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Reflections for Christmas and Advent
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Sr. Joan Chittister, O.S.B.
Reflections for Advent and the Christmas Season
- Introduction
- First Sunday of Advent (Staying Awake)
- Second Sunday of Advent (Realizing What Matters)
- Third Sunday of Advent (Reaching Out)
- Fourth Sunday of Advent (Receiving God's Promises)
- Christmas Eve (Gaining Wisdom)
- Christmas I (Beginning Again)
- Epiphany (Following the Star)
Reflections for Advent and the Christmas Season
Introduction
The lectionary texts for Advent/Christmas are a series of Biblical passages that help the faith community prepare for and celebrate the coming of God in the birth of Jesus. For each week read over the Old and New Testament lectionary texts assigned for the four Sundays of Advent, Christmas and the first Sunday after Christmas. You may find slight variations used in your denomination. Some ideas and directions for personal reflection, group discussion and sermon preparation are suggested. Each Biblical reflection continues with a look at themes that come out of the texts.
First Sunday of Advent
Staying Awake
Scripture Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5, Matthew 24:36-44
"Come, let us climb God's mountain, to the house of Jacob, that God may instruct us in holy ways and we may walk in this path."
"Stay awake, therefore! You cannot know the day your God is coming."
"Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them," Ruben Alves writes in Tomorrow's Child. "We must live by the love of what we will never see." Advent is the time of the church year that calls us to live by the love of what we will never see. At the same time, it is precisely the same part of the civil year that calls us to want only what we can see. The tension between the two is the great Christian tension of our time. Having everything we can get now is the national anthem of this society, the goal of our educational programs, the measure of a person's success. Until, of course, Advent comes and turns time on its edge, tips life off its business base and points us toward the future rather than the present.
Advent opens this year with two scenes. One is from Isaiah about the future to come. The second, from Matthew, tells us that it is our business to prepare for that future, to be ready for it by keeping our hearts centered, our vision keen, our lives sure and our commitment clear.
Isaiah says that, in the end, what Advent is really about is the creation of a new world in which there will be only one center, one people, one Light and one reason to be. "The mountain of God's house shall be established as the highest mountain . . . and all nations shall stream toward it. . . O house of Jacob, come," Isaiah pleads. "Let us walk in the light of our God."
The prominent Christmas message, however, the one that glitters from billboards and oozes out of Christmas advertising and seduces all the lines of children that troop to Santa Claus, is hardly that I must keep my eye out for the Coming of the Christ. No, the ads want me to keep my eye on me. I'm to spend the season deciding what things I'll give and hinting at what things I'd like to get. I'm to forget about what I need to be so that the Reign of God can come, world unity can be and the Light can shine for everyone.
The ads are wrong, Matthew says. We have to learn to keep alert. We have to learn not to get immersed in the kind of tinny dailiness that numbs our souls, deadens our spirits, deafens our ears to the Word and leads, as a result, away from the Mountain.
Advent reminds us not to get distracted by these other things at any season, not to get misled by the glitter, not to go after the baubles and bangles, but to move toward the Mountain always. "In the days before the flood," Matthew reminds us, "the people were eating and drinking, marrying and being married, right up to the day Noah entered the ark. They were totally unconcerned until the flood came. . ." They got all wrapped up, in other words, in daily activities and missed the Spirit. Unlike the people in Noah's time, we must make our lives seeds of a higher hope.
The fact is that we don't know when God will come into our own lives. We must wait and watch and be open and make ready.
Indeed, the questions for Advent are: How is God trying to come into my life right now? What is making the road to the Mountain obscure or difficult for me this Advent? What should I be doing differently?
Second Sunday of Advent
Realizing What Matters
Scripture Readings: Isaiah 11:1 10, Matthew 3:1-12
"A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse. . . And he shall judge the poor with justice and decide aright for the land 's afflicted. "
"Reform your lives! The reign of God is at hand. "
The Talmud says so poignantly: It is not your obligation to complete your work, but you are not at liberty to quit it.
This week's Scripture readings say much the same: We must go on and go on and go on in our attempts to make the world new, to make the vision new, and to make ourselves new.
