Three to Get Ready
"You won't believe what I'm looking at!" the woman in the
department store exclaimed into her cell phone. I couldn't help
overhearing her conversation. I was shopping for the monastery,
and she was blocking my aisle. "It's barely September, and
there's a Christmas display. There are reindeer and elves and
trees with little lights! ... I know! Did you ever hear of such a
thing?"
You can see the logic of the stores' starting Christmas
early. (Although I agree with my fellow shopper. A couple of days
after August is carrying things too far. Way too far.) The stores
sell the things people use for their Christmas celebrations: the
presents, wrappings, cards, decorations, and holiday foods. To be
able to use these things on Christmas, people have to obtain them
ahead of time. And decorating the stores to go with the holiday
merchandise makes sense, too. It sets an appropriate mood, and
reminds people not to put off holiday preparations until the last
minute.
The Church offers a similar reminder in Advent, the three or
four weeks before Christmas. The holiday preparations she reminds
us of can be summed up in the words of Joel 4:12, which I used to
see on homemade signs by country roads in the North Carolina of
my childhood, "Prepare to meet thy God!"
We church people use Advent to prepare to meet the Lord in
our celebration of his birth on Christmas, and also to prepare
ourselves for the meetings with God we look forward to at the end
of our earthly lives and the end of the world. We prepare by
purifying ourselves, by listening to what God has to say to us
and trying to understand it, and by nurturing our desire to be
with our Lord. And like the holiday preparations offered by the
stores, these preparations should not be put off until the last
minute.
Perhaps "purifying ourselves" is too highfalutin an
expression. What we need to do is get cleaned up and ready for
our meeting with Jesus. Of course we meet the Lord in all sorts
of ways, sometimes very much by surprise. And part of what's good
about that is that these meetings are a normal part of our
everyday life in Christ and don't call for special preparations.
They're like the meetings we have when we pass a co-worker in the
hall, or come across a close friend in the grocery store. But the
more solemn meetings for which Advent prepares us are more like a
very important date, or perhaps a special anniversary dinner. We
want to get cleaned up and to look our best, to honor the
occasion and the one we're meeting with. The way we clean and
dress up our souls is by examining our consciences, confessing
our sins, resolving to live better lives, and by doing good
where, before, we had done what was not good.
Advent is also the time to take particular care to listen to
the word of God. Remember, we're talking about listening as
preparation for meeting our God. So we come to the Bible to hear
what God has to say about what sort of people we ought to be, and
what our relationships with each other and with God ought to be
like. And we work to avoid our usual ways of not listening. One
thing we need to avoid is thinking of other things while our
beloved speaks to us. And we mustn't assume that since God is
someone we love, someone we've listened to before, we already
know what's coming and don't have to listen the way we would if
we thought God might have something new to say to us. Both of
these failures in listening can happen in long-standing
relationships, even the Christian's relationship with Christ. But
part of our preparation is to take special care to keep them from
happening as we listen to God's word at this time.
The third part of our preparation, nurturing our desire to
be with our Lord, is delicate and tricky. We can't force
ourselves to be excited about the Lord's coming, or force
ourselves to be eager to celebrate that coming. But, just as we
can deliberately pay attention while we're listening to God, so
we can pay attention to the aspects of drawing near to God that
really do appeal to us. And we give thanks for those moments, and
look forward to them and nurture them. The secular celebration of
Christmas can be a support to us in this area. After all, it
isn't entirely secular, really. And I don't usually call it
"secular." I tend to call it "shopping Christmas." It's not all
shops and shopping, either. But the name seems to work because of
the newspapers' notice, "X more shopping days until Christmas."
Shopping Christmas does have its red-nosed reindeer and
singing chipmunks, but it also offers us bits of the gospel
story, and much sacred music, live and recorded. Presents and
cards we send and receive and checks made out to our favorite
charities speak to us of love and giving. And so do the
multitudes. Look at a busy sidewalk or crowded store and remember
that it was love for each one of those people that moved the Word
to become flesh and dwell among us. We can use thoughts like
these to fuel our eagerness to meet the Lord at "Church
Christmas."
That's my name for the Christmas that begins on December
25th, the day shopping Christmas ends. Some Christians don't
bother with trying to juggle the two Christmases. They integrate
them and rejoice in the Messiah's nativity in a season (briefer
than the "shopping days before Christmas") that reaches its grand
finale on Christmas day. But we Anglicans treat Christmas as the
astounding opening scene of the season of the church year set
aside to ponder the great meeting in which God became one of us
for love of us. That's why we make the weeks before that day one
of the seasons when we obey the prophet's, and God's, command to
prepare ourselves to meet our God.
Fr. Jude tries to mail this edition of our newsletter so
that it reaches our readers before Christmas, but not too much
before. If the system worked this year, you still have a few days
before the feast of the Lord's Nativity arrives. Please join us
in using those days as a time to prepare to celebrate the birth
of God's son as the son of Mary, and to prepare for the day when
we will see that loving Savior face to face.
 Fr. William
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