Welcome to Homecoming 2024!
You are invited to the Homecoming of God, friends! I am so grateful that you will journey with us this year again! This year, each reflection will be released via email newsletter and here on the website every Sunday of Advent starting December 1st.
Advent invites us to prepare our hearts for the extraordinary mystery of God drawing near. In the Incarnation, we witness not only the Divine entering into the world but also a radical act of proximity—a holy homecoming. God doesn’t arrive from afar as a stranger. God moves into the neighborhood, becoming intimate with the streets, the stories, and the struggles of the people God loves and that God has always been amongst. It is a return, a re-membering the family of God right in the midst of the chaos of community. This homecoming reclaims what is already ours: love, belonging, and proximity to the Divine.
For many of us, especially descendants from the African diaspora, displacement and longing for home have been historic and ongoing realities. Advent speaks of a God who understands our yearning for rest, safety, and justice—or waiting for the embrace that is ‘home’. A familiar place of acceptance where we can unfurl all of the uniqueness of who we are.
““In seeking home, we are coming down to earth and we will not arrive intact.””
Over the weeks of Advent we will embrace "Homecoming" as a metaphor for the Incarnation—a return not only of God but a return also to ourselves, our communities, and the sacredness of the spaces we inhabit.
May we reflect on what it means to come home—to find our identity in God’s love, to be welcomed into community, and to recognize the divine dwelling within us and our world. As you journey through this guide, may it root you in the assurance that God is always moving closer, inviting us to make room for joy, justice, and the fullness of life.
