Preparing for Jesus

Preparing for Jesus--December 5, 2017

"A voice cries out: 

     'In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, 

           make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

     Every valley shall be lifted up, 

           and every mountain and hill be made low;

     the uneven ground shall become level,

           and the rough places a plain." [Isaiah 40:3-4]

After all these years, I am trying (still) to learn how to be ready for Jesus.

And, honestly, I think a lot of the energy I have spent over the years in the name of “preparing for Christmas” has missed the mark.

The more I read the Gospels and spend time in the Scriptures the more I get the sense that Jesus doesn’t care very much when your household puts a Christmas tree up… or how big it is… or even whether it is live or artificial.  I’m not convinced Jesus gets very worked up at all over whether you even have a Christmas tree or not.  (They’re lovely and all, but in truth, since Christmas trees weren’t even a “thing” until the 1500s, most of Christians over the span of history didn't have them.)  And yet, I have found myself over years… acquiring more and more decorations, spending more and more time digging through the boxes and forgetting what we had last year, losing my patience over tangled lights, impatient kids, and broken bulbs, and chasing after some impossible, imaginary idol, marketed to us by ads and Hallmark movies, as “the perfect Christmas."

I am ready to admit I have been missing the point.

I don’t think it has been just me.  We have all been taught the same, somewhere along the way.  And while it is still perfectly fine to trot out the old boxes and put up all the decorations, we should at least be honest and say that all of that is preparing for Christmas (as some idea of a day or season in our minds), rather than preparing for Jesus.

Preparing for Jesus is both a lot simpler and a lot more difficult.

There is nothing to buy.  There is nothing to fuss over.  But it will take all your life to do.

Preparing for Jesus, as opposed to simply decking your halls for a season or a holiday, is about letting the living Spirit of God do renovation work in our hearts, our way of thinking, our pocketbooks, our priorities, and our calendars.  Preparing for Jesus has little to do with whether you do, or do not, have a Nativity set put up somewhere, or have even lit an Advent candle, and instead has very much to do with the extent to which we let God sweep us into the “new thing” God is doing in Jesus—the thing that, as Mary sings, “lifts up the lowly,” “fills the hungry with good things,” and “fulfills the ancient promises.” It is about letting the living God make us into the reflection of Christ, and turning us outward from our self-centered bent.  It is about learning to see in Jesus—a child born to ordinary peasants in a backwater province of the empire, who flee for their lives as refugees from Herod—the very face of God.  And then, in that light, we see who we truly are, as well.

When the ancient dreamer's words that we call Isaiah 40 were first written, nobody was talking about decorations.  When the prophet says, "Prepare the way..." he's not interested in getting his fellow Israelites to put bows or bells on anything.  He's interested in getting people's attention to see God's promise to put things right.  It's a picture of God clearing the path for gathering exiles back, for leveling off the high places and filling in the valleys that would have been obstacles for bringing them back home.  To "prepare the way" was to be on the look out for God's in-gathering of the ones who had been pushed to the margins, left out in exile, and forgotten by the powerful in Babylon.

And for us who hold onto these words still, all these centuries later, and who hear in them the whisper of a promise of a Savior, to "prepare the way of the Lord" still looks a lot more like attuning our hearts and senses like satellite dishes to the kind of thing God is up to in the world. 

Christians believe--and maybe we should own that it is an audacious belief--that Jesus is the fulfillment of these ancient visions from the book of Isaiah.  That means that, even if Jesus' way of fulfilling the promises was ultimately surprising (no one expected a manger, or a footwashing basin, or dinner parties with tax collectors and prostitutes, or a cross), the point of Jesus' mission was precisely what the old prophets had been hoping for: a final great homecoming, an end of exile, an in-gathering of the people who had been scattered and stepped on, and a welcome of people far away.

To prepare for Jesus, then, and to dare to take up a whole new year's journey of falling in love all over again with a homeless crucified rabbi, will mean that we perhaps calm down our fussiness about bows and lights and trees, and turn our hearts again where Jesus would point us--God's work of gathering in everybody who feels they have been left out.

Lord Jesus, we are on the journey again.  Lead us back to you.  Clear the path in front of us from whatever obstacles that get in the way--even if they are our own Christmas decorations.  And teach us how to smooth out the path for others you are drawing to yourself, too.