Advent Message

[RevRonRobinson at aol.com]

Greetings, 
 
I hope you will find ways and a time during this Advent season (perhaps  even 
while you are reading this letter) to simply breathe in deeply, and hold  
your breath, and in that moment of holding to be aware "in the twinkling of an  
eye" of all the world contained in your lungs, all the spirit, all the hope of  
your life and of those you love, and also the longer you hold your breath 
that  you will become aware too of the pain and hurt and scarcity and deprivation 
not  only in your life but in the world. In holding your breath, the beating 
of your  heart becomes clearer and louder, along with the sharpening of all 
your senses. 
 
That is like the waiting that is called Advent. And Christmas is like the  
rush of new breath, new life, that comes filling us up once again, reminding us  
of the gift of Life we've been given.
 
I have been more aware lately of all that breathing entails and implies  
since my angina and blocked heart artery last summer. Like breath,  Christmas can 
be taken routinely. But I am here to tell you that neither is  inevitable. 
Christmas may not come.
 
Oh Dec. 25th will come. Everything associated with Christmas may  
come--families may gather, churches may meet, presents may be given and  received, food 
may be plentiful, traditions may be kept. But still Christmas  where it 
counts--in our depths of soul and freedom of heart and joyful service  of hands--that 
Christmas may not come. The old saying is true: Christmas is not  like 
winter.(Excuse the northern hemisphere orientation). Winter will come  regardless. I 
love winter (he says from Oklahoma), but I've never felt there was  much to 
celebrate in the routine returnings of nature's cycle, splendid and  God-given 
though they be. And though I am with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and can see  the 
"miraculous" in the simple raising of an arm, marveling at all of the cosmic  
evolution and consciousness that has gone into the event, still the miracle of  
Christmas is something else, something more. You can't schedule, arrange,  
maneuver, will, engineer Christmas. In truth, the more you try the more  Christmas 
eludes. 
 
Christmas celebrates, imitates, and initiates the incarnation of God. 
 
About Incarnation, I share from Frederick Buechner's book "Beyond  Words":
 
"The word became flesh," wrote John, "and dwelt among us, full of grace and  
truth." (John 1:14). That is what incarnation means. It is untheological. It 
is  unsophisticated. It is undignified. But according to Christianity, it is 
the way  things are. All religions and philosophies that deny the reality or the 
 significance of the material, the fleshly, the earthbound, are themselves  
denied. 
 
"Moses at the burning bush was told to take off his shoes because the  ground 
on which he stood was holy ground (Exodus 3:5), and incarnation means  that 
all ground is holy ground because God not only made it but walked on it,  ate 
and slept and worked and died on it. If we are saved anywhere, we are saved  
here. And what is saved is not some diaphanous distillation of our bodies and  
our earth, but our bodies and our earth themselves. Jerusalem becomes the New  
Jerusalem coming down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband  
(Revelation 21:2). Our bodies are sown perishable and raised imperishable (1  
Corinthians 15:42). 
 
"One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is  the 
attempt to be more spiritual than God."
 
Amen! I know that is my own confessional. And my personal prayer for the  New 
Year will be to be more aware of the Word in the Flesh, experiencing what is  
called the embodied God in me and in others and in the earth. 
 
Christmas is a story to help us see and feel the Incarnation. The story,  the 
event, overturns all the theology that came later and too often  betrayed the 
event and story. God is always More than we can grasp, hold,  imagine, bear, 
know, or even experience--but God, Christmas witnesses, is also  right there 
in the womb of a young unmarried Jewish girl struggling to live  under every 
oppression, homeless, poor, hungry, outcast, afraid, shamed,  and God is right 
there in the presence of the body and companionship  and uncertainties of 
Joseph, right there in the birth pains and cries  and first breath, first touch and 
hug and breastfeeding, and first twinkling of  an eye that mirrored the stars 
overhead, so bright they seemed  to come closer and add their light into the 
darkness of the earth. God  is right there in the fragile new life that could 
have been, really could have  been, snuffed out so quickly, in so many ways. 
But wasn't. Not yet, not  yet. 
 
The miracle of Christmas came once. And the hope ever since is that the  
miracle of Christmas will come again, the Incarnation keep spreading. But  it 
isn't inevitable or predictable or it isn't Christmas. For the God of  Christmas 
who loves the world, for the creator of abundance and diversity and  freedom, 
"once is not enough." Christmas is meant to come again and again and  again. I 
believe it does. It has in my life and in so many others, and I  hope in yours 
too. 
 
Of course it may not come during either the liturgical season or  shopping 
season. But I believe it will come. Once it came to me in April, in a  story 
some may have heard before. I was having a particularly bad day in a  stressful 
time and part of it, a very small part of it, was a car that wouldn't  start 
and meetings to be had in other towns. So I borrowed a car from a  relative, one 
that ran but barely and was only used as a spare itself. I was  speeding down 
the turnpike, praying all the usual prayers for gas to hold out to  the 
station, for the car not to break down, for the police to be absent,  thinking of 
all the problems and coming up with no solutions. I looked down and  saw a 
cassette tape sticking out of the car player and my curiosity arose and my  need 
for something other than my own thoughts and own world arose, and I pushed  it 
in and waited to see what would come (music of some kind, motivational,  
audiobook? God forbid a televangelist tape to raise the blood pressure higher?).  
But what I got was Christmas music. Not Bing or Perry or Elvis or Celine. It 
was  dogs doing Jingle Bells. Chipmunks. Miss Piggy and Kermit. And "worse." The 
very  kind of music that the righteous "reason for the season" crowd 
(including me)  either frowns on or suffers. And yet I couldn't push the stop button. 
A  crazy light-hearted generous spirit from another world entered my own bleak 
and  shriveled one, and I was laughing and breathing again and the 
speedometer was  slowing down, and there was God Incarnate changing the world bit by bit 
 moment by moment. Reminding me that in the times so much more  difficult 
than that day, I too might receive a gift of love. 
 
You can't "spiritual" your way to Christmas. But one of the things  that does 
help is to be in an Advent spirit--of attention,  expectation--so Christmas 
doesn't come and you don't know it. 
 
The Rev. Buechner says this too of Advent in his book of words  "Beyond 
Words": 
 
"The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest  stop 
chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the  
orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised the baton.  In the 
silence of a midwinter dusk there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere  a 
sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the  
silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the  
front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost  
nothing. For a second you catch a whiff in the air of some fragrance that  
reminds you of a place you've never been and a time you have no words for. You  are 
aware of the beating of your heart. The extraordinary thing that is  about to 
happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it  happens. 
Advent is the name of that moment.
 
"The Salvation Army Santa Claus clangs his bell. The sidewalks are so  
crowded you can hardly move. Exhaust fumes are the chief fragrance in the air,  and 
everybody is as bundled up against any sense of what all the fuss is really  
about as they are bundled up against the windchill factor. But if you  
concentrate just for an instant, far off in the deeps of yourself somewhere you  can 
feel the beating of your heart. For all its madness and lostness, not to  
mention your own, you can hear the world itself holding its breath."
 
Blessings, 
 
Rev. Ron Robinson
Executive Director
Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship
_www.uuchristian.org_ (http://www.uuchristian.org)