"A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse," Isaiah shouts. When it seems hopeless, new life will come. When it seems that things can not get worse, when everything we have counted on, when everything our society ever told us mattered fails - money and success and connections and achievement - and have been proved to be nothing but emptiness, lies and idle hope, then we can do what must be done. Then we can live the just life, the kind life, the Christ life. Something will come out of nothing. What has died in us will bring new life.
Advent, in other words, is the time for realizing what matters. The word of Matthew is quite clear: we should not prepare for Christmas by running from sale to sale. Our task, like John's, is to bring new life around us by preparing our own worlds for Christ.
When I won't participate in slipshod production at work, that's preparing my world for the integrity of Christ. When I refuse to make money by designing or developing instruments of war and death, that's preparing my world for the compassion of Christ. When I take steps to see that the poor, the elderly, the homeless and the less advantaged are cared for not simply at Christmas, but throughout the rest of the year as well, that's preparing the world for the Kingdom of Christ. When like John, I learn to bear the ridicule, that comes with shouting the vision of Christ to a world that is more comfortable with its own, that's preparing the world for the birth of Christ in its midst.
Today's Advent readings are about the world that is to be and the world that is now. It is my obligation, like John's, to enable this world with its war, greed and self-centeredness to be more like the world to come with its peace, justice and Eternal Sabbath.
Today's Scriptures are unforgiving. There's simply no getting around them. Preparation for the Coming of Christ is not about conspicuous consumption, or loving those who love us, or filling our lives with more and more things. Christmas, Isaiah and Matthew tell us clearly, is about our obligation to see that lions lie down with lambs, to see that there is "no harm or ruin on God's holy mountain."
We must ask ourselves: What one specific thing have I done this year to bring peace into the world? What can I do now, in preparation for Christmas, to make the world more like the Reign of God?
Third Sunday of Advent
Reaching Out
Scripture Readings: Isaiah 35:1-6 and 10, Matthew 11:2-11
"The desert and the parched land will exult; the steppe will rejoice and bloom. "
"Go back and report to John what you hear and see: the blind recover their sight, cripples walk, lepers are cured . . . "
Christmas has become a candy cane and sugar plum holiday created on Madison Avenue to convince us that life is meant to be a fairyland, full to overflowing with the goods of the world. If that's the case, neither classic spiritual wisdom nor today's Scriptures are any proof of it.
Ancient mystics told the story of a seeker who searched for years to know the secret of success in life. Finally, one night a Sage appeared to the Seeker in a dream. The Sage said, "The secret of success in life is only this: Stretch out your hand and reach what you can."
The Seeker said, "No, it can't be that simple. It must be something harder, something more satisfying to the human spirit."
The Sage softly replied, "Ah, you are right. It is something harder. It is this: you must stretch out your hand and reach what you cannot." That is the message of today's Scriptures and the message of Christmas as well.
In today's Scripture, Isaiah is reaching for the impossible: fertile deserts and watered clay, lighter loads for those heavy ladened by life, joy for the joyless, hope for the hopeless. What Jesus brings, too, is not cornucopias for those already filled. Jesus brings impossible joy to those whose lives are limited by burdens beyond their control: "cripples walk, lepers are cured, and the poor have good news preached to them."
When John asks, "Are you he who is to come or shall we wait for another?" Jesus does not answer - see the rich get richer and the selfish get more satisfied. No, Jesus answers - the sign of the Coming of the Reign of God is that the empty are filled, the poor are enriched, the oppressed are relieved. Jesus says that the sign of the coming of Christ is not the coming of things for the affluent; it is the coming of justice for the forgotten.
Perhaps the best thing about this Scripture, however, is that we are there also, in John. Like John, we live in a grubby world where we must pay the price for trying to prepare the way for the Word of God. The government finds John a threat and the people find him a disturbing presence. But John keeps reaching for what he cannot grasp. He reaches for Jesus and for justice. John knows what Advent waiting is all about. Advent is about bringing hope to the hopeless. Advent is about learning to recognize what peace on earth and good will is. Advent is about realizing what is demanded of us as well.
