Pastor's Column, December 2008

If you come to church, you’ll notice that we’re ready for “Christmas.” The garland is hanging, the tree is up, the lights and ornaments are on. And, just like every year, the green cloths have been replaced by purple ones. In churches all around the world, these changes are part of “Christmas.” But even though most people call this “Christmas time,” a church calendar will show you that “Christmastime” is the time after Christmas—like in the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” What we call Christmas was only Day 1; the Christmas season went from December 25 to January 6. In church, we celebrate that by switching from purple to white for that time of year. But this time—the time before Christmas, is called Advent, which you could translate to mean “Coming In.” Advent is meant to be a time to prepare for the day when Jesus will come, to prepare ourselves to meet Jesus.

Since we make such a big deal about Christmas, it’s easy to think about “meeting Jesus” as waiting for the baby to come—and if you’ve ever known an expecting mother, that’s an amazing time. It is a time to marvel at what God did for us. There are many descriptions of encounters with God before Jesus was born, and most of them describe totally awe-inspiring and overwhelming events. When people encountered God, they usually fell on their faces and begged for their lives. But God wanted to meet us where we were, and so God came into this world as a little baby, tiny and defenseless. That strange idea, that God came into the world and lived a human life with us, is at the heart of everything else that Christians do and say. This is a time to celebrate it, lift it up, and deepen our relationship with that person.
But “meeting Jesus” doesn’t stop with that baby. That baby grew up, died, rose again, and ascended into heaven, and none of us can know him now. But Jesus told us that someone else was coming—the Holy Spirit, God who is with us each and every day. Today, our closest and deepest knowledge of God comes through the Holy Spirit who lives in each and every one of us. You might have heard people talk about being “filled with the Spirit.” The truth is that you’re already filled with the Spirit, but you may not know it! God, the Spirit, is with you all the time, even though most of us barely notice…but the Holy Spirit is there, waiting for us, waiting to introduce us to Jesus. And so, through the Spirit, we can use this time to look into our own hearts and meet Jesus there.

And even beyond that, the Scriptures talk about a time when everyone will meet Jesus. I don’t put any stock at all in the various schemes of “end time prophecy” that are floating around, but Jesus and his followers didn’t leave any doubt that the day would come when the whole world would meet Jesus. So when we think about meeting Jesus, we should take some time to remember that when everything else is gone—when everything we know, everything we’ve done, everything we’ve worked for has passed into dust—we will meet Jesus.

The Scriptures don’t say too much about what things will be like on that last day, but they do talk about one more way to meet Jesus. Jesus told his followers that he would remind them of all the times when they met homeless people, hungry and thirsty people, people in jail, sick people. And he said that every time we did, we were meeting him. He told us that we didn’t have to go back to Bethlehem to meet him, or wait until the last day. He told us that we meet him all the time, and that he wouldn’t forget how we treated him.

So, when you take some time to prepare for meeting Jesus this Advent season, by all means celebrate Jesus’ birth, and take some time to think about what you’ll have to say when you meet Jesus on the last day. But Jesus himself told us that we really need to think about meeting Jesus here and now, in the suffering, neglected, and abused people who are all around us. So, this Advent, don’t wait for Jesus to come to you. Go out and meet Jesus. We have food pantries for hungry and thirsty people, free clinics for sick people, shelters for homeless people, prison ministries for people in jail. Don’t wait, and don’t think that Jesus wanted you to write a check…go out and meet him where he is.