Advent and Christmas greetings to you all!
Yesterday marked our 4th Sunday of Advent, and as any child who can count to four can tell you: Christmas is almost here! Our sanctuaries are probably all decked out for the holiday, the Advent wreath front and center, altar guilds are preparing to swap out the Advent blue paraments for the white & gold of Christmas, poinsettias will be gathered, the tiny candles we use when we sing “Silent Night” will be unearthed and examined to see if they have another service left in them. If we have Sunday school, our Sunday school has presented their Christmas program. We are ready.
But I sometimes wonder if we really are ready for Jesus. Maybe we’re ready for the Jesus of Christmas Eve, who so quietly lays in the manger or is gently cuddled to his mother’s breast. We’re ready for a Jesus who is just a fuzzy wee head poking out from a swaddling cloth. We’re ready for a Jesus we can pack away in a box with the rest of the nativity & put away until next Christmas.
There is nothing that Christmas Jesus does that I struggle with. He’s cute. He’s sweet. He smells like hay and milk. His little fingernails look like pearls & his ears like shells. But we really only get to spend a small amount of time with Jesus as a baby.
In just a few weeks, we will celebrate his baptism, when at the beginning of his ministry a very adult Jesus approaches his cousin John the Baptist & asks to be baptized. Upon rising out of the water of the Jordan river, a dove “descends” from heaven (it’s really more like a cannon balling seagull who has spied a French fry, but ‘descends’ just sounds so much polite & elegant) and a voice proclaims, “This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!”
So what does Jesus say? To be frank, he says a lot of stuff we struggle with. He doesn’t hesitate to criticize the religious leaders of his day, who (contrary to popular perception) were not evil people. They were earnest people who truly sought to do God’s will. It’s easy to paint them as evil, because then we can distance ourselves from them—we are good people. They were not. Therefore, Jesus isn’t also talking to us. But I spend a lot of time with God’s People—and I would absolutely describe us as earnest people who truly seek to do the will of God. And sometimes that means we utterly grasp what it means—if that means feeding hungry people through our congregational feeding ministries or gathering enough goodies to fill 400 stockings for underprivileged kids. We understand our assignment & we execute.
But sometimes, doing God’s will is difficult. Sometimes we don’t understand it, or we understand it and simply don’t want to do it. Sometimes God asks us to step out of our comfort zone, asks us to change how we do things, expects us to put the needs of others ahead of our own wants, calls us to exist in ways we’ve never done before and feel awkward & uneasy. We want, more than anything, to stay where we’re comfortable. In the stable. In the manger. With the little lord Jesus asleep on the hay.
But Jesus doesn’t stay in that stable. He grows up. And he changes the world. And we are called to share in that world-shaking transformation that Jesus began. Following Jesus has never supposed to be comfortable (“deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me”). And following Jesus has never supposed to be about us (“love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind & strength and love your neighbors as yourself”). Jesus is bigger than Christmas and Easter (though we seem most comfortable interacting with him in those two contexts). Jesus has come to change everything. Everything. And there is nothing comfortable about everything changing.
Martin Luther said that if you are frightened by the Jesus of Scripture, come to the manger and cradle the Christ Child. This is excellent advice. But as Christians, as followers of Jesus, we are not meant to stay there. We are meant to go. Go out. Seek the lost. The forgotten. The marginalized. The people who have been told over and over again by earnest religious leaders who sought to do the will of God that they are somehow “wrong” and therefore: unwanted. Unclean. Unholy. Unwelcome.
No matter what else happens in scripture, Jesus aligns himself with those unwanted, unclean, unholy, & unwelcome ones. And because Jesus sees them, wants them, eats with them…their lives are changed. Even as ours were.
When I was in seminary, I had a professor who told me, “When you pray ‘Come Lord Jesus’ you better make sure you mean it, because Jesus will show up & you probably will not like what he has to say.” In my more honest moments: I know he was right. I know that Jesus’ coming will change everything. And most of the time: I’m totally OK with how things are. I don’t want things to change. The way things are work well for me. I know what to expect. I know how to act. I know what to do. I know what to say.
In becoming human, God in Christ Jesus seeks to change all of that. Jesus introduces a Holy Uncertainty into our lives, that in a weird paradox becomes a Blessed Certainty. Because of the incarnation, God in Christ Jesus points out where humanity is falling short & in his death and resurrection reassures us that our certainty is not found in religion or religious trappings but can & will be found in God alone. Any sense of certainty the world offers us pales in comparison to the certainty we find in being named Children of God. The world will change. The world has changed. The world has changed more than we could have imagined even four years ago. But God has not.
God comes to us as a newborn infant. As a precocious child in the temple. As a young activist challenging all the powers that be to imagine a different way of being. God becomes Emmanuel, God-with-us. In Jesus, God puts on flesh & lives among us. All of us. The holy. The broken. The lost. The found. The wanted. The unwanted. And in so doing: changed the world.
I invite you to join me in taking a deep (maybe shaky) breath, and praying, “Come, Lord Jesus. Come & change the world. Here I am. Send me.”
Blessed Christmas to you all,