NEED TO ADD SOME CHRISTMAS CHEER TO YOUR SEASON?

Be sure to join us this Sunday for worship. We’ll be singing lots of your favorite carols and our children and youth will offer the message of Christmas in a pageant you won’t want to miss.

WHAT BLEAK MID-WINTER MAKES VISIBLE

The last leaves have finally fallen from the trees outside our kitchen window. The oak leaves had stubbornly hung on until last weekend’s storm dropped them in our backyard. Tired of raking, I ran over them with the lawnmower and shredded them. Oak leaves do not seem to make the best mulch; but it was my path of least resistance so late in the season.

Without their canopy of leaves, the trees’ underlying structure was made visible. I noticed how some branches were stretched to unexpected lengths. Here and there, large limbs are snapped off and dangling mid-air. The stark, underlying structure of each tree has suddenly become visible to my mid-December eyes. One of the wonders of early winter is the way it lays bare the basic outlines of every trunk and limb in all their strengths as well as their vulnerabilities.

And it’s not just a tree’s fundamental shape and structure that I now notice. I also see the blue jay’s sudden flight through a tangle of bare branches. I now wonder at the squirrels leaping and scampering high among naked limbs. The squirrels and jays were probably there last July doing these same things; but a deep green canopy kept them hidden from my eyes.

The bare trunks and limbs speak of Advent’s message to us. Advent invites us to strip away the canopy of life’s distractions and examine the basic structure and shape of our lives. It prods us to pull back the canopy of forgetfulness and inattention that so often blankets our awareness and to examine how our lives are growing. Are our lives over-stretched to the point of breaking somewhere and need pruning? Are parts of our lives broken or left hanging so that healing is somewhere needed? Are the core foundations, the roots that nourish our lives, strong and upright?

John the Baptist cries in the wilderness, “Prepare a way of the Lord.” It’s an invitation to pull back the canopy of inattention and indifference that often shrouds our perceptions in the same way that autumn winds expose a tree’s elemental shape and structure. Advent blows through our December lives, stripping away the veil of apathy and inertia that sometimes obscures our ability to see where change is needed if we are to “prepare the way of the Lord.” To take stock of and address our anxieties and fears, our blind spots and secret woundedness, the pretensions and defenses that scamper inside us like the birds and squirrels that scamper among bare branches.

December’s leafless trees echo Advent’s announcement that “The coming of the Lord is at hand.” Prepare the way by looking at our lives’ roots and limbs the way December lets us look at the basic shape of trees and notice the creatures they harbor among their branches. What do we see that is typically hidden by a canopy of distractions? What rough places in our lives need to be made smooth? Where is our thinking bent or warped and in need of straightening so that our hearts may be an acceptable dwelling place for the One who comes proclaiming glad tidings of great joy?

Blessings, Pastor Thomas

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