"Christmas Preparation 101"
First Congregational Church -- Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Second Sunday of Advent -- December 6, 2009
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Malachi 3:1-4/Philippians 1:3-11/Luke 3:1-6]

Responding to popular demand, I am re-working a sermon I preached several years ago. As I think about it, this is really a primer on Christmas Preparation. I pray that its message is helpful to us all in this busy season and during these stressful times.

"A voice cries in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!"

Actually, it is no different now than it was in the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius. When John the Baptizer was preaching on Jordan’s bank it was the custom to tie important events to important people. So to be consistent let me put it this way: now in the first year of the presidency of Barack, in the seventh year of the reign of James over Wisconsin, when Jill ruled over Wauwatosa, during the high priesthood of what sounds like a law firm, Kwiatkowski, Szymanski and Peay, a voice cries, "Prepare the way of the Lord!" All around us we're invited to prepare, but our preparations are not to make the Lord's path straight. We're asked to prepare to spend money. We're asked to prepare to become frantic with too many parties, too much food, and too many visits with family and friends. We're asked to prepare to deck not only our halls, but our shrubbery, our rooftops, and now even our lawn with little inflatable thingies that light-up and have little figures running around in them. The voice cries out in the wilderness of the mall and the media: prepare a perfect Christmas. Prepare the way of Rachael Ray, Paula Dean, of Stewart, both Martha and the late Jimmy, such a wonderful life! Prepare a picture-perfect holiday that even the deep-green Grinch and the skinflint Scrooge would love – not to mention the picky relatives and friends I talked about. And, prepare to be depressed when the family and friends go, the bills come, and our expectations still haven't been met.

My dear sisters and brothers, the voice that calls for that preparation comes from a different wilderness and serves a different Lord! The voice of the prophet, the Forerunner, John the Baptist calls to us across the years and the wildernesses to bid us welcome the coming, the present Lord. John cries out to prepare the Lord's way – to make it straight. This Lord, John’s Gospel tells us, is the Father's eternal, creative Word, whom God speaks into human flesh in Jesus the Christ. The way of the Lord is not something obscure, arcane or mystifying: it is God's self-disclosure. The way of the Lord is God speaking God’s self into the babble of our world. I so appreciate what the English spiritual writer Maria Boulding has to say:

Together, only together, we can rise to truth, vision and communion.

All the beauty and riches that open to us through communication with other persons are possible because God has made us in his image. The Greeks defined man as 'a living thing that speaks'. We speak through verbal change, through body-language of manifold variety, through literature, art and music, through silent presence to one another, and through living truthfully in the fellowship of love that binds us together in a common humanity and a common destiny. This destiny is fellowship with the God who is communion, and with one another in him.

Our God is a God who gives himself; that is his glory. From all eternity he dwells in unapproachable light, yet he comes to find us, to call us and offer his friendship, and to ask for ours. His Trinitarian glory is self-giving love, and it overflows, as is the way with love; so he is glorified not by remaining inaccessible but by self-communication. This is what Revelation is: God speaking, not to present us with a list of truths we must believe or rules we must obey, but to utter himself.

The way of the Lord is the way of relationship, a way of listening and responding.

How do we listen and respond when it is only eighteen shopping days until Christmas? We may not have written a single card. We may not have purchased a single gift, much less wrapped one. We may not have composed the annual letter of "glad tidings” – which most people hate anyway. It doesn't matter. Listen to the good news – it doesn’t matter. It really doesn't matter. The voice that cries in the wilderness doesn't call us to prepare for these things. No. The voice that cries in the wildernesses of the mall, of piped-in music, of over-done television specials, and of daily existence calls out us to one thing -- prepare to be BLESSED!

