Advent
is a strange part of the church year. It’s a little like Lent—a time of
preparation, reflection, maybe even repentance.
But
unlike Lent it has multiple endpoints.
Easter is the
sole focus of Lent,
whereas
Advent points us to Christ’s coming at Christmas
AND also Christ’s coming again.
While
Lent is a one-way street,
Advent is a
two way street, going both backward and forward.
For
the last two years, when I’ve talked about Advent I’ve focused on preparation and hope, and I’ve tried to
locate us, and ground us, in a particular time—this in between time we live in.
But,
this Advent we’re going to try something a little different.
We’re going
to focus almost exclusively on preparing
for Christmas.
We,
along with 1,000’s of churches this year, and 10s of thousands of churches in
the last 7 years, will be following the format of a Christian group called the Advent
Conspiracy, who asks the simple question, “Can Christmas still change the
world?”
We
will head down the Advent Road,
toward Christmas, and along the way, we’ll stop off at 4 different stations, on
four different Sundays.
We’ll do
this in order to make sure:
We know
where we’re going,
We ensure
that we’re not over-packed,
We take
time to know our fellow passengers,
And
finally,
We’ll stop
to help some fellow travelers broken down on the road with us.
Or
to put it into the terms of the group Advent
Conspiracy We’ll:
Worship
Fully
Spend Less
Give More
Love All
Prayer
On
this first stop—this Worship Fully,
stop,
We
begin our journey toward Christmas, as one ought to, by assessing where we are and where we’re going.
We’re
in Advent, along the road, preparing for Christmas… yet there is a lot of
baggage that has been hung on this holiday.
Being
that Christmas has a lot of cultural weight in our society, its gravitational
pull naturally shapes the American calendar in such a way that we focus on
Christmas earlier and earlier—mistletoe goes up by the time Halloween candy
goes away.
Maybe
in a decade or two South Plainfield’s Labor Day parade will feature Saint Nick,
a Menorah, and a Manger Scene.
And
with this expansion of Christmas, filling up large swaths of the cultural
calendar, comes another type of weight
—if this one day becomes so important that it
swallows whole months, imagine how perfect Christmas has to be—
otherwise
you’ve failed! You’ve let months go to
waste!
Or at least that’s what it feels like
—and I know,
talking to some of you and you know experiencing Christmas myself as well, there
are lots of expectations you and your family have about Christmas
—a lot of
perfect moments and perfect gifts that are causing you anxiety.
Lots
of obligations—dinners, Christmas Cards, time with relatives and getting
everything done at work so you can have a day or two of Christmas Time.
If
former president Dwight Eisenhower were to diagnose this weighty
calendar
distorting,
culture
shocking,
emotional
and relational sapping,
baggage of Christmas, he might even go so
far as to call it a “Christmas-industrial-complex.”
And
the most off-putting aspect of all of this is,
among all
this hustle and bustle,
Christmas
becomes less about celebrating God’s coming for us in the form of Jesus Christ
and honoring this true center of Christmas with the joyful worship of God.
And
yes, as this point the sermon could very easily turn into a harangue about how
we’re taking both the Christ and the Mass out of Christmas. That we’ve missed
the reason for the season.
All of
those clichés.
But you know what? that would be
heaping still one more thing onto your backs, I would be loading just a little
more baggage into the Christmas-Industrial-Complex—
but that’s
not where we’re headed on this Advent Road, that would be a stop sign and I’m trying to show you a road-map.
We’re
headed toward celebrating God with us, worshipping Jesus for
his coming among us as the Christ Child, and among a plethora of obligations
that fact should be freeing!
Look
at Christmas up there, on ahead of us.
As
Isaiah writes, “Come let us go to the house of the Lord.”
Let
us go toward that manger!
Where
we’re headed, is to the celebration of Swords being beaten into Plowshares—tanks
into tractors.
At this
time that can make people feel unpeaceful and anxious, know this:
There is peace up ahead—because ahead of us is the Prince of Peace.
In
this season where evening comes early—it’s often dark by the time we get home
from work—know that, as Paul writes, “The Night is Far Gone, the Day is near.”
Look
up ahead of us—there is Jesus Christ, the one who is Light and Life for us all.
Do
you remember last week, I told you about the description of Jesus in the book
of Colossians?—well if you didn’t fully hear it last week, the Gospel of John
gives a very similar description this week!
The
Word of God—the Logos in the Greek—the
thing that Philosophers of the time thought of as the basic building block of life,
as well as
the blueprint from which all things
were made,
as well as the
source of that life,
is
attainable! Nah, is given to you!
Is,
in fact, in front of you!
That
light,
that little
light,
that single
Advent flame you see there,
is pointing
to it,
is counting
down as we get closer to it.
It
lights our way from here—like that star the wise men saw, it is a beacon
pointing us forward toward the Christ child—
It reminds
us that light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it.
Reminds
us where we’re headed on this Advent Journey and frees us to Worship Fully as
we go. A+A
