The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
December 4, 2011
Vol. 14 no. 45
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. We sing that line wistfully each year, but is this ‘look’ the same that we search and yearn for inside our church? We know that it isn’t, but beyond talking about Mary and Joseph and the Baby, we are not always clear about where the fuss belongs.
The Church year somehow knows this. Advent is here for a purpose – to make us wait a bit and prepare for something too big to comprehend right away. Mark’s Gospel does not even have a nativity story, beginning instead down by the river where John the Baptist comes to prepare the way of the Lord, just as Isaiah 40 had declared centuries before. Music never fails to escort us into the Spirit of matters: remember the opening song from “Godspell” – ‘Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord’?
What are we preparing and what are we preparing for? We are preparing ourselves, our souls, to become new and different. Most of us avoid, resist, deny, fight against becoming someone new, for we are convinced that who we are now is the best person possible. We prepare by letting go of the things that give us pride.
We are merely and all too human, but God is present in our lives. We all know the story of no room in the inn, the stable and manger, the couple and their baby. No trumpets blaring and flashing lights, no glory on that most glorious day, and undoubtedly most of us would be embarrassed and humiliated if we found ourselves in such a situation. That’s the point and that’s where God finds us and that’s when we begin to become new.
So now we pre-pare, a pun actually, we pare away ahead of time the things that hold us down, so at Christmas we can fly with the angels.
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan