Stir up our hearts

Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, see I am sending my messenger ahead of you to prepare your way, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

The preparations have begun. Earlier this week I got my Christmas tree up and decorated. There are still wreaths to be hung and decorations to be put out. This time of year my mom starts making long lists. For decades my parents have hosted a huge open house on Christmas Eve – Mom makes her own Swedish potato sausage. She pickles her own herring and pig’s feet. She makes her own lefse and crumcake and cookies. While my sister now has the job of putting up the Christmas village, Mom changes out the rest of her house to the holiday decorations. Come December 24 there will be holiday wreaths hung and candles aglow. All of the gifts will be purchased and wrapped and waiting under the tree. It will be beautiful – just like a page from Martha Stewart Living. And my mother, bless her, will be exhausted and about ready to snap.

Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare your way. I always find the second Sunday of Advent to be a bit jarring. As a bona fide procrastinator, this is typically the week when I start to think, "I guess I’d better think about doing some Christmas shopping." And as my mind wanders to gift lists and unfinished craft projects and – oh yes – Christmas cards, the scripture comes at me with a vision that is almost the exact opposite of an image from Martha Stewart Living. We see a man standing up to his knees in the muddy water of the river Jordan, surrounded by the desert. He is wearing a scratchy robe made of camel’s hair, he has a leather belt around his waist. Piled up on the banks are his breakfast, lunch, and dinner – the discarded wings of locusts and empty honeycombs. There he is – likely smelly and unshaven – and he cries out "prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight." He’s a preacher – this camel hair guy – and the message he proclaims is an immersion, a washing of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And, scripture tells us, people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem have gone out into the desert to see him, to be baptized by him in the river Jordan and confess their sins.

I wonder what it was that got all those people to go out to see John the Baptist. After all, he wasn’t offering any door-buster deals, he wasn’t showing people how to save time and still have a happy holiday, he wasn’t even a very family friendly show. What was the appeal? I think that people made the journey out into the wilderness to see this raw, rough looking preacher because he was doing something no one else dared to do – he was telling the truth. He told the truth about sin. He told the truth about our need to be immersed in the waters of forgiveness and to rise again to start over. He told the truth about repentance, that is, turning our lives around – literally turning away from the many things that have distracted us, in order to see the God of our salvation. John prepares Christ’s way by telling the truth.

Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare your way. As we make our preparations for Christmas this year, maybe we should put "tell the truth" at the top of our list of things to do. There’s irony here, isn’t there? After all, if we were really to be honest, the truth is that many of our Christmas preparations come from a fervent desire to cover things up, a deep desire to pretend for one 24 hour period that our life, our family, our world, are everything they should be. We clean the house and fill it with decorations to show the visitors and guests how together we are, how happy we are the holiday is here. Never mind that we are wracked with grief or lonely or stressed out to the max. We put the children in matching outfits and the dog in reindeer antlers and then we cajole and scream until we get that one perfect picture – and then that one perfect picture in which everyone happy and the dog is perfectly heeled is the picture that we paste on a card and mail out for everyone to see. Oh heavens, we wouldn’t send a holiday card with a picture of our real life on it – cheerios spilled on the floor, one child crying, parents arguing over the family finances, and the dog piddling in the living room. No, no, that just would not do for Christmas. This is not the time of year to tell the truth. This is the time of year to work and push and shove until our life fits into that Martha Stewart cover for just 24 hours – really, we wonder, is that so much to ask? Just 24 hours when everyone is happy and getting along and everything is beautiful and peaceful and goes just as it should? I firmly believe that this is a huge part of the reason that we are so stressed out, so depressed, and so frazzled this time of year. After all, it’s pretty exhausting pretending to be something that we aren’t.

Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way. Here’s the thing. Jesus was not born into a situation that looks anything like what we want Christmas to look like. When God took on flesh and came to live in this world, God came in the dirty, screaming, bloody grit of real childbirth. And it was not childbirth in a sterile delivery room, but child birth on the floor of a backroom, far from home, where the child’s welcome to the world, apart from his mother’s milk and arms, were strips of rags and an empty manger and death threats from the local king. God took on flesh and came to live with us and as us right in the middle of our everyday lives of sin and mess because God knew that it was exactly in the mess that we needed God the most. And that is what we are called to turn around and see at Christmas time – to turn around and see God entering into our mess and then redeeming it – God plunging our lives into the waters of love in order to wash them and make them new.

As you prepare the way to see Christ again this Christmas, what truth will you need to tell? Is there someone you are not looking forward to being with this Christmas? If so, maybe the next 2.5 weeks are the time to call that person up and try to reconcile before you are all together for the holiday. Is there a family secret that you know will be the elephant sitting under your Christmas tree that no one wants to acknowledge? Maybe the next 2.5 weeks are the time to air that secret with love and forgiveness and the desire to heal. Maybe in the next two weeks you need to be honest with yourself and your family and friends and say, "finances are tighter this year than they have been – or we have stretched ourselves too far the last few years. This year we will need to have fewer gifts – not a smaller Christmas, mind you – just fewer gifts." Or maybe this year we acknowledge the financial crisis by giving fewer gifts to each other and giving more to food shelves or homeless shelters. Maybe this is the year to sit the family down and say, "I’m tired of doing all this work for the holiday." Let others take responsibility for the traditions they prize at Christmas. Maybe this is the year to admit that you are lonely or depressed around the holidays and to seek out a friend or counselor or attend a longest night or blue christmas service. Maybe this is the year to spend some time in Advent reflection on our own sin and need for forgiveness. Maybe this is the year to just accept life as it is, rather than wish for life as we think it should be. Because the truth is that the world of Martha Stewart is a make-believe magazine, a series of well orchestrated photo shoots; it is, by no means, a reality show.

Yet, what we really celebrate on Christmas is more than real. What we are preparing for is a real God made real flesh. God for us and with as and as us. What we prepare to receive is real forgiveness. What we prepare to receive is real love – the very real opportunity to be immersed in the Holy Spirit and then emerge to start over again. Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way – turn us around from all the distractions of the holiday season in order to see the real Jesus, to experience real salvation and real life, and to know our very real God. Amen.