Even more provocative, perhaps, is that Jesus looks across the crowd, beyond the present and down through time, at us, and says, "What did you go out to the desert to see . . . ?" What were you expecting, in other words, when you reached out to embrace the Christian life: Madison Avenue or a journey to justice, commercial comfort or Christian challenge, Thou and I in gossamer privacy or Christian discipleship in the world?
"Reach out and grasp what you cannot," the mystic said. Reach out and become a better self. Reach out and make life better for others. Reach out beyond fences and worlds and build a brighter world for everyone. Reach out and make Advent real. No one finds the Christ without searching, without being open to the unlikely, the unfamiliar and the strange. No one finds the Christ without leaving one set of circumstances for another.
All of that takes stretching ourselves beyond ourselves. Isaiah knew that. John knew that. Jesus knew that. Now it's up to us. Reach out so that Christmas can really come.
Fourth Sunday of Advent
Receiving God's Promises
Scripture Readings: Isaiah 7:10 16, Matthew 1:18-25
"The Lord spoke to Ahaz: Ask for a sign from your God . . . But Ahaz answered, 'I will not ask! I will not tempt the Lord!'"
"Such was his intention when suddenly the angel of God appeared in a dream and said to him: 'Joseph, son of David, have no fear about taking Mary as your wife. . . She is to have a son and you are to name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. ' "
In today's Scripture stories of Ahaz, King of Israel, and Joseph, spouse of Mary, we are confronted with two kinds of people. We see one who recognizes that he is face to face with the Mystery of life and risks getting involved with it, and another who comes face to face with the Mystery of life and, finding it difficult as well as mysterious, refuses to trust it.
We are called to realize that there is a great deal of Ahaz and Joseph in each of us that Advent is designed to expose and to heal. In the first Scripture story of the day, Ahaz and Judea are faced with mortal danger from invading nations. The only answer, Isaiah instructs King Ahaz, is to rest absolute trust in God. He cautions Ahaz not to resist or to depend on the things of this world, but to do what is right for the people. "Ask for a sign, any sign," Isaiah challenges Ahaz. Hoping to look pious, Ahaz ignores God's invitation to request the sign by which he could know that God's will had been fulfilled.
"I will not ask for a sign," Ahaz responds to God. "I will not tempt my God!" I will not trust, in other words. I'll do things my way and the way of the world and Ahaz does and fails and destroys the people with him.
Disgusted with Ahaz's pretense to piety, God defines the sign anyway: "The virgin shall be with child. . ." Then and there, we get a glimpse of the Divine Economy. Here, down is up; poor is rich and weak is strong. In the Divine Economy it is trust and truth, not force and frenzy that save us.
In the second story, on the other hand, Joseph is faced with an equally difficult social situation and an equally incredible authority. An angel in a dream tells him to trust that what looks to him like disaster is really of God. Joseph trusts in God and saves the people by saving the Christ.
Like Ahaz, we so often go through life trying to look pious. We act as if our influence, our connections and our own power were enough to save us from the questions, doubts, difficulties and desires that plague us. Like Joseph, we get confused trying to choose good from better, salvation from selfishness. Like them, we wonder if we, too, will ever be freed from life's perils or be loosed from life's burdens. We then begin to concentrate on what we can amass to assure our security and prestige until, finally, we buy into the culture of death that depends on "deterrence," and the climate of comfort that depends on things that surround us.
Unlike Ahaz and Joseph, who were confronted with the promise only once, we are fortunate enough to be reminded every year that the virgin was indeed with child. We're reminded again every year that this is where hope resides. It's in the promise that we find real security and the purpose of life.
Advent is the time to remember Ahaz and his desire to save himself. Advent is also the time to remember Joseph, the one equally troubled by thoughts of social devastation but who, unlike Ahaz, heard the Word of God and believed and so saved the people, without power, without force, without things. Advent is the time to remember the promise in our own lives.
It is so difficult to believe in what other people do not see. The powerful of the country believe only in amassing more "defense" at the expense of life everywhere. The clever of the country believe only in the survival of the fittest. The wise of the earth believe only in the amassing of wealth for its own sake. How shall we trust that strength and salvation and riches are not in those things?
