God bless you in this busy, busy time!
I’d like to share with you a column by David F. Forte in “The Catholic Thing”. I pray it’s helpful in this busy, busy time of year.
“Put Christ back into Christmas,” we are told, often from the pulpit. “Take time out to pray and meditate upon the Advent season. Don’t be distracted by all the shopping advertisements.” All well and good. But I would also argue the contrary. It’s in the noise of the Christmas season that we find Christ. Mary and Joseph and the Magi sought not to escape from the commotion, the drama, and “noise” surrounding the great moment. They traveled into it.
Consider these scenarios.
She finally has the Christmas cards addressed. Darn! Not enough stamps, and the post office has run out of the religiously themed ones. Is her address list up-to-date? It took forever to compose the Christmas letter, trying not to leave out any important events and people. She still has to fold the letters, insert them into the envelopes, seal them, and take them to the post office. It’s all such a rush.
When that happens, we should think of Mary. As I once heard Mother Teresa explain to her nuns, “What did Mary do, after she heard that she was to bear the Savior? Did she stay at home and meditate on the great mystery? No, when she heard that her elderly cousin Elizabeth was also with child, she immediately got up to go on a long journey – a very long journey to help her. To wash the pots and pans and do whatever needed to be done.”
Our Christmas cards are messages of love to people that we perhaps have not seen in years. So when the rush of Christmas cards is upon us, we should think of Mary and offer a grateful prayer, for every card we send is a visit to Elizabeth.
It’s three days before Christmas and the roads are packed. There’s hardly a space available in the mall parking lot. Too late for an Amazon delivery, the husband fears. “Have I got the right gifts for the kids? Or am I spoiling them again? I still haven’t bought the one for my youngest – that doll she asked for – and I almost forgot my wife!” His budget is stretched. He worried about his credit card statements come January. It’s all such a rush.
When that happens, we should think of the Magi. If indeed, these “wise men” had come from Persia, it was a journey of over 1,000 miles over often inhospitable terrain, a daunting trip in that era. Uncertain of the kind of greeting that they would receive, especially by the Romans, they pressed on, transiting the Parthians, the Decapolis, crowded marketplaces, hostile stares. It wasn’t an inexpensive journey even for them, and they too sought to bring just the right gifts for the child.
Our travels to the mall and the Christmas sales can be nerve-wracking. Frustrating, too, if that special gift is now out of stock. And then there is the wrapping, the shipping to distant friends and relatives. But at such moments we should remember the Magi, and meld our journey into theirs. We, too, look for the right gifts for the right persons, objects of our love.
*
It’s Christmas Eve. The children and wife are asleep at last. But besides the electronic gifts, there are still toys to put together: the tricycle, and wagon. “Why are there so many bolts and screws to this thing? I’m so tired that I can hardly read the directions, and they are so confusing anyway.” In just a few hours, the children will wake him and his wife as they burst into their room on Christmas morning. He doesn’t feel up to the task, but he continues until all is done and ready.
When that happens, we should think of Joseph. After Joseph had done the angel’s bidding and had taken Mary unto himself as his wife, he expected that the child would be born in Nazareth, with Mary’s kinswomen around to help. But no. Caesar commanded him to return to the city of his birth, Bethlehem, the city of David, Joseph’s royal ancestor. And so, Joseph walking and Mary riding, they undertook their long journey along crowded roads, everyone travelling this way and that, to their own cities.
But his trials had just begun. In bustling Bethlehem, his kinsmen and extended family apparently didn’t welcome him ore Mary. Instead, Joseph was forced to seek shelter among strangers in an inn. Even worse, there was no room, and all that was available was a cave used as a stable.
Joseph must have felt shame as he took Mary into that cave. Fastened by Jewish law and the command of God to care for his wife and his Davidic son, all he had for them was a stable, reeking perhaps of animals. A feeding trough was all that was available for a cradle. More, there was likely no woman to help with the birth, for if there had been a midwife, surely Mary would have told St. Luke, and that woman would forever have been the patron saint of childbirth.
It was Joseph, we can presume, who had to preside over the delivery. Indeed, St. Joseph may have been the first human ever to have received into his hands the body, soul, and divinity of Christ the Lord, as we can, on the day commemorating His birth.
Joseph, Mary, and the Magi all undertook long, arduous treks in preparation for the coming of the Savior. They did not withdraw into comfortable silence. If we wonder why there is never enough time to relax at Christmas, the truth is that, like Mary, Joseph, and the Magi, we are not supposed to relax! We are to plunge in, to take this journey – a bustling pilgrimage really – to seek out Christ through all confusions of Christmas. It is in that noise that we shall find Him.
He comes...
As I mentioned in Bible Class this past Sunday, Jami and I have been using a devotion book compiled from the writings of Bo Giertz, a Swedish pastor and Bishop of the Lutheran diocese of Gothenburg, Sweden in the twentieth century. Having just moved from the end of one church year into the beginning of the next, the texts and his devotions on them were almost without exception about the end times and the return of Christ Jesus.
It was beneficial to be reminded that God is delaying this return in order to give us time to reach the people around us with the news of their salvation through the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus. It was also a bit jarring to be reminded of the struggles which are to come as that Last Day approaches (texts from 1 Peter and Revelation, especially).
Let me share something from Donald T. Williams (“Right to the End” Touchstone Magazine, Nov./Dec., 2023) about these very things:
In his first epistle, Peter is writing to encourage people facing the Neronian persecution. He tells them that they are “protected by the power of God”—from what? From being fed to the lions? No, they are being kept “for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1:5). Peter gives no promise that God will protect believers from suffering, sorrow, loss, or death. Rather, if they have to face these things, he wants them to be confident that it will be worth it because of the glory Christ will reveal in the last time.
Maybe we Christians and our churches would be more like those of the first century if, instead of promising people their “best life now,” we proclaimed a Christ worth living—and dying—for.
God bless your Advent observations as we rejoice in (a) the nativity of our Lord is His first coming, (b) the presence of Christ Jesus in Word and Sacrament assuring us of our forgiveness and His eternal love, and (c) the promise of His return in power and glory!
Perspective
There was an article in the August, 2023, issue of Vanity Fair, an excerpt from Jonathan Taplan’s book, The End of Reality. As it maintains that four contemporary billionaires (Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreesen) are creating an alternate, autocratic reality what I like about it is the following quote. It flies in the face of the claim that “religion is the opium of the people.” (Karl Marx, 1843).
“The men (and they are mostly men) who are inventing this world of super machine intelligence and biological engineering tend not to believe in religion. But they want to be gods. As the writer and commentator G. K. Chesterton contended in 1932, ‘The truth is that Irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world’.”
So it was with Adam and Eve at the start (worshipping knowledge, in essence, and thereby desiring that they themselves become the strongest thing in the nascent world). Satan is always tempting to move in such a direction. Thanks be to God for Jesus’ reminder: Matthew 4: 10 Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written,
“‘You shall worship the Lord your God
and him only shall you serve.’”