Getting Ready

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. We have four Sundays, or 28 days, before Christmas. Are you ready for Christmas? What do you have to do to get ready? Buy gifts for loved ones? Wrap them? Send Christmas cards? Put up and decorate a Christmas tree? Hang a wreath? Make Christmas cookies? Plan whom you have Christmas dinner with? Go caroling? What are the things you have to do to make yourself feel ready for Christmas? One of the things that I find interesting is the choices people make for their Christmas preparations, and how the tasks are assigned.

In our house, the weekend after Thanksgiving is the time that I move stuff in the basement to be able to use a stepladder to go into the crawl space under our kitchen, to bring out the plastic tubs in which we store our Christmas decorations. We store Meredith and Adam's decorations, too. Typically, we cut a live tree on a weekend early in December and I put on the lights, while Sharon and the girls put on the ornaments. I hang the wreaths and put up the other decorations, because I love doing it. I take responsibility for getting most of the Christmas cards ready for mailing -- I am not sure how that came to be my job. I do almost all the gift-wrapping, and Sharon was both relieved that I would do it and surprised that I love to do it. Who does this stuff in your family?

We used to know exactly what we needed to do as a congregation to get ready for Christmas. Usually someone in the Church of the Saviour arranged to get a Christmas tree from Dayspring for the foyer, and there would be a decorating party to which we would be invited, sometimes at the last minute. That was about the extent of decorating for the building. For our Seekers Church service, we would put up the crèche on the altar, and we would have our Advent wreath and candles. Another thing we would have to do was have our annual Seekers discussion about whether we could sing Christmas carols during Advent. Sonya Dyer felt strongly that Christmas carols should only be sung between Christmas and Epiphany, which meant that some never were sung, because we could only sing the old favorites at our Christmas Eve service of lessons and carols. However, Sonya and Manning are in Charlotte now and in the years since then we have begun singing a few Christmas carols before Christmas. However, we usually only sing the less well-known ones.

Then we had to plan our Christmas Eve congregational dinner and the service of lessons and carols. Part of what made that evening so memorable was the preparation. Various people chair the event, make sure we had a fairly accurate count of who would be coming, enlist volunteers for servers and for cleanup, and assign different foods to different families. Sharon would buy paper plates and plastic utensils from a party store. The morning of the 24^th, a group of volunteers would pile up the chairs in the sanctuary, bring the tables up from the furnace room and down from the 2^nd and 3^rd floors, move the piano out into the center of the foyer to become the buffet for entrees, put down the tablecloths and centerpieces, and set the tables with plastic utensils. Celebration Circle would enlist people to do the readings of the lessons for the service.

Now that we are finally here in this building, we have had to plan for Christmas with the freedom to decorate our own building as we would like. Have we decided or are we still discovering what we want to do? Will we have a Christmas tree? I hate to ask whether this is still an open issue, and whether it should be real or artificial. (Will this become yet another issue on which to discuss our environmental views, or is that already decided?) If we are having a tree, whether real or artificial, have we decided where we should we put it? Will we make enough decorations on Sunday morning for it, or will we need to purchase some or make additional ones at home? Does the crèche go on the altar, or downstairs in the window or on the stage? We have candle lights for the windows, but will we also have a wreath? How many wreaths should we have?

I am not sure what the plans are for Christmas Eve dinner. I know how many people we can feed around our new tables and how many around the folding ones we brought with us. Is that enough? Is our kitchen island large enough to serve as a buffet? What will the traffic pattern be? This Christmas will be a bit unfamiliar, like a Christmas carol set to a jazz beat.

Well, we know that we have four Sundays and 28 days before Christmas. What if we did not know when Christmas was coming! Would we have all this preparation -- that takes us a month -- all ready done? Do you have gifts for loved ones already on hand? (My older sister has.) Are they already wrapped? Do you have your Christmas cards ready to drop in the mailbox? Have you put up and decorated your Christmas tree? Hung a wreath? Made Christmas cookies? Planned whom you have Christmas dinner with? Gone caroling? Is there anyone here who is not just ready today for December 25^th, but is always ready for Christmas?

Would we be ready as a congregation? I assume that Celebration Circle is all ready for Christmas, but are they always ready? Is the Christmas Eve dinner committee already selected? Would everything be ready if we had to have dinner tonight?

Today's passage from the gospel of Matthew may seem to be a rather odd choice for a lection for the first Sunday of Advent. It reminds us that we should always be prepared for the incarnation of God because we do not know when it will come.

But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Child, but only God. As were the days of Noah, so will be at the coming of the Human One. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark; and they did not know until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Human One. Then two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one is left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one is taken and one is left.

Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Sovereign is coming. But know this: that if the householder had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, that householder would have watched and would not have let the house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Human One is coming at an hour you do not expect.

