Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
People love to celebrate. We love to throw parties, dress up, eat big meals followed up by great desserts and coffee or wines, and make a big to-do of things. Any chance we get, whether it’s a birthday, anniversary, or even on the occasion of moving away, we love to get everybody together and have a good time.
It’s in our nature to celebrate. Celebration helps us to remember things, how old we are, how long we’ve been with someone, or how important the people in our current situation in life have been to us. When we don’t celebrate, we have a tendency to forget, or worse, to take for granted. In fact, this is one of the chief reasons we gather together every Sunday, to celebrate the work of God in Christ, to be reminded of the good words of the Gospel, lest we forget. We celebrate to defy forgetfulness.
There’s another thing which we defy by celebration. We defy the darkness of life. We defy all the ominous things which lie at our doors every morning- death, sickness, war, hatred, loss, and whatever else may come our way. We rebel against them, and in spite of them we declare that we can still enjoy life, even though the world may tempt us to despair.
In fact, we so love any opportunity to defy these horrible things, that not only do we love to celebrate, but we love to celebrate early. We love to celebrate not only the thing itself which excites us so much, but we celebrate also the waiting for this expected thing. For example, when a man and a woman have been dating for years, when everyone knows how wonderful a couple they are, and when it’s been obvious to everyone else that the next step is coming for sure, they get engaged. And everybody goes crazy. Women jump up and down, they tear up, they make well-intentioned criticisms like “it’s about time” and “I wish mine would man up and do the same.” Men laugh, congratulate, shake hands, and pat on the back whilst whispering sarcastic things like “well, you’re in for it now,” and “sorry for your loss.”
Then, of course, there are the engagement parties, and searching for dresses and tuxes. There’s the sampling of cakes, the talking to potential photographers, and, the mother of all engagement activities, the forming of the guest-list. All while the semi-blissful, semi-exhausted couple beam with the delight of getting ready to tie the knot. It seems almost as if people get more excited about being engaged than they do about being married. I’ve never known a married couple to jump up and down together going “we’re married, we’re married, woohoo!” But I have known engaged couples to behave that way.
The same is true when it comes to pregnancy as well. When a couple first discovers that they’re going to be parents, there’s the jumping, the laughing and screaming, the tears, and the well-intentioned jokes about having good “birthing hips.” For the guys there again are the slaps on the back, the cigars, the somewhat inappropriate jokes about virility, as well as comments like “if you have a boy buy a baseball, if you have a girl buy a shotgun.”
And, again, there are the parties, the baby showers, and the selection of cribs, wallpaper, and the eternal question of which toy is most likely to make your kid a genius by two. All the while the semi-blissful, semi-scared-out-of-their-wits couple beam with love as they prepare a place in their lives and homes for this new human being. And again, it seems as if people are more excited about the pregnancy than the actual task of being a parent. Beforehand it’s all laughing and hugging and the ever-important cuteness scale when it comes to blankets and one-sies. Everyone talks on and on about the first smile, the first word, the first step. But when the baby actual comes, it’s eating, and pooping, and eating, and pooping, and eating, and then some screaming, and then pooping, then screaming again, and eating again, and finally, pooping; with some wonderful moments scattered throughout of course.
I remember watching this clip from the recent movie “The Backup Plan,” where one of the characters is asking his friend what it’s like being a parent, and his friend turns to him and says “the best way I can describe it is this: it’s awful, awful, awful, and then, something incredible happens, then awful, awful, awful, awful, and then, something incredible happens again… I feel like I’m drowning, like I’m gasping to get my old life back, and then a small moment happens that so magical, so life-affirming, that it makes it all worthwhile.”
And, in a sense, this is not all that different from the season of Advent. You see, from what I hear, pastors who are liturgically-minded, such as myself, often waste a lot of time and energy trying in vain to convince their congregation that there is a fundamental difference between Advent and Christmastide. They try over and over again to drive home the fact that “it ain’t Christmas yet;” to stem the natural human inclination to celebrate everything early.
