(What follows is a slightly modified version of my Hanging of the Greens meditation.)
Heading home to Atlanta after Thanksgiving, Kathy and I saw two different cars, separated by miles, each with Christmas lights carefully strung to cover the whole body. It was daytime, so we didn’t get to see them in their glowing (twinkling?) glory, but we were impressed nonetheless (Oh Christmas Car, O Christmas Car, how lovely is your fender).
Drive around; Christmas abounds—lights, inflatables, trees. And while Santa might not have shown up yet, Mariah Carey certainly has. Christmas music fills the air.
Yet, for all the Yuletide sights and sounds, it’s still early December. The traditional job of the Senior Scrooge, I mean Senior Pastor, this time of year is to say, “Cut it out! It’s not Christmas yet. It’s Advent, a season unto itself, a time of preparation and waiting. Stop with the Christmas stuff!”
And all the Whos of Whoville smile and say, “Good luck with that, Scroogey,” as they return to their Christmas celebrations.
And the truth is I understand.
It’s obvious enough why the marketplace has expanded Christmastime. Commercialism has consumed October and November to encourage us to consume as well. But remove the glitz of the marketplace for a minute. We’re stringing lights on our cars in November for a reason. Our desire to stretch out the season has some longing about it, doesn’t it? We’ve expanded Christmastime because we hunger for its message. Even in its commercialized, secularized incarnation, the season’s lights, music, and emotions point toward the Good News that birthed it all. People long for the spirit of grace and joy, for neighborly peace and kindness, because such gifts, so nearly divine, seem in short supply.
I get it. But let me put a word in for Advent, as well (it’s in my contract). The season has its own message, and that message turns out to be THE message. It’s old ground, Advent; it’s new territory. These weeks between now and Christmas have a beauty all their own.
I hope you noticed the sign at the gate of December. “Take off your shoes,” it reads; “you’re entering holy ground. Don’t go stomping around and making a racket
… lest you miss the silence that becomes song,
… lest you miss the announcements brought by angels and the first rustling of straw in a stable manger,
… lest you miss the story—the prophets of old, John the Baptist, Elizabeth, the courageous Mary, the righteous Joseph—the story that fills the world with eternity.”
A group of around 60 folks from Glenn went together last week to see the new movie, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” based on the book by Barbara Robinson. It’s a fun story, a touching story, and it raises an interesting question: What would it be like to experience the Christmas story for the first time, to listen with a blank slate—no assumptions, baggage, or even traditions—nothing to distract us from the raw, unprocessed Good News?
In his own way, T.S. Eliot ponders the surrender of expectations in his poem, “East Coker”:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
What awaits us in our waiting this year? What will we find on this patch of ground called Advent? What and who might find us? I say this pretty much every year: Though many of us have experienced Advent oodles of times, we who arrive now are not the same people we were a year ago. A lot has happened … in our world and in our lives.
But this, too, is true: Come Christmas, we will not be the same people we are now at the start of Advent. In our trek across the season,
we will SING hope and peace and joy and love;
we will TELL the story of the ages, a story for all ages;
and every time we come into the place called sanctuary, we will SEE signs, symbols, images that speak wordlessly the mystery of Incarnation.
Only then, changed by the moments shared, will we arrive again at the day at the heart of our longing. Or, to quote T.S. Eliot one more time (from “Little Gidding):
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
In Christ,
Mark