THE SEASON OF ADVENT…BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Dear Friends,

We Americans have a difficult time with waiting! Deferred gratifications of our wants and desires seem unthinkable! Black Friday witnessed 21 million more Americans haggling for holiday bargains than the year before: 140 million people shopping the day after Thanksgiving. Often they waited in uncomfortably cold weather for 4 to 6 hours to get that desired item.  One knows that many of those same people would not stand outside in cold inclement weather for 4 to 6 hours to receive "the dear desire of nations” to come.

The season of Advent in the Christian calendar seems a particular "cross” for some of us to bear.  Our churches want to get those beautiful Christmas decorations up as fast as we can and we want to get started with singing Christmas carols as soon as possible and it seems only curmudgeonly clergy insist on singing those dreary advent hymns and force us to wait for putting up the Christmas finery. Here at First Presbyterian we diplomatically split the difference. But does our haste into the holidays also do some spiritual damage to the meaning of Christmas.

The season of Advent has three foci.  We look to the past and remember the four centuries the people of God waited for the Messiah to come.  When He did arrive, many chose not to recognize His presence among them so they still await His arrival: another two thousand years of waiting, longing, desiring that the One will come and do something about the grave injustices and violence seen everywhere in our world.

For those of us who have recognized and received Jesus as the Messiah, each year becomes a beautiful and joyous remembrance of His birth.  Our present celebrations are often awash with the sentimentality of the "Baby’s birth in Bethlehem” but we are most preoccupied with the presentation of gifts to one another which rarely reflect any of His values while He lived on earth among us. If you doubt that, the annual financial figures don’t lie.  We will spend 56 billion plus dollars on one another between now and Christmas day and perhaps 3 billion on feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked.

The season of Advent also looks forward to the future.  It is our Christian belief that the Messiah will return and set things right.  For those who have offended against God and neighbor it will be a time of judgment and sorting out according to the recompense of a righteous God.  However, it will be a time of jubilee when justice and righteousness return to the center stage of life in the world, the whole of creation will experience restoration, and human beings will experience the mercy and salvation of God and the return to full health and wholeness.

Curiously, the Advent Season was meant to be a time of reflection upon what God intended for human beings and the whole of creation in the first place.  It was meant to be a time when as we look to "the Day” of His coming, we use the present time to do those deeds of love, charity, healing and hope which are present signs of that which is to come.

Such an Advent observance is hardly gloomy or dreary.  Someone’s back rent is paid or forgiven; someone’s utilities get paid unexpectantly; food arrives at the door of a hungry family; clothes for a family that has next to none; a job is offered to someone who has been to long out of work; a medical bill is paid anonymously; …this is the real "wonder” of the Advent season which will make the season of Christmas bright and the future of faith in God and one’s fellow human beings grow! Now then, wouldn’t that would make a great Christmas out of the long season of Advent?

With best wishes for a goodly Advent;

Rev. Bill