Ahaz is our temptation, but Joseph is our model. We need to trust in God, not trust in things. That's what Advent is all about.
Christmas Eve
Gaining Wisdom
Scripture Readings: Isaiah 9:2-7, Luke 2:1-21
"The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined. "
"The shepherds said to one another, 'Let us go over to Bethlehem . . . And they went in haste. ' "
"The wise," an ancient proverb says, "are torches lighting the path of truth. "
Christmas Eve is about wisdom and what it takes to recognize the truth.
The problem is that today's scripture lesson is drawn in contrasts that shock. The promise, both readings say, has at last been fulfilled. Everything we've waited for is with us. The fullness of time has come in our time. Every thing we could ever want we finally have. The people rejoice. The angels sing. The truth has come. Everything is perfect. Except. . .
Except we find the Promise among the poor. We get the message from the margirial. We are confronted with the power of the powerless. The people who are present, the heralds of this new age, are simply not our kind of folks. There's no status here, no trappings, no minions of the state, no credentials, no reverends, no one to impress. Jesus was born, you see, independent of both the Temple and the palaces of Jerusalem.
Clearly, the wisdom to be had here is that God is among us where we would least like to think, perhaps, and Jesus does not bring what the world teaches us to want.
The Wisdom here is in the shepherds who had the sense to change their lives, and "in haste," in order to respond to the vagaries of the world around them.
The Wisdom here lies in recognizing the Peace of God in the unpretentious. The real power is found in the presence that threatens least.
The Wisdom here lies in witnessing to these things - to peace without violence, to openness to the moving spirit of God, to satisfaction without satiation, to the presence of God in the lowest, the least, the last around us.
But this makes for a great deal of Christmas discomfort, in a society that stands for comfort and total security and status, even in its holiest season.
We like "peace through strength" we say. Then we spend the money of the poor on the militaristic agendas of the mighty. We don't have enough money for day care or education or job retraining programs in this country, we insist. We don't have enough money to develop the earth, but we have enough money to arm the heavens. Our peace is clearly not in the crib - our peace is in the sword.
We look for Jesus in the clean and the comfortable, not in the down and out, not in the uncouth, not in shepherds, not in mangers. We expect a syrup and butter Jesus, not the one who cleansed the temple or called the Pharisees hypocrites or told Pilate he had no authority over him.
Well, the angels are singing for us this year. The little people are still rejoicing. The shepherds are still trying to get us to see. Indeed, the torches are still being lit.
The question is simply whether or not you and I, too, will have the wisdom to find Christ this Christmas. Will we change our lives as a result of the finding? Will we welcome into the human race all those we persistently see as lesser, and cry "Peace to God's people on earth"? Or will we settle yet for only a very, very cheap facsimile?
Christmas 1
Beginning Again
Scripture Readings: Isaiah 63:7-9, Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23
"In all their affliction God was afflicted, and the angel of God's presence saved them; out of love and pity God redeemed them, lifting them up and carrying them all the days of old. "
"Now when the magi had departed, behold, an angel of God appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, 'Rise, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt, and remain there 'til I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him. ' "
In one of the early writings of the Desert Masters the following tribute was recorded: "Abba Poemen said about Abba Pior," the desert monastics wrote, "that every single day he made a fresh beginning."
The faith for fresh beginnings is clearly one of the lessons of the First Sunday after Christmas. In Isaiah, it is God who makes the new beginning with a people for whom, it was now obvious, failure was to be a commonplace. By beginning again with a faithless people, God enables them to begin again as well.
In Matthew, Joseph shows us all how to begin again by carrying the Word himself. It is Joseph who shows all of us how to make life new by himself beginning over and over again. Joseph is sent first to Bethlehem, then to Egypt, then back to Judea and then finally to Nazareth. He went to all those places with steadfast love on behalf of the Word.
Today's scripture, clearly, is about the demand for steadfast love once the tinsel is down and the tree lights go out. However, today's Scripture shows us the eternal beauty of that love as well.
God's steadfast love will sustain us this year, through financial struggles, family pain, personal confusion and national failures. It is God's steadfast love, the Scripture assures us, that we can depend on, for "in all their affliction God was afflicted, and the angel of God's presence saved them."
