When Christmas Comes to the Unprepared

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
For what thanks can we render to God for you in return for the joy with which we rejoice before our God because of you? Night and day we pray deeply that we might see your face and supply whatever is lacking in your belief. Now may the very God who is our Father and our Lord Jesus make straight our path to you, and may the Lord intensify you and fill you to overflowing with love for each other and for all we are feeling for you. So may your hearts be established: faultless in dedication before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints. Amen.

It’s the question that you have already begun to hear, no doubt. Now that Thanksgiving is past. Now that December has come. Now that the Advent wreath and the poinsettias have made their appearance in the sanctuary (with more to come tonight), the question is on everyone’s lips when we don’t know what else to say: Are you ready for Christmas?

What a horrible question to ask someone! I ask it myself from time to time, but when I think about it – what a horrible question! As if there isn’t enough anxiety in the air already, we go around asking each other if we are ready for Christmas when the number one thing we feel unsettled about in this season is whether or not we are prepared for the holiday. Of course, we’re not ready and if you tell me that you ARE ready for Christmas, well, that’s only going to make me more anxious. “He’s got it all done. Why can’t I have it all done?”

But Advent comes to ask us a different sort of question. When we talk about being ready for Christmas, we are usually talking about presents, decorations, travel plans, Christmas cards. But Jesus is not really concerned about any of those things. Advent is the season in which the church asks us to think about not are we prepared for the coming of the relatives, but are we prepared for the coming of a savior. I don’t bring this up because I want to add one more layer of anxiety onto our already overloaded holiday schedules. I bring it up because Advent is a gift – an early holiday gift – that can help us to be truly ready for Christmas and which has the potential to pull the anxiety rug out from under all those other concerns we have at this time of the year.

Now the readings of this first Sunday in the season may not seem to say that. When we read the gospel story from Luke this morning it sounded a little…well…dark and they may have caused you to begin worrying. Jesus is speaking to his followers in the last days before his crucifixion here and he tells them that things are going to be bad in the future. There will be signs in the heavens and signs on the earth. There will be upheavals and trials. And all of this will be the sign that Christ is returning to make all things right. It was to be good news for them because for a persecuted people, which they were going to be, the end of the way things are was the end of their suffering. But for those of us who are not persecuted for our faith, the end may seem less welcome.

In fact, for us, living twenty centuries after Jesus’ words to the disciples, we may even begin to doubt these words…to doubt the second coming of Christ…to doubt his advent into a troubled world. We may even not wish for it to come. I saw a bumper sticker once that said, “Jesus is coming. Look busy.” It was a humorous way to talk about a serious PR problem that the Second Coming has – We’re not sure we want it and we’re not sure how Jesus will treat us if he does return. That bumper sticker presents us with the image of Jesus as a grouchy school teacher or an unloved boss leaving the class or the workers to play but then coming back to punish them for misbehaving.

But we have another reading from the scriptures today and I want to listen to that one, too, because it gives us a much different sense of what this second advent of Christ is all about, something that may help us to be prepared for Christmas, which is about Christ’s first advent. Along the way I want to ask you to listen for three counterintuitive rules for Christmas preparation. You can call them Joyner’s Advent Advisories, if you like.

So let’s see what we have. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonian Christians is probably the oldest letter we have in the New Testament. It was most likely written before all of Paul’s other letters and before the gospels even made their way to paper or papyrus. So what we have here is a glimpse of how the first Christian communities saw what they were doing and what it was they were called to do as they served God.

Thessonika was an influential city in Greece. It occupied a key spot on the major Roman road that cut across the north of Greece which meant that it was a crossroads town, a place where the currents of the world met. To be a Christian in this place meant to be a significant minority and a persecuted minority. Christians quickly became a threat to the status quo and to the empire. Their allegiance was to someone beyond the emperor. Their allegiance was to Jesus.

But despite their marginal status in the world, the Thessalonian Christians had a strong church and Paul loved them. Paul didn’t just establish a church in Thessalonika and go off and forget them. He wasn’t a “hit and run” apostle. He continued to have a very strong affection for them and his letter is laced with the joy he feels in knowing them. And above all he gives thanks to God for them.

Which brings me to my first Advent Advisory. If this passage gives us a lens to see what Christians ought to do as they await Christ’s coming again, the first thing we see is this emphasis on giving thanks. To update that a little bit, I would say, “The best light display is a candle.” Oh yes, I know a candle is about waiting and watching, but it’s also about thankfulness and an expression of hope in the God to whom we give thanks. You light a candle in a window to remember a loved one serving in the military far from home. You light a candle in the window to guide a friend to a safe haven. You light a candle in the advent wreath to give thanks for the joy we feel in this place in this season.

