Tidings of Great Joy: An Advent Meditation

 "Bah!" said Scrooge. "Humbug!"

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

"Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's nephew. "You don't mean that, I am sure?"

"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough."

"Come, then," returned the nephew gaily. "What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough."

Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, "Bah!" again; and followed it up with "Humbug!" (from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens)

It has, it seems, been a year for the history books: rioting in major cities across America, division and rancor across the Union that hasn't been felt in at least a generation, a disputed election, and the flotsam and jetsam of a global pandemic that continues to polarize people into various camps which divide along the virtues of wearing face coverings or not, of worshiping in person or doing the same virtually, of elected officials ordering shut downs or private citizens defying the same. Who is right and who is wrong depends largely upon what circles you run in. But no matter what with the kind of year it's been, it's all too easy for the dormant Scrooge within us (or the Grinch if you prefer) to be decidedly sour and obnoxiously loud as we approach the twenty-fifth of December.

What do we have to be merry about? When the CDC is recommending we all stay put this Christmas and avoid travel, when the President-elect plans to issue a federal mandate to wear a mask “for 100 days only” on the first day of his administration, when Covid continues to creep and crawl all around us now infecting people we know as well as ourselves, its all too easy to shout Scrooge's reply to his nephew's seemingly pollyanish view of the world: “Merry Christmas! What right have I to be merry?...”

Except this: Once upon a time in Bethlehem in Judea, Jesus the Christ was born. God became flesh and blood and “moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message) for one purpose and one purpose only: to save us from our sins.

If we're honest, the world has always been a pretty dark place (I think the last 100 years of history speaks loudly to that fact). There have been wonderful moments to be sure but there seems to be no end to the cruelty and ugliness that we humans can think up or mete out on one another. Despite the fact that there are a lot of nice people in these here parts, the verdict of heaven is that we are utterly and completely lost and cannot fix ourselves (our best efforts to the contrary).

But at Bethlehem, God entered the mess our world is and came near to us in Jesus. Years later Paul the Apostle would describe Christmas in this way: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” 2 Corinthians 8:9 (NIV). In ways that are difficult to quantify, Jesus imposed limits on his divine nature for a season and became one of us for the purpose that we might become sons and daughters of God through faith in him. His sacrificial death on a Roman cross paid the debt of sin we could not pay off in a million years and he offers us life eternal in exchange for our simple trust in him.

What right have we to be merry? Here are reasons enough! So on the days leading up to Christmas should Scrooge rear his ugly face and scream his sarcastic accusation we have every reason to smile and say back to him what his nephew retorted, "What right have [I] to be dismal? What reason have [I] to be morose? [I'm] rich enough."

No wonder one of the words found in the lexicon of heaven regarding Christmas is “joy”. As the angel spoke to the shepherds outside of Bethlehem that night, “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11-12, KJV). That's good news, maybe the best news, and should give us reason enough to rejoice in God's goodness and love for us as we wish all we know or meet Merry Christmas!

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.

Advent Meditation: Do I See What He Sees?

Jesus and his first Advent

"Saints before the altar bending, watching long in hope and fear.
Suddenly the Lord, descending, In His temple shall appear.
Come and worship! Come and worship! Worship Christ the new born King."
4th verse of "Angels from the Realms of Glory" by James Montgomery

In the closing chapters of Matthew, we encounter Jesus pensive, on edge, thoroughly aware that the last week of his life is upon him. Matthew 23 almost reads like a precursor of Luther nailing his protests upon the door at All Saints Church in Wittenberg as he denounces the religious authorities who have corrupted the Scriptures and have turned God into something that he isn't. I like the rawness of The Message which captures the bite of Jesus' polemic against the Pharisees and teachers of the law:

Pulling no punches

  "Snakes! Reptilian sneaks! Do you think you can worm your way out of this? Never have to pay the piper? It's on account of people like you that I send prophets and wise guides and scholars generation after generation - and generation after generation you treat them like dirt,
  greeting them with lynch mobs, hounding them with abuse."

  "You can't squirm out of this: Every drop of righteous blood ever spilled on this earth, beginning with the blood of that good man Abel right down to the blood of Zechariah, Barachiah's son, whom you murdered at his prayers, is on your head. All this, I'm telling you, is coming down on you, on your generation" (vv. 33-34).

Clint as a picture of Jesus?

Talk about not mincing words. In my mind, substitute whatever face you imagine as the countenance of Jesus at this moment and insert Clint Eastwood's from Pale Rider. Judgment Day for them is fast approaching.




As he leaves Jerusalem for Bethany, apparently some of his disciples had never been to the city before or why else would they marvel over the structures they saw here? Herod's Temple alone was forty years in the making and so any previous visitor to Jerusalem would already be familiar with the great construction projects going on there. But like awed sightseers in D.C., a few of them come up to Jesus thinking he will share in their wonder. Instead he responds with prophetic words that quickly dampens their enthusiasm. "One day, in the not-too-distant future, these impressive structures will be nothing but a heap of rubble" (see Matthew 24:2). There must have been something in his voice that sent chills up their spine for later some of them come to him and ask when this cataclysmic event would happen and what other signs would accompany his coming.

Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives

He begins a long, somber dissertation that has been dissected and discussed ever since. He doesn't paint a picture of things getting better and better but ultimately worse and worse. Wars, famines, natural disasters and the like are all the stuff of routine history. Every tsunami or tornado we experience is another spike on the monitor that tells us that a new world is closer to being birthed. But in the process everything that appears permanent will be shaken and many who profess devotion will betray him and one another. "...it will be dog-eat-dog, everyone at each other's throat, everyone hating each other" (v. 10, Msg). At this point, things are falling apart - preachers are deceiving, people are turning away or ratting each other out to the authorities. It's not just the terrain that is no longer certain (e.g., "earthquakes") it's who you can trust and depend on. Your nearest and dearest may stab you in the back because they fear for their life. "Because of the increase of wickedness the love of most will grow cold..." (v. 12, NIV). Such are the conditions that will prevail immediately before his return.

What is required of disciples (says Jesus) is persistence in the face of great adversity and pressure to bail out. As he continues his soliloquy, Jesus is painting in broad strokes of believers running for their lives, seeking refuge outside the city and of travail never known in the record of history. These times will be so difficult that it will be a mercy that heaven cuts them short. "End-times" people - people who like to study these things - have come up with a myriad of explanations, charts, graphs and what have you to tell us when exactly these things will happen. Other than my first two years of following Jesus (1980-81), my interest in this stuff has pretty much waned. Every other year or so, a new prophetic guy arises professing greater insight than those that have preceded him. They can cause a bit of a stir and for awhile they are the "end-time" guru but as time goes forward it is easy to disregard their "sky-is-falling" mentality. Jesus, however, counsels against a "Que sera sera" attitude. On the contrary, he warns us to be ready to run, to flee lest we get consumed in the coming conflagration that is certain to come.

We are now in the season of Advent and just the other day at our monthly ministerial gathering, Pastor Norm reminded all of us that the word, advent, means "coming." Most of this month we pastor-types will spend a lot of energy in our sermonizing looking backwards reminiscing about his first coming replete with its pastoral images of shepherds and wise men and a star. It's a story that needs to be retold at least once a year. But instead of hanging out in Luke 2 or Matthew 2, we might do a better job of preparing the members of our parish for Christmas by turning their attention to Matthew 23-25 or Mark 13. If "coming" is what the season is all about whatever else Jesus may mean by such things as "the abomination that causes desolation" (24:15) and the lesson from the fig tree (24:32) watchfulness among his disciples is called for as his Second Advent draws ever closer.

Jesus at his second Advent