It must be our steadfast love that enables us to begin again and again. Like Joseph, we must go to the Bethlehems of our own lives, to those places where those in our own family reject us, ignore us, irritate us, or need us. We must begin again to be kind and understanding and supportive of one another. We must go wherever we are needed, not simply to the neighbors who are near to us, known to us and like us.
Like Joseph in Egypt, we have to begin again to carry the Word by showing steadfast love to the foreigners in our own lives. We need to reach out to the people whose skin colors are different, those who speak with an accent, those who have different values and those who believe in a world of a different shape.
We have to do more this year than simply speak to the foreigners in our lives. We must begin to go to them. We must learn to live well with people very much unlike us in background, culture and religion. We have to stop expecting the whole world to look and think like us. We must learn to love everyone steadfastly, despite differences, despite distances.
We have to begin again, like Joseph in Judea, to deal with those who are hostile in our lives without responding with hostility ourselves. We must begin to see that our task is not to destroy the enemy or to become emotionally and spiritually captive to the enemy that we carry within us. Our task is to learn to live well despite the enemy. We must see that the enemy does not become our excuse to be less than we can be.
Finally, like Joseph, we have to find the Nazareth that nourishes our lives, feeds our souls and directs our energies to the carrying of the Word with steadfast love. Every day we must make a new beginning to build the world of peace and Justice in our own lives that Bethlehem promised, Egypt saved and Nazareth nourished. We must begin and begin and begin with steadfast love.
Epiphany
Following the Star
Scripture Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6, Matthew 2:1-12
Philip Sydney wrote in the 16th Century:
Who shoot at stars,
though they never hit the mark,
may yet be sure
they shall shoot higher
than those who aim at bushes.
And Emerson wrote, "Beware what you set your heart upon for it surely shall be yours."
The question is not how many Magi arrived in Bethlehem. The real question we should ask is: How many of them started the journey in the first place? How many began but failed to persevere? How many saw a Star but got discouraged at the length of the journey, the heat of the day and the dull and dreary conditions of the trek? How many set their hearts on other things and settled down to live life on a lesser plane.
The real Epiphany questions for us are: What stars are we following? What stars are we failing to see and follow?
Isaiah says, realize what you have. Be everything you can be and you will become what you are called to be - a light to others. However, we forget that Christmas is as much a pledge as it is a boon. We've come to see Christmas more as what we get than what we are now obliged to give - ourselves.
There is so much of Christmas that is privatized now: my wish list, our family dinner, my church, our house decorations, our presents. Only the Epiphany can be counted on, if we get lost in all of that, to pull us out of ourselves again.
"Lift your eyes round about, and see," Isaiah insists, "They all gather together; they come to you." Indeed, see those who are following the star today. See the undernourished, undereducated, underdeveloped children of the Third World who are being sacrificed to pay back overbearing debts to First World nations.
See the staggering military costs of our own nation that will come back to haunt us in the schools not built and the arts not developed and the homes not contructed in our own country. See the people on the other side of town who work, but are still poor. See those who are uneducated and so can't work. See the refugees on our borders who are looking for room in the wealthiest inn in the world and are being refused.
Like Herod, our world, too, says that it worships the Child and is simply waiting to welcome Him. Yet all the time the systems, the neighborhood and the country clubs fear what would really happen if the people did actually discover this Star, this Child, this God.
Perhaps the most telling part of the Matthew story is precisely this: that, having followed the Star and found the Christ, the Magi "departed to their own country by another way." And there is a key: Like the Magi, once we really see the Christ, we must begin to follow other ways. We can't go back by way of profit and power anymore. We can't proceed on the ways of division and oppression. We can't think like we used to: that salvation was mine and everyone else could take care of themselves. We can't want what we used to consider valuable anymore. Or, if we're not careful, we will indeed get what we set our hearts on and that would be a pity.
This Epiphany we are not called to follow a star. On the contrary, the purpose of Epipany is to become a star.
About the Reflections'Author
Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B. is prioress of The Benedictine Sisters in Erie, PA, and a member of Sojourner's editorial board.
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