Christ Church welcomes you.
We are a community of faith called to seek and serve Christ in All persons at the crossroads: The Body of Christ offering Infinite Respect and Radical Hospitality To All.
Service Times
Directions
Contact Christ Church
What's Happening
Please follow us ... 
Musings
The Last Thing We Need Right Now is "A Little Christmas"
Rev. Peter Faass | 12/3/2010
We are in the season of Advent; a time in the liturgical calendar of quiet waiting and reflection. I am hard pressed to think of a more countercultural time of the year as the sacred message of this season butts heads with the secular one!
Many parishioners think we Episcopal clergy are really cranky at this time of year. We don’t schedule Christmas carols until, well, Christmas. We focus our sermons on the scriptural message of the prophets to repent and to make new beginnings for ourselves so we may prepare for the coming of the Holy One.
While we don’t go as far as John the Baptist, calling people a brood of snakes, we do remind them that the wheat will be separated from the chaff at some point and ask if you are ready for the winnowing? We are hyper-critical of the crass commercialism of the “holiday season” that is a cancer in our society. In response to that criticism I had one person tell me that I had beaten the death out of that topic and to please try to be a little brighter in my preaching. My response was, if you stop doing it, I’ll stop harping about it.
My friends we are all pretty weary these days. There is a pervasive sense of hopelessness that permeates our culture. It seems like no matter what we do, we just can’t get a handle on making things better for ourselves or the culture. Time is beginning to feel like “one damn thing after another.” And the frenzied celebration of the “holiday season” is not the panacea to our ills that we wish it were.
Frankly the reality of our circumstances is that the last thing we need right now is “a little Christmas.”
What we need is what the prayer for the newly baptized in the Book of Common Prayer calls, “The gift of joy and wonder in all [God’s] works.” (BCP, page 308) That is what the season of Advent does for us when we engage it faithfully; it strips away our jaded, cynical view of life. It strips away our weariness because we no longer are obsessed with the “perfect Christmas” and the acquisition of material goods.
Advent restores our child-like innocence of seeing joy and wonder in all of God’s works. It does so by lighting one new candle after another on the Advent wreath each week. Each of those candles illumes the path out of the wilderness of our weariness and leads us to Bethlehem. In Advent we are guided to the place where the ultimate joy and wonder of God Incarnate shone forth in a world as dark and as weary as our own.
Love came down at Christmas to redeem a sin-sick and weary world; not only the world of Palestine 2000 years ago, but the world for all eternity. Advent becomes for us the antidote to our weariness and our malaise, for in Advent we come to know the truth: “The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Ever.
Peter +
P.S. Here is a link to a marvelous YOUTUBE video from “Advent Conspiracy.”