There’s a movie out right now called “Deck the Halls,” and the premise is that two neighbors get into an all-out war with each other to see who can put up the greatest light display in the neighborhood. I haven’t seen it but I imagine that they take it to ridiculous extremes and forget the real meaning of Christmas. I don’t know what the heartwarming ending looks like but I bet it doesn’t end with a candle.

There is a lot going on in this season and I love to see the lights on the houses and buildings. The Christmas specials on the television sometimes remind us of what’s important. Linus reciting the Christmas story on an empty stage in the Charlie Brown Christmas is still one of my favorite moments. But we need the story we hear here, too. We need to know that there is something different about the lights in the wreath. To walk into the church is like walking into an alternate reality. The world may not know that Jesus has come to save it and to turn it upside down and to redeem it, but we do know that. We do believe it. And we need to live in this world.

My second Advent Advisory? What the world needs now is love. Maybe Hal David and Burt Bacharach came up with that first, but I’m borrowing it. This is what Paul talks about, too. You may not have noticed it in the midst of the dark images in the readings, but laced throughout Paul’s letter is the language of love. He says that he is praying earnestly to see their faces again and that is born of his love for them. And his prayer for them is that they may be intensified and filled to overflowing with love for each other and for all. What are they supposed to do while they await Christ’s coming? Love!

Now this doesn’t mean sticky sentimentality. For a community that was being forced underground by oppression, there was no room for sentiment. The Thessalonians were not going around sending each other chocolates and Hallmark cards. The love the shared was born of deeply sharing each other’s lives and recognizing that Christ’s call was not just for them but for all the world, particularly the poor and outcast.

We live in a world which has largely ignored the power of love to transform things. We may be discovering the limits of the other kinds of power we possess, but we have surely forgotten how powerful love can be. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the other leaders of the nonviolent civil rights movement had to work very hard to keep this Christian truth at the forefront when they were working to overthrow the effects of racism and segregation in the South. There were a lot of folks who felt that the walls would never fall without violence and struggle. But there were folks, Jews and Christians, who believed that love has its own power and that overcoming segregation was good, not only for those being oppressed, but also for those who were dominant. So they trained diligently in how to live out love in a prophetic way. They were witnesses to a different order and a different kingdom and many of them drew their inspiration from the love they had known in Jesus Christ.

What are we doing to be witnesses to that kind of love in our community and our world? Are we reaching out to our neighbors in need? Are we speaking out and joining hands with our neighbors?

This week, our clergy group met again with guidance counselors in the Northampton School system. Karen and I were there representing our church. We began to make plans for another series of cottage meetings to bring together our community, across racial lines, to talk about how we help our students succeed and how we enlist them in leading our community when they graduate. We want them to know that we want our young people to consider coming back when they go away to become teachers. To come back and better the community with new businesses. To come back as people who can help us overcome the barriers that remain. That is a work of love.

Finally, my third Advent advisory, which also is drawn from Paul’s words: Jesus is coming every day. Jesus is coming every day. It’s not just at the end of history that we should expect Christ’s return. Christ is lord of every morning and the kingdom, so he says, is among us and at hand. So our lives need to be about the work of the kingdom every day, not just in special seasons of the year.

There are people who need to hear Christ’s good news every day. There are people who need to have their lives turned around every day. There are people suffering every day. There are people wondering what their purpose in this life is every day. There are people giving their lives over to idols and distractions and drunkenness and drugs and dissipation every day. There are people who doubt their worth and doubt that they are loved every day. There are people struggling to stay on the path every day. There are people whose relationships are foundering every day.

But there are people overcoming all of this every day. There are people who know that the kingdom will not be brought in by their efforts but who work for it anyway every day. There are people who know how much their lives have been transformed by love and who live out of that every day. There are people who find healing and hope in prayer every day. There are people who know that little children and surly teenagers and difficult parents all alike are children of God and are deserving of our thanks every day. You know what you call these people – Christians because they do all this knowing that Jesus Christ is coming every day.

If we live with this expectation – that the return of Christ is not just a story we trot out several times a year to increase our anxiety but a promise to be realized every day – then it changes everything. And it begs the question – what are you going to do this Christmas? How could it be different for you? How will you give thanks for this community and for the ways you have known Christ through it? What’s the candle of thanks you light? How will you love others in a visible way? Who is God calling you to love? What are the practices you can undertake to help you be ready for the day? In prayer and journaling, in meditation and meeting together with other Christians, in worship and devotion – how are you meeting the Jesus who comes to you each day?

Don’t have any anxiety about Christmas. It’s coming and will come whether you have every ornament on the tree or not. The challenge for you on this first Sunday of Advent is to open the gift that is this season and to see what it is challenging you to do to be prepared for the coming of Christ. Jesus is coming. Don’t look busy. Rejoice. Thanks be to God.