You see, Advent, as you may well know, is the four weeks leading up to Christmas. Christmastide, or the Season of Christmas, is actually the two weeks following Christmas, from the 25th of December to the 5th of January. This, of course, is where the old Christmas Carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas” comes from. I remember thinking as a child “man, I wish I could have Christmas for twelve days, I’m getting jipped out of 11/12ths of the presents I could be getting.”
Advent, like engagements and pregnancies, is this weird time in the Church year where we begin to celebrate the expectation of something which hasn’t happened yet. We celebrate not the birth of Christ per-se, but the anticipation of His birth. We celebrate the preparation, we celebrate all that has led up to this moment, and we celebrate the loss of everything which this moment put a stop to.
All of this leads up, of course, to the one proclamation, the one defining moment in history where God becomes the son of a virgin in a stable and He is called Emmanuel, “God with Us.”
In Advent, we celebrate the beginning of this special time in which we live. We live in a time in which Christ has come, but He is also coming again. He’s been born, died, and raised, but His work is not yet finished. Our enemy has been defeated, but he is not yet dead, and his works are by no means erased from the world.
Our passages for today address several of those works, but what stuck out particularly to me were the issues of violence and poverty. In a time such as ours, you cannot pick up a newspaper without seeing these two themes throughout it’s pages, from first to last. There is war in Afghanistan, potential war in Korea, there is poverty in the U.S., a collapsing economy in Europe. In every town in our country people continue to murder, starve, and die.
In Advent we celebrate the fact that, sometimes, being a Christian is a lot like being a parent; it’s awful, awful, awful, and then, something incredible happens, and then awful, awful, awful, and then, something incredible happens again, you may feel like your drowning, gasping, wondering where God is at in all this. And then, a small moment happens that’s so magical, so life-affirming, that it makes it all worthwhile. In this time of Advent we celebrate the fact that things will not always be as they are. We celebrate the fact that God Himself stepped into human history. The only solution to all of our pain and suffering has come to live amongst us.
You see, though we celebrate, in Advent, the time in which the world waited eagerly for the arrival of Christ; we, living in the here and now, know the rest of the story. We know the story of the incarnation, the fact that God actually took on human flesh. We know the story of the Cross, the story of our forgiveness because of what this infant Christ would do for us when He became a man. And we know the story of the Resurrection, the story of what awaits us on the other side of death, the fact that when all is said and done, it still isn’t over for us, there is a life which awaits us in which there will be no more war, no more starvation, no more oppression.
We celebrate, in our passages for today, the day which pre-Christian Israelites longed for a prophesied about, the day which the birth of the messiah would be the beginning of. They looked to the day when all violence, injustice, and all the evils of the world would cease.
And we know, in this time of Advent, that it is only through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ that there can be peace, that we can be filled, and that we can be free. We celebrate, in a sense, our own waiting for this time to occur. In Christmastide we will celebrate the fact that, because He was born in a manger, we can be born again; because He lived amongst us, we can begin to live with each other, because He came in love for us, who once considered Him an enemy, we too can love our own enemies.
We expect, in this time before the birth of Christ, that one day the wolf will lay down with the lamb, in Jesus name; the poor will become rich, in Jesus name; the meek shall inherit the earth, in Jesus name. We, like the lamb, will be able to lay beside our own enemies without fear, without anger, without pain, and without hatred, in Jesus name.
In our tendency to celebrate things early, we recognize that because of the birth of Christ, in some sense, these things have already begun to happen. They have not happened the world over, but they have begun happening in our hearts; they have not reached their fulness, but they can fulfill our hearts. In defiance of a world lost in despair, Christ steps in and offers comfort. In defiance of a world of loneliness, God Himself steps in to live within our hearts.
In this, the darkness of winter, we celebrate the coming of the Light of God. In this, the coldness of winter, we celebrate the warmth of God’s love for us. We defy the darkness, coldness, and outright evil of the world which surrounds us and so often lays at our door, and instead celebrate the beauty, innocence, and holiness of the One who was laid in the straw of a stable.
We celebrate that He who is the end of all things, the fulfillment of every pure hope and desire, has come down amongst us poor, hateful, warring sinners, to be God for us, God with us. We celebrate our expectation of Emmanuel in our lives and in the world around us.
Amen.
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