It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! 

 

And on TV, the radio, in the newspapers and at the mall, it has been looking like Christmas for weeks.  Decorations, Santa, the music – yup, we are knee-deep into the Christmas season now.  As Lucy cynically observes, “We all know that Christmas is just a big commercial racket, Charlie Brown.” 

 

But despite our urge to spend money we don’t have, on gifts we can't afford, for people who don’t need them; despite the incessant music, the relentless commercialism, the secular trappings, the false glitter; despite all our efforts, we never quite manage to ruin Christmas, because the real Christmas story is not about the mall, or decorations or Santa.  The real Christmas story is about love and relationship:  God’s love for people like you and me, God’s desire to be in relationship with us, and God’s longing for us to love and be in relationship with each other.  Love and relationship – that is the heart of Christmas.

 

Today we celebrate the first day of the new church year, the beginning of the season of Advent.  “Advent” means "coming," and these weeks leading up to Christmas prepare us for God’s coming to us.  And coming not just as a baby in the manger 2000 years ago, but also coming back again, in the present and in the future.

 

The four weeks of Advent is the Christian church’s New Year’s, our new beginning, our time for the renewing of hope and expectation.  And yet, even as we celebrate these four weeks of Advent, I know that some of you may be dreading the Christmas season.  Perhaps illness or loss or financial problems or a breakdown in a relationship is casting a pall over your holidays, and you live somewhere short of the joy we’re all supposed to be feeling.

 

If that is the case, then you might be comforted to know that in Advent, we all live somewhere “in between.”  We live in between the “already” of God’s coming to us as a baby born in Bethlehem, and the “not yet” of Christ’s return at the end of the age; we live in between hope and despair, in between the presence and the absence of God.

 

And our Scripture reflects this living in between.  While we are ready to hear about the coming birth of a baby in a manger with such soothing words as “gentle,” “meek,” and “mild,” this morning’s lesson from the Gospel of Luke describes Jesus’ second coming with ominous words: “distress,” “perplexity,” “fear,” and “foreboding.”  In the midst of holiday advertisements that urge us to "feel the magic" and engage in a materialistic pursuits, Christ calls us to "watch at all times" – to open ourselves to the ways Christ comes to us in the here and now.  We don’t know when God might show up in our lives; we don’t know the time or the way God will appear.  Advent is the time to remember that God can and will break in to our lives anytime – and we are to prepare ourselves for God’s coming.

 

Some of you may remember the song entitled “One of Us,” which was a hit for pop singer Joan Osborne a few years ago and was also the theme song of the TV show “Joan of Arcadia.”  The refrain asks:

 

What if God was one of us?

Just a slob like one of us?

Just a stranger on a bus

Tryin’ to make his way home.

 

Some critics took offense at the lyrics, especially the “slob” part.  To some, the idea that God might be sitting next to you on the bus ride was inconceivable.  Others thought the song was a cynical putdown of faith. 

 

But try to envision a personal God; a God not “up there” but right here with us; a God who knows our hurts and longings; a God who can identify with the things that make up our everyday lives.  What if?  If God were one of us, God would know what it’s like to feel love, joy, sorrow, disappointment, temptation, betrayal, loneliness and loss, just like we do.  If God had an earthly body, God would know what it’s like to feel hunger, thirst, weariness, pain; God would know what it is like to suffer and die.  If God were one of us, God would be able to identify fully with you and me. 

 

The Good News is that we don’t have to ask “what if?” because God DID become one of us.  God became fully human, in the person of Jesus, so that God would know and feel what it’s like to be human.  The Statement of Faith of our denomination, the United Church of Christ, puts it this way: “In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord, [God] has come to us and shared our common lot…”  I love that!

 

That’s what the incarnation is all about -- God became human.  It is the central belief that Christians hold; it’s the reason we celebrate Christmas, and it’s the reason why, during Advent, we prepare for God’s coming to us in human form. 

 

Would we know Christ if he came into our midst?  The Gospels suggest that Jesus is hard to recognize.  At the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene mistakes the risen Christ for the gardener [John 20:15]; two of the apostles walk the road to Emmaus with the Risen Christ without realizing who he is [Luke 24:15]; when the disciples see Jesus walking on water, they mistake him for a ghost [Mark 6:48-50]; and when Jesus stands on the shore calling to the apostles in a boat, they do not recognize him [John 21:4].

 

We never know how or where or when God might show up.  Every moment is alive with the possibility of Christ adventing into our lives, because he surprises us by coming at the time, and in the places, and through the people we least expect.  In the words of poet Ann Weems, “Christmas comes every time we see God in other persons.  The human and the holy meet in Bethlehem or in Times Square…”[1]

 

A pastor in New York City[2] tells the story of Phil, one of his parishioners who is a street person.  Schizophrenic and homeless, Phil refuses to stay in a shelter.  And so he spends his nights sleeping in doorways, and he spends his days in church.  “He keeps us honest,” says the pastor.

 

Once during a funeral service of a prominent lawyer, Phil – filthy and dressed in rags – sat in the back of the church.  The law partner of the deceased came up to the pastor and said, “Can you get him out of here?”  The pastor answered, “Yes, I can get him out; but you should know, that if he leaves, I go with him.  He belongs here; he’s been a member of this parish for ten years.” 

 

One Christmas Eve after the service, the parishioners were enjoying cookies and coffee together in the Fellowship Hall when out of the sanctuary arose a magnificent voice singing “O Holy Night.”  It was a trained, professional voice, radically beautiful, and everyone stopped to listen, awed by the holiness of the moment.  When the singing ended, they rushed into the church to find the source of the music.  And there they found Phil.  That Christmas Eve, God had appeared through homeless and ragged Phil.

 

Year in, year out, despite its commercialization and secularization, Christmas stays special because it’s about God’s love, God’s desire to be in relationship with us, and God’s longing for us to love and be in relationship with each other.  This Advent, God waits to be invited into our hearts and to live within us, for it is with and in all people – you and me – that God dwells. 

 

It’s Advent, the start of a new church year, and a time of new beginnings.  May you be filled with hope, peace, joy and love this season.  And may your eyes and your hearts be open to the living Christ adventing in your life.  Amen.