An Advent Humbug…sorta

I am not a fan of holiday decorations in public places. Sounds kind of Scroogy of me, huh? What I mean though, is not that holiday decorations should be removed, but rather that they shouldn’t be holiday decorations. I am a huge fan of Christmas decorations, decorations that are there to honor not the generic winter holiday season, but the season of honoring the nativity of Christ. We see an awful lot of ambiguous holiday stuff filling up the stores and lining the streets. And none of it is allowed by litigious fearfulness to imply any sort of allegiance to or honor for the deity at the center of the primary winter holiday!

Equally ambiguous are the warm and fuzzy new “reasons for the season”. Peace. Joy. Hope. Family. Once again, I find myself not a fan of any of it! Now I sound downright mean, don’t I? Again, I don’t want any of these things removed per se, but rather assert that they are not holiday ideals – or even holiday possibilities. As much as our retail marketing culture wants to trumpet these themes, the rest of our culture, particularly the arts culture, holds a deep, deep cynicism about the possibility of a peaceful, joyful, hopeful, family anything! And I might agree with them against anyone who thinks that a general winter holiday season is going to help with any of that.

And, well, blame it all, it ain’t Christmas yet. It’s Advent. Yes, Advent. Purple doesn’t look good with red, folks. And the clash between Advent and the culture’s preemptive Christmas melee is more than just a clash of colors. While the world dreams up or sneers about the possibility of Peace and Joy and Hope and Family, we Christians are taking some time out instead for recognition that not a stinkin’ bit of it is at all even remotely possible for us on our own terms and in our own power or certainly by our own gift-giving.

Christ must come. He must come and reign. He must take over, ripping from us the reins of power and the whole damned (literally, folks) commercial culture of winter holiday nonsense.

“The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.”

Until Christmas I must remind myself constantly – and my parishioners as well – that there simply is no Peace, no Joy, no Hope, no Family apart from Christ and his reordering of all things according to the will of his Father and ours. That there is no sense in tinsel and bows and gifts and roasting chestnuts (who does that anyway?) without a Lord to take upon his shoulders the government, a Wonderful Counselor and Mighty God who has made at last a defeated foe of sin and death. Of corporate greed and of poverty and of suffering and of the ambiguity of human wishful thinking founded on selfish fantasy and divorced from the true Life of all things. We discipline ourselves for these four weeks with a Scripturally and liturgically imposed sense of profound longing for that which the culture pretends it has and is tragically empty of.

And then at Christmas – like at Easter after Lent – we will burst forth with a joy unrestrained. A joy well-pruned and yet now in full flower. A joy that is grounded not in vain wishing but sure hope.

Christ has come; Christ will come!

Even so, come quickly. Amen.