What do
you want for Christmas? How about just
being free of finals? As a fellow
student, we’ve just come off this lovely break, but now we’re staring down the
barrel of some pretty busy weeks here and being free of that, that’ll be a
pretty good Christmas gift right there.
And I actually think there’s some spiritual wisdom in there for
Advent. That this is our time, a short four
week period, to prepare ourselves to celebrate Christmas, the celebration of
God’s first coming among us in human form, and by doing that to prepare ourselves
for Christ to come again, which is what our readings on this first Sunday of
Advent concentrate on. And I think that
asking ourselves what we want for Christmas, and making that less about what we
want to get, and more about what we want to be rid of can be a very real way to
do that.
So, what
do you want to be rid of? Finals, I
know, I get it. How about anxiety? How about a constant need to be right or in
charge? How about a fear of asserting
yourself, or any kind of fear at all? How about guilt, regret, grief, disease, pain…
sin. All of these things constrain us and
clamp us down. We want so desperately to
be free. And God hears that prayer and
is powerfully present to our longing.
God reaches out and says, “I know… you want to be free. You will be.”
We will be. God is bringing
liberation. Our redemption is at
hand. The Son of Man is coming with
clouds and glory, for us, to bring redemption, freedom from all that enslaves. …And
that’s what Christmas is all about, right?
Well,
kind of. Because Christmas always seems
so nice, fluffy, cute, comforting, with the shepherds and the angels and all
the lights. Well, it’s not. Shepherds smell, angels wrestle us to the
ground, and the sun, moon and stars will be part of the chaotic barrage of signs
promised. Today’s gospel doesn’t promise
nice, doesn’t sound fluffy and clashes with any sense of the ‘cute.’ And that’s right, because freedom isn’t cute;
it’s hard. Chains can be comfortable –
ask the Israelites marching out of Egypt without bread to eat. “Couldn’t you have left us in Egypt to die
where we had plenty of food to eat?”
In his
letter to the Thessalonians, Paul prays that their hearts will be strengthened
so as to be found blameless in holiness when the Lord Jesus comes. Consider how much we expect of our
hearts! In Paul’s letters we read of how
many things hearts do: hearts love, they grieve, they plan, they lust, they
suffer, they doubt and they believe. We
need strengthened hearts to receive the gift of redemption, something only God
can give so I pray the same today. May
God strengthen our hearts that they not grow weary. May God raise us to stand erect with heads
held high.
Here’s a
picture of what it looks like when God answers that prayer, that we see in another
story in Luke’s gospel. Picture a woman
bent over, unable to stand because she had been crippled by a spirit. Hear
Jesus call to her, tell her of the freedom he is granting and lay his hand on
her. She rises and gives glory to
God. “Rises and gives glory to God” –
are those two actions… or one? The glory
of God is a human being fully alive – the glory of God is you, living fully in
freedom in Christ.
That’s
the Advent posture, waiting with strong hearts and heads held high, alert to
the world and prayerfully connected to God, the God whose hand-print we still
feel on our heads, pulling us up. Because
to think we can stand under our own strength is to enslave ourselves to
something new – to a myth of independence, of self-sufficiency that will
collapse like so much sand when the powers of the heavens are shaken. No, all that can pull us back to our full
stature is that hand, that loving hand … pierced by a nail … counting the hairs
on our head and coming, coming to take us home.
That’s
what I want for Christmas, and that’s what Christ is bringing.
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