Preparing Your Body, Mind and Soul
The church I just came from always had a Christmas Party on one of the Mondays leading up to Christmas. The week before the party, we had a secret Santa gift exchange where you would draw a name out of a hat and then shower that person with personal, small gifts the week before the party and then the night of, you were supposed to try and guess who was your secret Santa. This was always lots of fun as you were given things throughout the week and you shared with others what you had been given and tried to figure out who had put the small gift on your desk. Now, not everyone participated, it was an optional thing, and, there was one staff person who refused to participate and was quite vocal about how he thought it was wrong to celebrate and share gifts at all before the actual night of Christmas Eve. We loving called him Deputy BaHumBug of Deputy Bah for short. If things went missing around the church, he would blame it on secret Santa, if something went wrong, it was a secret Santa’s fault. This was all done with lots of joking and fun, and at the same time, there was always a serious tone in his voice and actions. He truly savored the time of Advent and preparation.
Each year, as the secret Santa exchange came up at staff meeting, we knew we could count on him for some moaning and groaning and commentary about how we should all wait until Christmas and how commercial everything had gotten. To some extent, he was right. The commercialization of Christmas has gone to an extreme. This year as I was trying to find a Halloween costume for my son, they already had the trees and lights up in the seasonal section of Target. When I saw this, I sighed and walked on. There will probably be a time when you can go to Target and get your back to school supplies and your fake Christmas tree all at the same time. And even through all of this commercialization and even though I often fear that we lose the real sense of Christmas, I love a good Christmas party. I often find that Christmas parties are a form of preparation for me. It is a time to be with others, to reflect on the past and to look to the coming year. It is a time to be with people and get out of my head. It is a time to be surrounded with the music of the season, the story of Christmas, the symbols and the celebration of Christmas. All of these things can help prepare me on my path of Advent as I continue to try to find Christ in my life - as I try to come back and repent and begin anew with my walk of faith and life with God. Christmas parties are a great time to do some of this preparation of the heart and soul, and they are not the only preparation that we have to do in order to be ready to receive the Christ child once again.
The reading for today begins with a long list of people – those people who were in some kind of position of power at that time. Then he tells us that, “the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” God came and spoke to John and sent him into the region around the
The reading from Luke begins by telling us where we are and who is ruling in the world only to then point to where we are going and who is coming. It is a way of saying to those around him – we are here – and now we are going somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere totally different and we get there through repentance and baptism. We get there by making a path to God, knocking down things that are our obstacles (which often times means ourselves) and making way for God to come into our lives.
The beginning of the story of John the Baptist is a reminds us that we have much to do to prepare for Christ coming into our lives. There isn’t a prescription or a set path, for everyone’s path to Christ is different, but one thing is the same. We all have to repent, to turn around and find Christ over and over again in order to live the life that God intends for us to live.
Now, if you are like me, the word sin, doesn’t necessarily translate. Are the little things that we do sins? Or is it just the big things that we know are really bad? Some of my clergy colleagues don’t want to use the word sin because they think that it doesn’t translate. There is some truth to that, especially if you grew up in a tradition where sin was talked about a lot. However, what is sin? To sin is to do something that brings you away from God. Sin does not have to be the big, bad, ugly actions such as murder or stealing. Sin is anything that does not allow us to live out the primary command from Jesus and that is to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. We are all sinful people and John knew that because he, too, was sinful. We all are, because we are human and to be human means to mess up.
John, was sent to preach to people about God in a new way – “to preach a baptism of repentance that led to the forgiveness of sins. John's baptism was symbolic. It represented a reorientation on the part of the sinner toward God. But it did not forgive sins in itself.” [i]
John instructs us to repent of anything and everything that might hinder ultimate faithfulness to Jesus. He invites us to make our crooked ways straight, to flatten all terrain, and to prepare space for the birth of Christ into our lives. John is not lecturing us on how and why we are all going to hell, but rather inviting us to repent and find the way to God again and again.
Advent is a time for us to all focus on what is taking us away from God and what we need to repent of in order that we will be ready for Christ to come again. Russell Pregeant says that, "The function of Advent is to focus on...the always-to-be-expected coming of Christ into our experience, and the specific contribution of repentance-texts is encourage reflection upon all the ways in which our lives do not in fact manifest the love and devotion that are appropriate to relationships with God and our neighbors."
Advent is a time for us to realign ourselves. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, it is a time when we are to prepare of God coming into our lives and make our path to God straight. All the low places in our lives need to be filled and every mountain, or all the road blocks need to be leveled off. We need to make our crooked ways and our rough places straight and smooth in preparation for Christ entering into our hearts and souls once again on Christmas. In doing this preparation work, we are ready to find God again and again. I challenge all of is in the next few moments of silence to lift up to God all those things that are separating us from God. All the worries, all the resentments, all the stress, all the emotions that separate us from people. And then know, that as we say the prayer of confession, that all those things that you just named are given to God – all those things done and left undone, all those things that cause us not to love, all those things that we have thought or said or done that have taken us away from God’s love and from the love of those around us – each and every one of these things is forgiven. Each and every one of these things is gone and you are able to then go forward on your path to God and find forgiveness and wholeness.
Let’s take a few moments of silence to name all of those things that we wish to give to God, knowing that we are forgiven and loved.
posted by The Rev. Shannon Kelly @ 2:02 PM
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