Not Alone, After All

Over the years, my family’s Christmas traditions have changed from time to time, as traditions do.  We’ve changed when we see our extended family and for how long; when and where we go to church; what kind of gifts find their way under the tree.  But there’s at least one piece of Christmas past that promises to reemerge year after year:  sometime during the Christmas season my brother and I have to watch Home Alone.  We’ll probably watch Home Alone 2, as well.  Preferably as soon after Thanksgiving as possible.  At my parents’ house, these movies are an essential aspect of the holiday season.

                If you haven’t seen these Christmas classics in a while, here’s a recap: In the first movie (Chris Columbus, 1990), 8-year-old Kevin McAllister accidentally gets left behind while his family travels to France for the holidays.  While he’s home, he discovers that two burglars, Harry and Marv, are planning to rob his house, and he concocts an elaborate scheme to thwart them.  In the second movie (1992), Kevin accidentally gets on a plane to New York City while his family flies to Florida for the holidays, and there runs into Harry and Marv again as they plan to rob a local toy store.  There’s nothing uniquely Christian about either movie, of course.  They’re both, in many ways, your typical feel-good secular Christmas family comedy where a kid fights some bad guys, grows up a little, and learns to appreciate his family.  And while it’s better for Christmas to be about appreciating your family than about how many presents you get, that’s hardly the whole story as Christians understand it.

                But at the same time, I think we can see in the Home Alone movies a few glimpses of the real Christmas story—the one the Bible tells, not just the one America tells.

                In each of the movies, Kevin ends up befriending the outcast.  In the first, it’s Old Man Marley, Kevin’s silent, elderly neighbor who walks around with a snow shovel salting people’s sidewalks.  Kevin’s brother Buzz calls Marley the South Bend Shovel Slayer and whispers that he murders people and keeps the bodies in his trash can full of salt.  In the second movie, it’s the Pigeon Lady, who spends her days feeding and serving as a roost for the birds of Central Park.  The first time Kevin meets each of these people, he runs away screaming.

                Kevin meets Old Man Marley again in church on Christmas Eve, where both are listening to the choir practice for that night’s service.  When Old Man Marley sits down next to him, Kevin can’t run away this time.  It turns out Marley is there to hear his granddaughter sing.  Because of a falling out with his son long ago, he can’t come to hear her in the service.  As Marley and Kevin talk, it turns out they have a lot in common—they haven’t appreciated the people they love, and they both miss their families.  Likewise, when Kevin runs into the Pigeon Lady again, he learns her story as they sit and listen to music on the roof of Carnegie Hall.  She hadn’t always been that way, she told him.  She had a home and a family and a job.  But after the man she loved left her, she was afraid to love or be loved by anyone again.

                The Christmas story as we read it in the Bible invites us to befriend the outcasts.  It invites us to see that unmarried mother, that refugee family, that homeless baby, in a new way.  Maybe their story, after all, isn’t what we think it is.  We may meet God in church on Christmas Eve, but we might just as surely meet God in a stable in Bethlehem, or on the streets of our own neighborhood, or in Central Park.

                I don’t think we can claim to take the Christmas story seriously without admitting that it calls us to love the outcasts—not just love them from afar, with our money and our sympathy, but love them by knowing them and their stories.  That, after all, is the whole point of Jesus’ birth.  On Christmas we celebrate the fact that Jesus became human so that God could love us not from afar, but by being here with us, having a life in common with us, knowing our stories, knowing our struggles, calling us to repair our broken relationships.  The human life into which Jesus is born on Christmas is a life lived among outcasts—the poor, the sick, the lonely, the ones society labeled as “bad.”  If we make a sincere attempt to follow him, there’s a 0% chance we won’t find ourselves among those same people.   Christmas means sitting next to Old Man Marley in church and hanging out with the Pigeon Lady in our own parks and squares.

                But there’s more than that, too.

Near the beginning of each movie, Kevin is alone.  After the initial thrill—“I made my family disappear!”—he realizes how lonely he really is.  And while there’s a lot Kevin can do by himself—order pizza, go grocery shopping, defend his house from Harry and Marv—he can’t do it all.  And thus he finds himself, finally, in the grip of the bad guys.  Defeat is imminent—when none other than Marley comes up from behind, clocks Harry and Marv with his shovel, and saves Kevin.

                Likewise in the sequel, Kevin can do a lot of things alone in New York—book a hotel, hail a cab, and protect Mr. Duncan’s toy store.  But again, he can’t do it all—and finds himself, again, in the hands of Harry and Marv.  Enter the Pigeon Lady, with her bag full of bird seed, which she throws on the bad guys and waits for the birds to do their worst.  Each time, it turns out Kevin can’t quite do it all alone.  But that’s OK.  In the end, he’s not alone, after all.

                The world can be a lonely place—even if sometimes we wish everyone around us would just disappear.  We’ve all experienced that loneliness at one time or another.  We muddle through, most of the time, thinking we can get by on our own—but at the end of the day, sometimes it just seems like the bad guys, literal or metaphorical, are going to get the best of us again.

                But the best part of Christmas is that we’re not alone.  Jesus is Immanuel, God With Us.  Of course, God has been with us all along, but in Jesus that is true in a new way.  Jesus is born, Jesus lives, so that we don’t have to go through this life alone.  Our struggles have been God’s struggles.  Our human story has been God’s story.  Jesus makes each part of this life holy by living it himself.

                In the end, we can’t do it alone.  We need to be saved from ourselves, reminded what it means to live in light of grace and forgiveness, pointed back toward the God who created us in God’s own image, back toward the people whom God loves.  And we might get up each morning and try to muddle through the best we can, but in the end, we fall short.  At the end of the day, we just can’t quite do it all alone.

                But that’s OK.  In the end, it turns out, we’re not alone, after all.

—————————————————

—————————————————

Sunday worship in Advent, 8:15 am and 11:00 am, Nov. 27, Dec. 4, 11, and 18

Handel’s Messiah: Saturday, Dec. 3, 5 pm

Christmas Eve, Dec. 24: Family service 5:30 pm, Candlelight services 8 pm and 11 pm

Christmas Day, Dec. 25: worship at 11 am