Advent and its prophet John the Baptist, comes striding into the midst of our wilderness of Christmas-is-coming-stress and shouts: "Get ready -- the Lord is near!" Get ready to be blessed! Get ready to have peace spoken to your heart. Get ready to allow God to tear down the obstacles, to make the rough places smooth, and straighten those crooked paths of our lives. Go straight in all of the best ways to go straight – be honest with God, with yourself and be honest with others. Get ready! God is coming to bless, God is coming to love, and God is coming to make us whole again. The salvation announced in this wondrous season is not some arid proposition to be believed, it is a relationship to be lived. This season, then, isn't about living up to some societal ideal, it's about listening and speaking, it's about opening one's self to heal and to be healed, and it's about extending ourselves in self-giving service to others. God's readiness to share life with us, God’s eternal 'yes' to us demands a like response. To prepare the way of the Lord, to make God’s path straight, is to live in response to God's offer of blessing, to God’s offer of presence, to God’s offer of peace, to God’s offer of relationship.

As John the Baptist's words speak across the centuries to us, so too should Paul's. The confident words he spoke to the church at Philippi still apply to the church gathered on Church Street in Wauwatosa, "the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ." Like Paul, I rejoice and thank my God for you and for the work that you're doing through this gathered community. Good things are happening here as we seek to respond to God's invitation to shared life. We've still got much to do and much to learn together, but the love of Christ, the compassion of Christ is evident in this place. Of course we still have to overcome some complacency and some ‘let-someone-else-do-it-ness,’ but that’s matter for a different conversation coming on the horizon. With Paul, I pray that "your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight, to help you determine what is best, so that in the day of Jesus Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God."

As your minister, as your voice crying out in the wilderness, I am calling you to prepare to go straight, and go straight to being blessed. Other voices will call you to become stressed, to inflate your expectations, to forget what this season is really about. Heed the voice that calls you to come into relationship. Heed the voice that calls you to seek the center and to be at peace deep within yourself. The Latin American martyr-bishop Oscar Romero wrote:

Peace is not the product of terror or fear.

Peace is not the silence of cemeteries.

Peace is not the silent result of violent repression.

Peace is the generous tranquil contribution of all to the good of all.

Peace is dynamism.

Peace is generosity.

Peace is right and it is duty.

Heed the voice of peace and the call of Malachi, of Paul, and of John the Baptist who ask us "what really matters?" Isn't what really matters to our families, to our churches, to us, to be at one with God and with each other? Isn't what really matters realizing the wonder of life and relationship in themselves; celebrating who we are rather than what we have or what we may get? God wants to pour blessings upon us, but we must first clear the way and prepare to receive them.

If we hear the voice in our wilderness calling us to prepare, calling us to go straight to God and to be blessed, we should answer by taking some quiet time for ourselves even in the midst of all the hubbub that is the holiday, even if it's only five minutes. Get in touch in that time with God who seeks us and longs for us to respond to God’s loving care. If we hear the voice in our wilderness calling us to prepare the way of the Lord, we should answer by seeking to be a healing presence, a calming presence in our home or in our workplace. A gentle word, a loving deed could make all the difference to someone experiencing the stresses of this rather busy, over inflated season. Perhaps the voice calls us to remind people what really matters: relationship. If we spend even half the time focusing on God and other people that we use for fretting whether we’ve done it all right or not, we’ll make a difference. Just imagine what it would be like to really listen to people, to really listen for God speaking through them, and the wonder of discovering new things about them, about self, about God. The best gift we can give is ourselves, our time, and our attention.

The prophet Malachi said the Messiah would come to purify us "like a refiner’s fire" or "fuller’s soap" (Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase The Message said, “like lye soap from the laundry”). Maybe that is what we need? Maybe what needs purifying are our priorities, our understanding of what really matters in daily life? Ultimately, even the so-called perfect gift is discarded or forgotten -- all of us have seen the wondrous toys lying tossed aside while the boxes and wrappings become the focus of attention and delight -- but a relationship, a caring action never is. Preparation for going straight in God’s way, going straight to being blessed involves listening, responding, openness, caring, prayer and time. Advent calls us to prepare in a different way.

Long ago God was ready to speak God’s Word of blessing, God’s very self into our world. A voice came calling, "Prepare the way!" The voice still calls, the way must still be prepared, because God still seeks to bless us with God’s presence. So, you want to prepare for Christmas? Listen to the voice calling in our various wildernesses, which may come to us in different ways, heed its call, prepare, go straight and find the way to be blessed! Because all the rest of it? Well – say with me – “it doesn’t really matter.”