Ready or not, here it comes! Most years the race toward Christmas sneaks up on me just as I am settling in to enjoy fall. This year is no different. We are graced with the second snow of the year - that first one was so amazing coating the leaves while they still hung on the trees, and now the beauty of this day is snow clinging resiliently to the branches. Ready or not… This year, to fit in all of the lessons for Sunday School, they began talking about the arrival of the Magi two weeks before Thanksgiving, and we all got to hear about it in the children’s sermon with an Aussie camel guest. Here it comes… Each year, as I am startled by the season and unprepared for the rapid approach of the holidays, I’m reminded of how God's story is always supposed to be startling.
As a child, I think I heard the Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany stories as wondrous, but I’m pretty sure I never thought of them as startling. The tale of a little child born in a manger always evokes that warm cozy feel-good story that is cloaked in candlelight services and singing “Silent Night.” Those are wonderful experiences of the wonder of God choosing us. Still, what I’ve come to so clearly understand as the years have gone on is that the tenderness of God arriving in that unexpected infant-package in Bethlehem so long ago is also a radical proclamation of a totally different way of being in the world. Jesus’ birth sets in motion a wild cascade of events that ought to challenge everything that we see in the world. Jesus was declaring that the way the world valued people and related to God wasn’t aligned to God’s values. He kept not only teaching but also living a way of love that really upset the status-quo. It challenged the ways that people had always done things before. Instead of focusing on power and institutions, Jesus focused on people and healing. Instead of focusing on amassing wealth or prestige, Jesus kept offering examples of humility and generosity. It’s a crazy idea — an idea today often gets dismissed as socialist, or anti-American, or impractical, or who knows what. But this was the startling way of Jesus’ birth and life. It was as though he was crying out the world “wake up!” with every fiber in his being. Be awake to the ways that God's love and truth and grace are to be lived as gifts instead of held onto as limited possessions which some chosen few have deservedly received.
Marty Haugen in his 1983 hymn proclaims:
Awake! Awake and greet the new morn,
for angels herald its dawning.
sing out your joy, for Jesus is born,
behold! the Child of our longing.
Come as a baby weak and poor,
to bring all hearts together,
to open wide the heavenly door,
and lives now inside us forever.
Each year I pray that God’s choosing to be born among us breaks us open in new ways so that we will never be the same. Every pregnancy and birth touches the family involved in indelible ways — Jesus' entry into the world should be no different. But the changes that Jesus offers seek to introduce us to a different way of relating to God- and that is rooted in a thousand small decisions that would place God's love, and not the ways of the world, first. We still choose between the kingdom of God that we pray for, and the kingdom of Caesar into which Jesus was born.
How do we encourage love and generosity to change our lives? God wants us awake to greet the new morn with every moment of every day – to see how our choices impact for good or for ill, for benefit or detriment. We are to wake up and see the world through fresh eyes filled with God's wonder and revelation.
This January we will have the opportunity to welcome into our congregation for the year a fresh voice and new perspective in ministry. We will be welcoming a German pastor, Jakob, who will be serving a Vicariate year (an internship year) with us. I’m looking forward to a different theological training and a different perspective. I’m looking very forward to seeing how another minister in our midst might encourage each of us to be startled with new insights about how God's love is at work among us. Of course, I’ve always delighted in seeing you as a congregation so beautifully embody God's love in welcoming, supporting, and encouraging those among us to serve God. In many ways, “ready or not,” we will have another experience and person shaping the next chapter in the story of Peace Church.
Ready or not, here it comes — a holiday season, a new year, a new adventure in which we are always invited to see God embodied in all that surrounds us.
God bless us!