Following The Star: Preparing

"Following The Star:  Preparing"
Matthew 3:1-6

I think I'm on fairly safe ground when I say that getting ready for the Christmas season takes a great deal of preparation.  Maybe some of you are list makers, organizing all your tasks and checking them off, making sure all the details are covered.   Are any of these on your list:

__ haul all the boxed Christmas decorations out of your storage area
__ set up the artificial Christmas tree
__ decorate it
__ put outdoor lights up
__ haul all the empty decoration boxes back to the storage area
__ figure out what to buy for whom
__ purchase presents/gift cards
__ wrap presents
__ mail presents that go out of town
__ purchase Christmas cards (as if anyone does that anymore)
__ go over Christmas card list, adding and deleting names
__ become distressed that you deleted more names than added
__ write in cards, address them, stamp and mail  (hopefully before New Years Day)
__ plan for any kind of Christmas open house
__ dust off Christmas CD's (or records, depending on your vintage) and start playing them
__ if relatives are coming, clean house and guest rooms (if relatives aren't coming, leave guest rooms dirty)
__ if you're traveling to relatives homes, make travel arrangements, and smile thinking about them cleaning their guest rooms (you hope)
__ plan menus
__ make several runs to Dillon’s for all the food being prepared
__ attend various and sundry Christmas oriented gatherings (including, hopefully, church)
__ open presents
__ clean up after opening presents
__ seriously ponder the significance and/or meaning of some of the presents you got
__ let your dog figure out the best use of certain presents
__ put together toys that need putting together
__ repair new and newly broken toys you put together a half hour previously
__ haul all the boxes out of storage
__ put away all the decorations
__ put all the boxed decorations back in storage for another year
__ watch a lot of football
__ fall asleep watching a lot of football

Then, about one month later, (and put this on your calendar so you won't forget it), sit down and try to remember as much as you can about all that stuff on your list that you did.  Then try to gauge its impact, either positive or negative, on you and your family.

It's amazing how little of a real impact all that external preparation ultimately makes on our lives.  The only real impact comes on that highest of holy days, that falls some time in January, called VISA Day.  That day when everyone opens their credit card bill and utters, "Oh, my, God!"

Now this is not to say there will be nothing memorable.  Often there comes a Christmas season more full of memory making than others.  But for the most part, I am going to hazard the generalization that most Christmas' come and go with little real impact.  If that generalization rings true in your experience as well, then doesn't it all seem kind of contradictory and sad when you think of all the effort and time and money we put into it?  To make it something that it usually does not turn out to be?  Either our memories are too short, or the experiences are just not that memorable.

What I have found is that if a Christmas season is remembered, it is because of something that happened out of the ordinary--something unplanned, something surprising and serendipitous.  For all the planning we do, it is that which we haven't planned for that makes Christmas memories.  In other words, be prepared for surprises.  They just might be the only meaningful parts of your Christmas celebration.

II

Certainly it has been so, ever since that first Christmas.  Mainly because no one expected the first Christmas to even happen when it did, how it did, and where it did.  Sure there were expectations for a Messiah, or a kingdom ruled by God.  But no one was prepared for how it all unfolded.  Not even Joseph and Mary.

Part of the problem was that the spiritual climate had been anesthetized by the political hubbub of the day.  A census was going on and everyone had to travel back to their ancestral home town to be registered, counted, and assessed for tax purposes.  Everyone was preparing for their trips and grumbling all the while.  It caused physical, mental, and financial hardships on many.  Everyone was preparing for that, but they were not prepared for God's surprise.

They didn't have time to think about God, except to grumble at God for this mass exodus from one place to another.

Imagine if an angel of the Lord appeared in your living room on Christmas Eve, or on Christmas morning, in the midst of your most riotous unwrapping of gifts, and told you to go at once to such-and-such a place, because the Savior of the world has arrived.
"Well, gee, Mr. Angel, sir, uh we're kind of busy at the moment.  We're having our family get-together, and we're right in the middle of unwrapping gifts, and there's a bunch of people coming over later on, which has created a long list of things I have to prepare for our meal, and we'll have to clean up this mess, and we need to put together some of the kids toys because they're anxious to play with them, and thank you for coming, we'll try and drop by some time later--where did you say this place was again?"

Ever since that first Christmas, people have been busy preparing, but they have never really been prepared for what God was, and is, about to do.  The preparations, even though masked under the guise of religiosity, reap instead the fruits of spiritual insensitivity and dullness.

III

There are other kinds of preparations a person can make.  They will take just as much, if not more, effort on our parts, as compared with the other kind we are all familiar with.

