close. Maybe that means writing words of encouragement inside those cards I usually hand students that include words of acceptance and encouragement that I never before thought to include at Christmas.

This year, even as I celebrate the joy in our home at Christmas, I feel suddenly awake to the feelings and experiences of others, especially our LGBTQ+ siblings whose families are not fully welcoming. I want to be a beacon of joy to them. 

December 15

As I reflect on the past year during this Advent season I am reflecting on the fact that even joy can be complicated.

As a closeted queer clergy person I had accepted that there were certain areas of my life in which true joy was simply unattainable. The joy of being fully authentically myself as the clergy person God has called me to be and also a member of the LGBTQ+ community is not something I can experience without serious personal and professional consequences. I had always assumed that the joy of a partnered relationship was out of the question, not just because it would be logistically challenging, but more so due to the internalized shame the church has ingrained in me. I have spent most of my life believing that the life of a queer Christian or clergy person inherently involves a sacrifice of joy.

The idea that being a part of the Christian community would involve sacrificing a fruit of the spirit so that one might be fully who God created them to be is deeply out of sync with the promises God offers to God's people throughout scripture.

This year I have rediscovered many of the aspects of joy I thought weren't available to me: The joy of knowing and loving my whole self as Christ loves me. The joy of relationships in which I can love and be loved as I am. The joy that comes in the safe spaces I have found that I can call home.

This newfound joy doesn’t come without caveats. There is an ongoing process of grief that is tied to all that joy. The weight of knowing that my joy is not something that I can share without consequence, that my joy might be seen as incompatible with Christian teaching. To be a Christian inherently involves being a part of a community; to be a part of the body of Christ. To be a queer Christian in the United Methodist Church involves distancing oneself from that body unable to share the joys of life with the rest of the body, unable to lean on the rest of the body for support and care.

To be a queer Christian in the United Methodist Church is to live in a perpetual state of Advent. There is joy to be found in living authentically, hope to be found in loving relationships, but also a sense of waiting. A not-quite-yet that tempers the joy and hope. I pray for the day when Christ moves in the United Methodist Church when I can share my joy and hope with the people I do life with as the body of Christ.

December 22

Every time I go home to see my family there are comments. They are little things, short phrases meant to convey more in their silence than in the words themselves. 

“Oh, you got another tattoo.”

“Vegetarian? That’s interesting.”

“Your brother wants a better relationship with you.”

“Why do you do so much at church?”

Each comment stings because it betrays a fundamental truth in the relationship: my family doesn’t understand me and refuses to try. And so, I shrink…I pull back…I hide my thoughts and true identity from them. I shudder to think what comments I’ll hear if I open up to them.

I thank God for liberation and yearn for a church that doesn’t replicate the “welcome home” messages I hear from my family. I pray our churches might be a place where those yearning to feel at home can bring their whole selves.