I would like to share a passage I wrote for my book From Advent to Ascension: A Journey with the Christ. I think it fits this time of year quite well.
With Advent is the sense of anticipation. For many Christians, that anticipation seems to end on Christmas Eve – the night before. Christmas Eve is a beautiful time of rest and reflection. It is full of joy, of hope, and of atmosphere. Sometimes that atmosphere is a mixture of excitement and exhaustion. Some people have been waiting for Christmas Eve because it marks something of a finish line: there isn’t anything else to do; Christmas is about to arrive.
It is an unusual time, though. Because as much as the sense of preparation is the heart of Advent, we begin to recognize in Christmas Eve that there really is no preparing for the activity of God. We can try, but what happens, happens. Prepared or not, God moves. In some ways Advent, viewed through the lens of Christmas Eve, can only be experienced in retrospect. Once we have Christmas to celebrate, we can piece together the tradition of Advent and put it as a precursor to Christmas. Like many things with the working of God, only after God works can we develop a Christian season to prepare for that which God has already done. It is a paradox (or is it simply irony?).
With the approaching Christmas season, things within the church also become far more scripted and planned. It becomes a labor of love, at least initially. Then it becomes a chore that seems to be focused more on pleasing everyone than genuinely approaching Christmas with anticipation and hope. We spend so much of our time preparing for Christmas that when it arrives, we are already exhausted. Some of us even say, “We just want to get through Christmas.”
That, to me, seems odd. Especially when the first Christmas had little in the way of preparation. Mary was already pregnant. Hotel reservations had not been made through Expedia. Joseph’s family seems to have been caught off guard – they didn’t have any guest rooms cleaned.
Everyone would have to “make do.” Perhaps this is the mystery of the season. At its heart there is a simplicity to Christmas. It happens as it happened. One does not foster it. For those involved, there was no script. There was no planning. There was the night before and then there was the day of.
Sacred is not scripted. It indwells within. It breaks through. It is not manufactured or prepared for in the sense of decorating, cooking, or planning a guest list. Sacred is. And it is often the prevue of God which means that it is beyond our control. Otherwise, the shepherds would not have been watching their sheep, but looking to the sky.
So, when it comes to preparing for Christmas, what is expected of us is simply this: To have open hearts to the story is our task all these centuries later. To live in expectation, but also to allow his birth to take place in our hearts that he might grow within us; that we might bear Christ to the world, much like the Shepherds, who, “when they saw it they made known that which had been told them concerning the child.”
Pastor Charles