Quite a ride huh? This 4 week journey of Advent toward Christmas.
This van ride, this road trip, in which we took out our GPS to track and figure
out where we are at and where we’re going… that
is that we’re lodged in a secular Christmas season that starts around Halloween,
but we’re going toward a Christmas in which we Worship Fully Jesus, God come fully to us.
Then we lightened our load, tossing out the excessive consumption we as a
society are consumed by—we spent less,
and in doing so we recognized that our worth has nothing to do with the worth
of the gifts we give, but instead our worth comes from the Love of God found in
Christ Jesus.
Then, last week we looked around and
saw our fellow passengers, and we didn’t just look at them, but gave more … gave them our time, we
began to wrestle with our connections with our friends and family and how we
can nourish those relationships and cultivate interdependence.
And now, here we are, two days from Christmas Eve, it’s just over that
mountain. It’s just through that bank of fog.
You can almost see it.
You can almost hear it.
In fact, you can hear it.
Listen
Listen!
(CHOIR SINGS
MAGNIFICAT)
Yes, you can hear Mary’s song, the
Magnificat—you can hear her interpret for us what that manger means, what
Emmanuel, God with us, is all about.
In her self-proclaimed lowliness she
encourages us to look around and see our neighbors with new eyes.
She encourages us to actively be
concerned for, and on the look out for, those who are so often invisible.
She encourages us to recognize how
this “God with us” changes how we are with one another.
She encourages us to celebrate the topsy-turvy
tumult of Christmas.
She encourages us to love all.
Let us pray.
We drive toward that music, over that
hill and through that fog, doing just fine, we’ll all get there in time.
Then comes a banging against our back
window.
Holy cow, there’s an ill-clothed very
pregnant woman banging on our window!
“Why didn’t you stop for us?” is the
first thing out of her mouth.
“We didn’t see you,” we reply.
“What do you mean you didn’t see us? I
waved and both of us shouted at you when you drove by us, we even flashed you
with our high beams.”
We mumble something about “the fog,” squish
her into our Advent Van with us, and drive back a quarter mile to an Oldsmobile
Station Wagon—with the wood paneling and everything—broken down there—there’s a
man with his head deep down into the engine.
“Didn’t think you’d stop,” he said,
“people rarely do… it’s like they don’t see us… too focused on Christmas I
suppose.”
Two of us get out and hold engine
pieces in place while he does something that gets the car running again, while
the rest share a thermos of hot chocolate with the woman.
They thank us, tell us they’re the
guest of honor at Christmas and it’s good they’ll be able to make it to the
manger, and then drive off toward Christmas…
but we all
sit in our little van with the heat going for a while. We drove by Mary and
Joseph… what does that mean?
It means, as we go along on our
travels there will be fellow travelers broken down on the road, people put in
lowly places and in need of a helping hand.
It means we have to look for them,
because there is a lot of fog in life, and we sometimes are so concerned with
the songs of the season that we don’t engage our eyes as well as our ears.
There is, in fact, a danger that we’ll miss seeing God with us, God among us,
among us all.
I think of a situation a fellow Pastor
just dealt with—there was a man living in their recycling bin who wasn’t
welcome at the local shelters for a variety of reasons. The church opened their
doors to him and he attended their bible studies and the coffee hour after
worship, when he can’t make it to worship itself… and they finally found him a
shelter that will take him in…
and when he
left one of the children innocently asked, “Was that Jesus.”
Truly out of the mouth of babes.
Yes, preparing for Christmas, going
along this long Advent road, means being unsettled by those broken down along
the way, unsettled because the song Mary sings is an unsettling one,
one that
topples the ruthless and enthrones the lowly, feeds the hungry and sends off
the rich unfed.
One that
insists we care for, and be with, human beings broken down along the way, because that’s the very act of God we’re
preparing to celebrate.
And today you have in your hands two
small ways to help those broken down on the highway of life.
The first is an insert you’ve likely
seen for the last month to help fund the ELCA’s response to Typhoon Haiyan—
if there has
ever been an example of a people made low and in deepest hunger the survivors
of that horrible Typhoon are an example.
I probably don’t need to remind you
all, but just in case you’ve not heard, the ELCA’s response to disasters is phenomenal—we had boots on the ground
in the Philippines before
the US
military did.
For that
matter,
as those in New Orleans and the people on the Jersey Shore
can attest,
we stay
committed to healing that which has been broken long after everyone else has
left.
Secondly, there is the ELCA Good Gifts
Catalog—a program that went out to people all around the world in need and
asked the simple question, “what do you need?”
“What do you
need to fight malaria?
what do you
need to fight hunger?
what do you
need to create or sustain your new church, and your seminary?”
and then set
up this program in which we can give those very things as gifts.
I’m sure there are other ways we can
help those who are the least among us,
those stuck
on the road leading toward Christmas—
in fact I’m
sure there are more concrete, down to earth, and personal ways to do this that
you all know of, and I hope and pray you will do so.
With that we’ve reached the end of
this Advent road—all that remains is to rejoice that God has come near in the
person of Jesus Christ. A+A
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