Advent I: Christmas--Don't Miss the Glory

photo courtesy of technolibrary / flickr

Every year like many of you I keep coming back to those old words in Isaiah. Sometimes I read them—sometimes I put on the old Messiah music and hear the mournful words: “Comfort ye…comfort ye my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem…”

God knows we need some comfort these strange days. And somebody, somewhere needs to speak tenderly to us. The harshness of our times is wearying. The old prophet had it right—in the wilderness get ready. In the desert it is going to happen. Something you won’t find on any GPS. In that desert there will be highway that leads us where we desperately need to go. 

And along your wilderness or desert is a glorious promise. The valleys—everyone of them shall be lifted up…the mountains and hills so hard to climb will be made low…that uneven ground—which we tread day after day will be leveled…and all the rough places from Washington to Aleppo to the street where you live—will be straight and smooth and make just living a joy. 

And somewhere through the years some old scribe bent over a scroll or some calligraphed Latin text and muttered: ”That’s Christmas! That’s the real Christmas!” The old man looked out the smeared windows at what lay out there. Poverty…,hunger for many…broken and wounded folk…children with no light in their eyes—a world gone wrong. And the old reader, turned began to the manuscript,  traced the words with his finger and tried unsuccessfully to hold back the tears. 

“The glory of the Lord shall be revealed…” We all need some glory in this winter of our discontent. We won’t find it anywhere else. Oh I know we keep looking and hoping, just hoping that at Wal Mart or Dillards or Barnes and Noble we will find it maybe. We’ll string up the lights and haul dusty boxes from the attic—trees to be assembled. Ornaments to be found. Extension cords located yet another yuletide season. We won’t just keep it inside—but we’ll move through the front door to hang the wreaths, to string lights and more lights along the shrubbery. We’ll go back into the house and place little tiny candles in each of the windows. 

We might search for the Christmas list or open the boxes of greeting cards. We’ll make a long list of what we need to get at the Grocery store and how we will set the dining room table. We will wrap or hide the presents for the little ones and sometimes the big ones too. We’ll exhaust ourselves with these customs we cling to year after year. 

The old prophet was right. More than anything we really do long for some glory. But it won’t

be found in any of our fevered activities. Somebody called it the “big OK.” Hoping that amid the faces and the presents and the time off we will discover at the heart of it all—that we are OK and we are loved and that it all matters. All of it. The rest of the year. The visits to the fresh dug graves. The time in the hospital. The job we wish was a little better. Worries about credit cards. 

But we won’t find the glory there. But it’s coming. In a darkened Christmas Eve service as a little boy comes forward, holding a candle singing: “This little light of mine…” Or looking down your pew at the family members you are so proud of and hope others notice. Maybe the glory will slip in when you open that card or some package from far away. Or watching the bathrobe drama you’ve seen a hundred times—and yet something good and clean stirs once more. It could even be opening the leather-bound book to Luke Two and reading it over yet again. It could even come when you unwrap that nativity set and place Mary and Joseph and and a few animals and maybe even an angel too in place. But carefully set at the center of it all: a baby. Of all things that ties it all together: a baby. Like some buried treasure—the glory really is there for your finding.

If we are lucky somewhere when we least expect it this season—the glory just might come. To  comfort whatever it is in you that needs a comforting. To speak to your wilderness or the desert of your days. To send you back like those Shepherds and Wise Men to ordinary days where, like them you will praise God for all you have seen or heard.

I don’t knock the presents or the decorations or all the other parts that make this season so shining. But unless somewhere in these darkened days we touch the glory we will have missed it all. 

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com