Preparing for Christmas is about simplicity, not excess.
Are you prepared for Christmas?
If your answer is “No,” that’s no surprise. Who is, this early in Advent?
There’s so much still to do, isn’t there? Things to buy, things to bake, things to hang, things to wrap. All those preparations take time, money and energy — all of which seem to be in short supply this time of year.
It’s Advent, all right: the season of preparation (some would say the season of desperation!).
For a lot of us, Advent is sort of like the vestibule of Christmas. It’s an entryway, a transit-point, a place to take off coats and overshoes — but not a place where we especially want to linger.
Because this is so, it’s hard for us to give Advent the attention it deserves. Spiritually speaking, it’s so much more than just a waiting room. It’s a beautiful, holy, hopeful season of the Christian year — but, for so many of us, it’s a place we tend to rush through.
Don’t rush it
There’s a story about a group of tourists who were visiting the Vatican in Rome. Their tour guide had told them all about the famed Sistine Chapel: the place where the College of Cardinals meets when they’re choosing a new pope. It’s the historic chamber whose painted ceiling is one of Michelangelo’s masterpieces — the entire Christian story in pictures, from Adam and Eve through Jesus enthroned in the heavens.
One aspect of the Sistine Chapel comes as a shock to most first-time visitors: its size. It’s a surprisingly small room. This particular group of tourists included a young man who was so eager to see Michelangelo’s painted ceiling, he dashed in one end of the Chapel and out the other before he even realized he’d been there. He mistook the Chapel for a sort of antechamber. Somebody had to go after him and call him back, saying, “Hey, you missed it. Come back into the chapel — and this time, remember to look up!”
It’s the sort of mistake that’s so easy to make during Advent. It’s so easy to dash through these four short weeks, arms full of packages, eyes cast downward.
A destination in its own right
Advent is a destination in its own right. We miss the beauty and simplicity of these days of preparation if we only have eyes for Christmas.
Maybe some of you watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV. Some of us have been watching that parade since we were kids. It’s a Thanksgiving tradition in many homes.
Of course, anyone who’s ever watched the Macy’s Parade knows it’s not really a Thanksgiving parade at all. It’s a Christmas parade. There are a few obligatory floats with Pilgrims and their Native American neighbors, and a giant turkey balloon bobbing down the avenue, but the whole focus of the parade — and the whole reason Macy’s, a major department store, puts millions into it every year — is that it points the way to Christmas. The climax of the festivities — the final float — is the triumphal entry of Santa Claus, waving to the crowd with one white-gloved hand and clutching his ample belly with the other, booming out his distinctive “Ho, ho, ho!”
If you listen to the TV commentators, their job is all about telling the audience what comes next. Their script tells them exactly what’s coming down the Avenue — be it giant balloon or float or marching band or some B-list celebrity, lip-syncing a forgettable pop song.
For many years, the Macy’s Parade has had a theme that sounds positively religious. The theme is, “Believe.” A giant version of that word’s seven letters, several stories tall, hangs high on the side of the Macy’s building. It’s strategically placed so you see it on your TV screen, right behind all the lip-syncing celebrities.
The belief structure of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is highly predictable. During the three hours or so the parade lasts, everything’s scripted right down to the second. If the most important thing you believe, in your heart of hearts, is that Santa Claus is coming down the Avenue, then you’re guaranteed not to be disappointed: because, in the final five minutes of the broadcast, there he’ll be, riding his float into Herald Square.
It’s a great thing when any kind of belief is that certain and predictable. But we all know it’s not always that way. Belief couldn’t have seemed so certain when John the Baptist first showed up by the banks of the Jordan, calling Israel to repentance. “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness,” he proclaimed, quoting the prophet Isaiah. “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
Preparing is our first item of business, during this Advent season. The preparations we’re meant to make have nothing to do with shopping or decorating or hanging lights from the eaves of our houses — all the sorts of things, in other words, that give us apoplexy as we tote up the days remaining and wonder how we’re going to do it all. No, John the Baptist is calling us to make a deeper set of preparations, and of a less tangible sort.
Repentance is the thing
Have you ever noticed that all the preparations for the secular Christmas holiday have to do with things? There are cookies to bake, presents to wrap, a tree to decorate and wreaths to hang. When John commands, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” he has something more spiritual in mind.
What John’s talking about is repentance. Luke tells us he proclaimed “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” How welcome do you suppose John the Baptist would be, if he showed up one year in the staging area for the Macy’s Parade? From the description of him in the other Gospels, he wouldn’t have met the dress code. John looked entirely too scruffy to fit into the carefully scrubbed, all-American wholesomeness the parade’s sponsor works so hard to cultivate. In fact, if John showed up anywhere along the parade route that morning, with his wild hair, scraggly beard and trademark camel’s hair cloak, like as not New York’s Finest would hustle him off to a homeless shelter.
Repentance is not something most people are inclined to think about in the days leading up to Christmas. When the secular holiday culture encourages us to “believe,” it’s a vague, free-floating sort of goodwill. It’s all about dreams realized and wishes fulfilled. It’s all about the pursuit of happiness, not the pursuit of righteousness. There’s a major disconnect between what our Christian faith suggests we do during this Advent season and how the larger culture is inviting us to use our time.
A time to cut
John urges us to “Prepare the way of the Lord.” That word “prepare” is an interesting one. It comes from a Latin word, praeparare, which is composed of the prefix prae-, or “beforehand,” and parare, which means “to make ready.” Most of us have, in our kitchen drawer, a little knife with a small, sharp blade. It’s called a paring knife. The words “paring” or “to pare” means to make something ready by cutting away all that’s not necessary. If you’re following a recipe that calls for slices of apple, you take out your trusty paring knife and peel off the apple’s skin — digging out, also, the core with its seeds. This is how you make the apple ready for its role in the recipe.
That verb “pare” is embedded in our word, “prepare.” Curiously, when John the Baptist elaborates on what he means by preparing the way of the Lord, he uses exactly this sort of cutting image — talking about an ax lying at the root of the trees, ready to cut down those trees that don’t bear good fruit.
It’s a stern warning the Baptist is giving. His idea of preparation has to do with radical simplicity. Cut away from your lives, he’s warning, all that’s unnecessary, all that detracts from your spiritual journey. Confess your sins and henceforth practice justice and righteousness — so you may be ready to greet the Messiah when he comes.
What a contrast this message is to our culture’s typical Christmas preparations! These weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are, for the larger culture, a time not of simplicity, but of excess. These are weeks of high-calorie snacking, office parties and shop-till-you-drop. These are weeks when retailers count on us to spend more money — often on things nobody really needs — than at any other time of year. It’s not that we’re just ignoring John the Baptist’s message. We’re doing precisely the opposite!
So, how should we prepare for the coming of our Lord, this Advent? Why not try, in the midst of the mad holiday rush, to do some cutting — to carve out some islands of time to stop doing and simply be? There’s much joy to be found in reflecting on the simple details of the story of Jesus’ birth.
And yes, we’d do well also, in these days, to find some time to repent — to turn from our preoccupation with material things, our over-consumption, and discover new ways to live more simply and more faithfully. It’s what preparing the way of the Lord truly means: cutting away the excess, focusing on what is true and good and pure.
Now is the time: prepare the way of the Lord!
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