How Do We Prepare For Christmas?
Good Morning Friends,
This morning I was looking at a painting attributed to Pieter Brueghel, called The Fall of Icarus. And a poem by W. H. Auden related thereto for it describes a moment beyond time relevant for our time and the importance to prepare for the tests of life. Auden writes this about Brueghel’s painting:
“About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
And having laid all this out I get back to the task at hand, but perhaps seeing with new insight the significance of a transformed partridge in a pear tree even as I ask: Just How Do We Prepare For Christmas?
Scripture: In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'”
Luke 3:1-6 (NRSV)
Message: Did you know that you can buy a partridge for about $20 but that getting them to perch in a pear tree is a really difficult task. So too for churches and parishioners, it is difficult to avoid the commercialization of Christmas. But perhaps we should not make it out to be such a bad thing if we seek the presence of Christ in the experience. The thing is that Advent is to help us focus on the spiritual preparation for Christmas and the coming of our Lord in the flesh to dwell with us more than the buying of presents, attending parties, singing carols and decorating the home. It is more about leveling out the rough edges of our lives than a solstice party. So, maybe this year we will spend more time reading scripture and contemplating the advent wreath’s unending circle of hope, peace, joy and love of Christ as we light candles. For such preparation is witness that the light of the world is with us attending in an elevated aesthetic focused on the healing of our brokenness and the brokenness of others beyond time. But then again maybe we should not put too much faith in wax. Icarus’ fate as Christ’s in the first coming is a fall to earth and brokenness that many consider failure. But if it is considered failure, it is the most important failure of all history. In preparing for Christmas we must attend to all those broken events beyond time for they are likely more important than we realize. Even the failures that might one day be redeemed when Christ returns.
Pray we share in the present experience of the ancient expectation of the Messiah’s first coming even as we share in the longing for the Savior’s second coming. Pray our ardent desire is faithfully renewed in a way that makes us ready to meet Jesus. Pray we realize that God’ love is to move us while the love of God remains forever unmoved because it is out of time. Pray we prepare this Advent to receive Christ as though He were coming for the first time. Pray we make this Christmas a celebration of the birth of Our Savior and the great gift of faith we have received. Pray we realize that by striving to live in the presence of Christ during Advent, we will receive the best present of all. Pray this season we attend to the moments of importance in the events of life. Pray we fly high and land smoothly.
Blessings,
John Lawson
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