Advent 3

What do you do at your house to get ready for Christmas? Over the years I’ve noticed that family customs vary from household to household. Some like to decorate the house inside and out, while some only put up a few modest decorations in the living room. Some like to put the Christmas tree up before Thanksgiving, while others wait until around now.

But there’s one ritual that’s carried out about this time of the year in homes all across America, maybe even in your home. You go out to the garage or up into the attic, and stumble around amongst the too-many cartons and boxes stored there. You fumble around until finally you come upon that well-worn box (or boxes) marked “Xmas.”

You brush eleven months’ worth of dust off the top of it. You sneeze repeatedly. Then you pick the box up and gingerly but with great effort you carry it down from its attic hiding place. (Keep your head down, now!) And once again, it’s time to get ready for Christmas.

As always, the box is a veritable treasure chest. Someone else might think the contents of the box are nothing but glass and plastic, but to you their very presence and familiarity make them more precious than gold. Come Christmas morning there will be other boxes to surprise and delight you. But the delight of this box, here and now, is that everything in it is so blessedly familiar. It even smells familiar, as you carefully open the lid and gaze once again at the treasures of Christmases past; some long ago, some not so long ago.

Here is the ornament you bought to commemorate your first Christmas as husband and wife; a little tarnished maybe, a little ragged around the edges from the numerous moves from one house to another, but still a treasured keepsake.  In the Reese house, it’s Snoopy and Woodstock from 1986.

And, look! Here’s one that says “Baby’s First Christmas.” As you look at your child now, it seems so long ago that you first hung this one on the tree. But as you look at the ornament, the memories rush back and it seems like only yesterday.

One by one you remove other objects from the small box. You unwrap donkeys and cows, sheep and shepherds, Mary and Joseph, until finally the whole cast of characters from the Nativity Scene has arrived. All but one, that is. He lies by himself now, swaddled in an extra protective coating in the bottom of the box. One last bundle, the smallest of them all, and yet the most important one of all, awaits your attention. You smile as you peel away the bubble wrap and tissue paper knowing that here is the greatest treasure: the baby Jesus!

As you look through the remainder of your Xmas box, you find a curious mixture of sacred and secular angels and reindeer, Santa and church bells, and only you know what else! But there is one character you won’t find in that ornament box, even though he is a central figure in the Advent season. I’m talking, of course, about John the Baptist.

Although John appears on the scene at this time every year, faithful as any shepherd or wise man, our Nativity scenes have no porcelain statuettes of John, dressed in his camel’s hair shirt with a leather belt around his waist. But on the second and third Sundays of Advent, the church’s ear is tuned to hear, not the sound of angels singing in the night sky, but the “voice of one crying in the wilderness.” That’s John.

“Make straight the way of the Lord,” John urges, quoting from the prophet Isaiah. What John was saying was, “People get ready. Your world is about to be rocked.”

The writer of the Gospel of John describes the ministry of John the Baptist with these words: “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him.”

Now, mind you, John the Baptist will make it abundantly clear that he is not the light, but one who comes to make other folks aware of the presence of the light in their very midst. Matthew, Mark, and Luke picture John the Baptist as something of an eccentric, a weirdo, camping out in the wilderness, eating bugs and wild honey. But in the Gospel of John, it’s not John the Baptist who is the stranger. John the Baptist says that someone else is the stranger. “I baptize with water,” he says, “but among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me. I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.”

John, you must be talking about Jesus, and yet you say we don’t know him? What a ridiculous thing to say! Of course, we know Jesus! He’s the one in the manger, the baby, the one of whom the angels sang to the shepherds tending their flocks on a cold winter’s night.  

We think we know Jesus, and we say that we know Jesus. “What would Jesus do?” we ask, and we think we know, but we can’t really be sure, can we? He’s among us, and yet far beyond us. We wonder at his presence, and we don’t understand him any better now than did his first followers, 2000 years ago.

Who is this stranger in the manger?

“Among you stands one whom you do not know,” says John. And, deep down, don’t we really hope that he’s right?

We carry that old box marked “Xmas” down from the attic and unpack the familiar Nativity scene. And it’s good to have those enchanting porcelain figures to help us tell our children and our children’s children the wonderfully familiar Christmas story, and to be reminded of it once again ourselves. But isn’t there a danger of shrinking Christmas down to something we think we can grasp and manage and control, taking it out of the box for a little while, then packing it away again until this time next year?

Don’t we ever hope, in the midst of all that is so blessedly familiar, that we just might be invaded by a sense of wonder and mystery that is beyond our knowledge, beyond our ability to know and prove?

John the Baptist’s announcement is disturbing, but it is also “glad tidings of great joy.” Among all that is so familiar, there is much more that we don’t know yet. There is a greater blessing yet to come, one that we cannot even begin to imagine. You think you know Jesus? Nah.

John comes to “bear witness to the light” and says, “Among you stands one whom you do not know.” For an America that is quite obviously lacking a moral core; for the thousands who do not know and cannot believe; for those who profess to believe but seem incapable of acting; for those living lives of quiet desperation, who need for the church to be what we have been called to be, set free to be, redeemed to be, let us begin today to imitate Jesus.

Let us make peace on earth and bring good will to all people.

And in the struggle and pain of that birth, we will discover the companionship of One whom we did not know and did not expect. Our joy will be magnified and, in His light, even those things that are so blessedly familiar to us will take on a new appearance, a new significance. In Advent, we wait and hope and watch for this One whom we do not know, this one called Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us.