Today’s question is in keeping with the pre-Christmas season. It’s this: excluding the Bible Nativity stories, what is your favorite Christmas story? What story do you enjoy reading again and again, or, since so few people seem to read stories anymore, what Christmas story do you enjoy watching for the tenth time on television? How many would vote for Miracle on 34th Street? How about It’s a Wonderful Life? And what about my own, personal favorite: A Christmas Carol?
Have you ever wondered why such stories as Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, and A Christmas Carol might be so popular year after year, and, in the case of Dickens, for over a century? There are probably many reasons, of course, but one of them might well be our human fascination with the past, the present and the future.
Miracle on 34th Street deals with a nostalgic past in which every child wanted to be certain about the existence of Chris Kringle, as well as wishing a dream house would come true in the future, but with a recognition there are trials and tribulations in the present. As for It’s a Wonderful Life, we want to know our past and present life have meaning for the future, what we have done (and what we are doing) will make a difference in the world of tomorrow.
Then, there is the quintessential story of past, present and future: A Christmas Carol, which Dickens said was a ghost story. And who does not enjoy ghost stories in front of a fireplace when it’s cold and snowy outside? On the other hand, it may take some imagination for Houstonians to consider weather conditions in London during our own Christmas holidays! Anyway, here we have the classic setup of the ghost of a nostalgic Christmas-Past, a joy-filled Christmas-Present, and a sober, painful future Christmas resulting from what we have done in the past and in the present, and our desire to change the future, not only for ourselves, but for all who surround us. Dickens spoke to something deep within each one of us, whether we are Londoners or Houstonians.
He spoke to us of expectations. He spoke to us of times of waiting. For it, too, is a human condition to await something or someone. The Church throughout our history, is also aware of that condition of waiting, of expectancy. The Church, in fact, has given us this special time of the year, a time called “Advent,” the time of “Coming,” the time of waiting and of expectation. And for what, or for whom, do we wait?
A first response might be: Christmas. The coming of the Christ Child. The time of the Incarnation, the enfleshment of our God into human form. And yes, in part, we do await the night when the universe became a single star, when a star became a single light, when a single light became a person to lead us out of darkness. But we do not expect that special night to happen in two weeks. Rather, we await the celebration of the fact it has already happened some two thousand years ago. We do not await the Incarnation, but rather the celebration of the Incarnation. But is this all we await? Is this all we celebrate? Or do we as Resurrection people, as Christians, also await the return, the Second Coming of our Lord?
The Jewish people, in our first reading from the prophet Isaiah, looked for the coming of the One who would possess “… the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and of strength, the spirit of knowledge and of the awesomeness of God.” They awaited a time when natural enemies would put aside animosities and co-exist in peace with one another. A time when the smallest child would not be endangered.
Have we arrived at such a time? We have – and we have not. We have seen the time of Emmanuel, God with us, the time when Emmanuel still walks with us, exists with us, as the Holy Spirit. But we still await the return of the Resurrected Christ and the completion of the Kingdom when the rest of Isaiah’s words will be fulfilled, when there will be peace in all of the nations of the world, when every child will be safe from harm. The time of Advent is not merely the four-week period of waiting for Christmas.
Advent is, really, the waiting we do for the rest of our lives.
And so, the question becomes: how do we await the return of Jesus the Christ? Perhaps, for each one of us, we can gain an insight into our waiting for the return of Christ, by how we wait for other events in our life. Perhaps, as in A Christmas Carol, our future is, indeed, bound to our past and to our present.
There are many kinds of waiting. There is the waiting we do when we wait to hear about a new job opportunity or about the results of a test we took in school. In each case, we had prepared as well as we could. We had the best interview possible. We studied everything we could. Now all we can do is wait until our future is revealed to us. We wait with the knowledge we did all we could do.
There is also another kind of waiting. There is the waiting for the birth of a child. While the final results are out of our control, there is still much we can do as we await the inevitable outcome. The mother can eat well and avoid harmful activities in order to maintain the best possible internal world for the expected child. The father can paint the reconverted nursery and do everything necessary to provide for the best possible external world for the expected child. The exact moment of the birth is unknown, but the parents do know, with almost absolute certainty, the birth will occur. In the meantime, they do not wait passively, but rather they continue to prepare as best they can, for the future event.
Unfortunately, there is also a third kind of waiting: an expectation without doing anything at all, either before or during the period of waiting. Here, the potential job-seeker did not prepare for the interview, the student shrugged off the reading assignments. The mother did not concern herself with the health of her own body nor that of her child. The father did nothing to get ready for the child’s homecoming. And so the period of waiting continues to be one of “que sera, sera,” what will happen, will happen. I await the future without any effort on my part, what-so-ever.
John the Baptist warned his listeners about such people. For those who wanted the blessings of baptism, but without the accompanying need to change, to re-form their lives, for those who said they had no need for repentance because of who they were, what backgrounds they came from – he called them “a brood of vipers.”
He also presented them with the image of the one who would come like a harvester. The harvester who would toss the grain and the stalks of wheat into the air, where the winds would carry off the inedible chaff which would be finally collected for burning, while the heavier grains of wheat would be gathered together. There is the one who continues to work until the wheat becomes bread, the bread of life.
Yes, there are many ways in which we can wait for an event to occur. We can prepare ahead of time. We can continue to do all we can do while we are waiting, or we can do nothing and reap the consequences of our inactions. The choice is ours. Like Scrooge, we can heed the dreams of the ghosts of Christmas-Past, Christmas-Present, and Christmas-Tomorrow and change our ways of waiting for the Coming of Christ. Or we can ignore them, pretending all of this is merely a bit of indigestion. But if we ignore them, if we fail to prepare, if we fail to change, we are unlikely to hear the words of Tiny Tim exclaiming: “God bless us, everyone!”
Second Sunday of Advent; December 10, 1995; Revised: December 5, 2010
Is 11:1-10; Rom 15:4-9; Mt 3:1-12