This is an excerpt from a longer prophecy by Jesus during his last week before his crucifixion. The disciples had asked him when the Temple would be destroyed, and what the signal would be for Jesus' coming again and the end of the age. Jesus responded with a prophecy that describes the coming destruction of the Temple by the Romans about 35 years after his death, a destruction that was part of a much larger massacre throughout all of the Holy Land. It was a first holocaust, which had some of the same sadistic brutality that we have associated with the Nazis, with the Khmer Rouge, with the Rwandan civil war. Jesus concludes with three parables:

the foolish bridesmaids whose lamps ran out of oil and who had not prepared for this by bringing extra oil,
the parable of the talents, and
the Son of Man separating the sheep and the goats on judgment day.

My first reaction to this scripture was dismissive. I am building a bookcase in the library upstairs. It has turned into a bigger project than I had anticipated, sort of like the bookcase that devoured Cleveland. I have had to deal with our complicated security system when no one else is in this building in the evenings and on Saturdays, including a false alarm. When I read this scripture I thought, "I wonder whether, with our modern security system, we would need to keep watch on this lovely building if we knew a burglar was coming."

Of course, that is not the subject of this scripture. It is asking us, are we ready for the incarnation of God? Are we prepared for God's judgment? Yesterday Peter and I were discussing the importance of being prepared like a Boy Scout. Peter, can you repeat what you rattled off yesterday? [Peter recites the Boy Scout pledge.]

We all know that we have to prepare for the birth of a child. It involves arranging to get a crib or cradle, clothing, diapers and a diaper bag, toys and objects to stimulate learning, a car seat and similar stuff. Preparation for a baby is so important that we have rituals for it, a baby shower and childbirth classes. Again, we usually have a good idea of when the child will come, even if the child is to be adopted. What if we were to find ourselves responsible for a baby, with no advance warning? Would we be ready? Most of us would not have a house already prepared if we didn't know we were going to have a baby.

That preparation is really about the things that we have to do and the things we have to obtain in preparation for a baby. What is the preparation we have to do inwardly in our hearts to be ready for a baby?

More importantly, what preparation must we do inwardly in our hearts to be ready for God to come to us in judgment? For that is what Christmas really is, Judgment Day, the day that God's judgment became visible. God's decision to become incarnated as a human being was a judgment upon us. It was God's considered judgment that by ourselves we humans somehow just cannot live in a covenant relationship with each other or in a covenant relationship with God no matter how many words of guidance we had been given how many prophets we had been sent.

Are we, part of the Body of Christ, ready for God's judgment because of our spiritual disciplines? Do we already love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength? Are we joyous? Are we thankful? Do we know how to pray, and do we pray regularly?

Do we love our neighbor as ourselves? (Yes, that includes loving conservative Republicans.) Do we comfort the sick, and visit the prisoner? Do we give generously to those in need? Have we revised our economic structure so that everyone can earn enough money to have decent housing, clothes, enough food and health care? Have we beaten our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks? Do we still make war on other nations? Do we still learn war?

Jesus tells us to be ready, because no one knows when the Christ is coming, especially when Christ comes in judgment. For when the Christ comes in judgment, some will be taken and some will be left. What is Jesus referring to when he says that some will be taken and some will be left? American Christians who believe the Bible to be a literal account of God's word believe that Jesus is referring to the Rapture. The faithful will be swept up to heaven while the unfaithful are left to face the destruction of the final conflict on earth. The Rapture and the end of the earth that accompanies it is the overarching theme of Tim LaHaye's books that are on the bestseller lists. I asked my daughter Erica this morning if she believed in the Rapture. She replied, "I don't know. I find this whole Second Coming thing really tricky." And so it is.

There is another way to understand Jesus' words other than believing in the Rapture. In our class on the Gospel of Luke, one person said that Jesus' teachings on the last days describes everyday life -- we always have joy and sorrow, wealth and poverty, inclusion and exclusion, war and peace, life and death. Every day is the Last Day; every day is Judgment Day. Every day some of us enter the kingdom of God, and every day some of us do not. Those of us who do not experience the kingdom of God fail to enter it because we are not ready for it. We cannot quite nerve ourselves up to wholly committing ourselves to be ready for it, and therefore to prepare for it. We do not quite believe that the kingdom of God is true, a deeper reality than we ordinarily experience. Therefore, we are not ready for it and we will be left out of the kingdom of God. We will not get the experience of deep joy, of knowing that we are truly loved, of knowing that God is present in every human being.

In our deepest hearts, many of us know that we are not prepared to enter the kingdom of God. Can we get ready in 28 days? As individuals? As a congregation? Well, maybe we can or maybe we cannot, but if it holds any interest for us at all, we have to get ready now. Christmas Day, Judgment Day, is coming. In fact, it is already here. Some of us will enter into the kingdom and some of us will not. It's time to decide whether we will, and if we will, to get ready.

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