A little Shekinah here if you don't mind: An Advent Meditation

Fahoo forays, dahoo dorays
Welcome Christmas! Come this way
Fahoo forays, dahoo dorays
Welcome Christmas, Christmas Day

Welcome, welcome, fahoo ramus
Welcome, welcome, dahoo damus
Christmas Day is in our grasp
So long as we have hands to clasp

“Welcome Christmas” from the 1966 “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”

A week ago Saturday night I decorated the sanctuary and entryway of our church for Advent (yes, I'm well aware that we are already well into Advent; it's how we roll in this fellowship.) It's not usually my job (for good reason). In fact, in the twenty-seven Advents I have served here I don't recall ever having to do it. But this year my lone volunteer got called into work at the last minute and on the eve of the Second Sunday in Advent our sanctuary was still looking a lot like Thanksgiving (as had been pointed out to me by someone on the First Sunday in Advent). So circumstances press-ganged me, as it were, into decorating service along with my somewhat reluctant wife and son who were there only because of my plea for help.

The funny thing is the longer you leave it plugged in
the more the lights come on. Odd.

The congregation I serve is a small one. Most of them are in these parts and with few exceptions our odd assortment of wreathes and candles and Advent what-nots are cast-offs from various people's homes or thrift sales. Last year two of our ladies bought a brand new artificial tree for the entryway that came with the lights already attached. This seemed to be just the ticket for a fellowship like ours that is – er, light – on committees. All you need do was take it out of the box and plug it in. It worked great last year but this past Saturday night when I plugged the tree in only the bottom third lit up. Admittedly, tidings of great joy did not automatically roll off my tongue.

I'm not Lutheran anymore
but they sure know how
to get ready for the season

As I dug through the bins that hold our collection of Christmas decorations I found myself wishing we were more like the Lutherans. In my experience, Lutherans do the seasons right. The colors, the banners, the candles, the trees, the lights. Everything matches and nothing whatsoever appears secondhand at all. Rich is a word that comes to mind as in both the quality of the item and the fullness of the meaning. I can still recall when I was a boy the excitement that would bubble up within me like some latent artesian spring when the first candle would be lit on the Advent wreath that hung reverently above the sanctuary. Christmas was approaching. (In my early years of service here I introduced the folks to an Advent Wreath but it didn't have the same effect them as it did on me when I was a boy. Apparently I was being way too Lutheran for a pastor of a Pentecostal church.)

So there I was grumbling beneath my breath as I hung wreaths and swags and Linda set up the donated nativity set in the sanctuary. The YouTube channel I had chosen to stream Christmas music kept cutting out and buffering interminably. Linda had a set of her own complaints a few of which she shared with me. And Charlie just wondered when we could go home. Our little decorating conclave was anything but festive.

I've been reading Eugene H. Peterson's memoir – The Pastor – of late. In the middle of my foul reverie of how drab our decorations are and how spotted and faded the carpet in our sanctuary is, I thought of a story his friend, Paul, a Jewish rabbi, had once shared with him. In his early days of ministry, Peterson was planting a church in the basement of his home in suburban Baltimore. It was a church that “didn't look like a church” (one of his teens lovingly referred to it as 'Catacomb Presbyterian'). A few of his parishoners had left the fledgling congregation over what they thought a church should look like. As he reflected on their exit with his rabbi-friend, Paul told a story about the Shekinah glory of God:

At the end of the Babylonian captivity, as the exiles returned to Israel, they began to rebuild the Temple. To us, a church is a holy place but you can always go to another church if you move or you don't like the one you're at. For them, however, the Temple was the house where God resided and the centerpiece of their nation. There was no other place to worship God. But this Second Temple that they had built was but a shadow of the one Solomon had constructed centuries before. So when it was at last dedicated the response of the old ones in their company – the ones who had once worshiped at Solomon's Temple decades before - was revealing.

When the first people arrived they took one look at the restored temple and wept at what they saw. The Solomonic temple that for five hundred years had provided a glorious centering for their life as a people of God had been replaced by what looked to them like a tarpaper shack. The squalid replacement broke their hearts, and they wept. As they wept, a dazzling, light-resplendent presence descended, the Shekinah –God's personal presence – and filled that humble, modest, makeshift, sorry excuse for a temple with glory. They lifted their arms in praise. They were truly home. God was truly present. The Shekinah faded out. The glory stayed.

“People like you and me,” Paul continued, “need that Shekinah story. And our congregations need it. Most of what we do in getting our congregations going doesn't look anything like what people expect it to.” (Paul's congregation was a fledgling synagogue worshipping in a three-car garage that didn't look at all like a synagogue.)

It's not an excuse to not take pride in God's sanctuary. I mean if we go all out in lovingly decorating our own homes for the season we should want God's house to look festively arrayed as well. But even if our decorations fall short of inspiring what matters most, when all is said and done, is the presence of God felt and experienced as we weekly gather together like the robbed Whos of Whoville to worship and welcome “heart to heart and hand in hand.” That's the kind of glory that remains long after the Advent season is past and our partially lit Christmas tree is put away. I still hope for the day that we can replace the carpet in the sanctuary and upgrade our facility a notch or two. But in the meantime I'll settle for some of that Shekinah to continue to transform our fellowship into something that truly honors the God we love and worship and comes near to us at Christmas.