But first, I think we need to face up to something personally hard for me to face up to.  And that is, a great deal of our Christmas customs and circumstances, which involve the greatest amounts of our time, effort, and money are not going to go away.  It appears we are not far from the day when fireworks stands will also be selling Christmas trees.  We won't be able to escape all the months of advance publicity and pressure unless we check ourselves and our families into a monastery some time before Halloween and then check out the day before Super Bowl Sunday.  All that stuff nagging at us to prepare for Christmas in that way, is not going to leave us unscathed.

One year, I talked the kids into just keeping Christmas a purely religious holiday.  We would have a small creche scene instead of a tree.  Instead of presents we would give the money we would have spent to a worthy charity.  We would have devotions and read from the Bible leading up to Christmas Day.  No glitter.  No hype.  No shopping.

That was an odd Christmas.  We didn't celebrate any of our future Christmas' in that way.  But who is to say that maybe in that Christmas' oddness was more truth, or authenticity, or Godliness.  I don't know.  The point is, as I've said already, it's hard to break away from established customs and create new ones.  Or reclaim more authentic ones.

So, given that hard reality, we need to try a different tact if we are going to keep anything of spiritual value and Godly expectation alive during the Advent season.  If we can't get rid of all the gloss and hucksterism, why not transform it--more specifically, redefine it?

Jesus' ministry was a mastery of taking ordinary situations and images and totally redefining them, instilling in them a spiritual dimension.  It wasn't a blending of the sacred and the secular, but a total redefinition of the secular by the spiritual.  Bread and wine into remembrance of His sacrifice.  Pearls, mustard seed, and buried treasure into images of the Kingdom of God.  Candles and bushel baskets into the message of personal evangelism.  Stories of an adulteress and a prodigal son demonstrating the amazing forgiveness and love of God.  A stable and a manger--a place for domesticated stock animals--as the birth place of a King.  A cross and a grave, symbols of a humiliating death, transformed into symbols of grace and eternal life.

We don't take this Christ-given ability and task of redefining our world seriously enough.  Mainly because we don't think critically enough about the definitions we are living under presently.  We just go on doing, because we don't know why exactly.  We don't look circumspectly enough into the meanings that are currently being massaged into our Christmas season.

We therefore lack the cleverness, the ability of infusing the spiritual into the mundane and the ordinary--a work that Christ performed and has now passed on to us.  It is no wonder that He told his followers, "Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; therefore be shrewd as serpents, and innocent as doves" (Matthew 10:16).

So, here's what I'm getting at.  Why not prepare for Christmas by redefining all the gloss and glitter?  Take all the customs that we so blithely swallow each December, examine them more critically in light of the Biblical story, and prayerfully and with spiritual creativity, discern how they can be redefined.

For example, take our Christmas tree here in the sanctuary.  The Christmas tree in and of itself is not a strong religious symbol--especially when you think about how we would be defining Christmas if this tree were decorated with shiny glass balls, plastic glow-in-the-dark icicles, Snoopy's dressed up like Santa Claus on top of his dog house, candy canes, stringed popcorn, and topped with Rudolph the red nose blinking reindeer.

The secular tree takes on new definition in this way with the white chrismons.  By being redefined with the religious symbolism, this tree calls into question all other secularly decorated trees, rather than the other way around.  Let the evergreen tree remind us of everlasting life.  The triangular shape remind us of the Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  It reminds us of the true stories of the season, calling us back to God's reality, and beckoning us forward towards further redefinition.

We can take all such Christmas commercialization, and turn the tables on it, not letting it define our season for us, but taking them and redefining them according to the true meanings of the season.  We won't throw out the Baby with the glittery bath water, but we will keep the Baby and change the temperament of the water a bit.

We will be a bit more shrewd each season as we seek to outwit the world and the definitions it seeks to lull us into accepting.  And by so doing we will lull the world into accepting the true spiritual dimensions and definitions of the Christmas celebration.  It is subversion of the first order, but it is God's work.  And I will guarantee you, it is more exciting and exhilarating than anything you've done at Christmas.


IV

Now I want to take this subversive plot of redefining our preparations and our plans for Christmas one step further.  This process of redefinition has to do with more than all the hype and fanfare of our outward decorations.  It has to do most importantly with preparing the inner sanctum of your own personal lives.

How do you personally prepare for the Savior's coming?  How do you allow Him to break through all the hustle-bustle window dressing in your life?  How do you define yourself, and more importantly, how much are you willing to allow yourself to be redefined by this shrewd and innocent Jesus?

To what length are you willing to go to change the sum of what your life is adding up to--to not only change the answer, but all the questions as well?  Part of the message and the power celebrated at Christmastime is the chance to change what was the gaudy into what is Godly, the secular into what is sacred, the glitter into what is grander by far.

Just imagine the power of Christian redefinition--to change the meaningless into the meaningful, not only for this Christmas, bur for our lives as well!

"...the kingdom of heaven is at hand...make ready the way of the Lord!"