Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Is it up, and decorated?

How many have outside Christmas lights up?

Have you mailed your Christmas cards yet?

Have you started receiving Christmas cards yet?

Have you begun your Christmas shopping?

Have you finished it?

Are the stockings all hung by the chimney with care?

Christmas is still 21 days away …

but those often seem like

the shortest 21 days of the year!

And I don’t mean just because the sun

comes up late and goes down early!

It isn’t here yet …but it’s rapidly approaching.

We don’t have to be 100% ready,

right this very minute,

but we have to be making preparations right now,

so we don’t get caught short.

The day is drawing near.

Now of course, all those things I mentioned at the outset

relate to the more secular aspect of Christmas.

The gift-giving, partygoing,

holidaying kinds of things.

But we know there’s more to it than that,

or we wouldn’t be here.

We know that Christmas means Santa Claus,

but even more it means Jesus Christ.

So our preparation may include all the secular trappings,

but it must also do more.

There is something that we as Christians

have to add to our list:

Decorate. Bake. Shop. Mail.

Repent.

Repent?!

Who wants to think about that at a time like this?

Repentance seems to be a more fit subject

for January or February,

when the holiday excitement is passed,

and the sky gets more than its fair share of gray.

Certainly every January I have to repent of gluttony,

when I try to stuff myself into my clothes.

Even March seems like a suitable season for repentance.

Wind whipping around,

making us want to stay indoors,

stirring up colds and allergies and so on …

Watching the fury of nature might well move us

to a sense of unworthiness, repentance.

But in December?

Getting ready for Christ’s birth?

Surely that’s a season for rejoicing, not repenting.

It’s especially hard to view Advent

as a season of preparation and repentance

when we’ve been hearing "Silent Night"

on store muzak since Halloween.

After all, it just stands to reason

that people will buy more stuff accompanied by

"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"

than by "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence."

So we don’t hear Advent carols and hymns

in those public places.

Which is probably why most of us

don’t know them very well.

In the secular world,

the Christmas season runs from

October 31 – or before – to December 25.

In the church year,

the Christmas season is

December 24 to January 6.

We’re not there yet!

Our time for rejoicing, Christianly speaking,

comes in another 20 days.

We’re still in a season of getting ready.

And as long ago as John the Baptist,

it was suggested that the way we do that

is through repentance.

Mark’s gospel doesn’t give us quite as

rough-and-tumble a portrait of John

as some of the other gospels …

here he doesn’t call anyone a brood of vipers …

but his message is clear.

John appeared … proclaiming a baptism of repentance

for the forgiveness of sins.

In the same way that he prepares people

for Christ’s ministry to begin,

so we prepare ourselves for the celebration of his birth.

We end with joy,

but we begin with a sense of sadness, of regret.

We repent.

Another factor, though,

isn’t just the spirit of the season,

but the timing.

Who among us needs one more thing

on our list of "things to do"?

Even if we are prepared to enter into

a more quiet attitude of repentance and preparing …

how do we carve out the time for it?

Where is time for prayer,

when the cookies have to come out of the oven in ten minutes?

How is quiet reflection possible

when our home is full of our adult children,

home for the holidays?

How do we focus our own life with God

when there’s even more than usual

demanding our attention?

It seems almost an unfair expectation

on the part of God, or the church, or whomever,

to think that we could find

that kind of time for self-examination,

and thinking things through,

and repenting,

so that we can set a new course.

On the other hand,

it may be that these things seem impossible

only because we’ve already let

the world set too much of our agenda for these days.

In which case, that may be

one of the things we need to repent!

Seriously, there’s no way I can tell any one of you

which of the other things on your list you could drop

in order to make time for time with God.

Some days, it’s hard enough

to discern that for myself!

I can remember clearly the first year,

that I made the decision

not to take the time and energy put up a tree that year,

and while I did miss it,

leaving it off my list

helped me be a lot calmer that year!

This year is likely to be the same,

for the same kinds of reasons.

To put it in a painfully simple way:

If we are too busy for God,

then we are too busy.

And repentance is even more important

if we find ourselves in that situation.

Christmas becomes all the more meaningful –

the birth of our redeemer is all the more

astounding and miraculous –

if we have spent time understanding

what it is we’re being redeemed from.

One last objection that some of us may have

to the possibility of adding "repentance"

to our "to do" list, is this:

For various reasons, the holiday season

often seems to come accompanied by

a certain weight of guilt already.

We’re not sure we need any more!

Whoever we have our Christmas dinner with,

there’s usually at least a twinge of guilt over

who we didn’t have it with.

We feel vaguely guilty if we

spent more on the Christmas present for brother Bob

than for sister Sue.

If a Christmas card comes from the Joneses,

we feel terrible if we didn’t send them one,

and we scramble to get one off quickly.

Nearly everyone seems to have at least one relative

who will try to make us feel guilty

if we didn’t read their mind

and get them exactly what they wanted.

I can recall one year that my brother and I

tried to make Mom feel ever so guilty

for leaving off the tree

the construction-paper chains we made

when I was about five!

You are a very unusual person from a very unusual family

if you’ve never had an experience of

the holiday "guilts."

So we might well wonder,

is this really a time that we want to focus on repentance,

and stir up even more guilt feelings?

Let me just say this:

A lot of the guilty feelings we get at this time of year

are unnecessary and maybe even unhealthy.

We can’t be two places at once,

with two families at the same time;

why should anyone feel guilt about that?

We can’t spend more money than we have;

no one is obligated to go into debt to buy gifts;

why do we let such things weigh on us?

True repentance enables us to distinguish between

the things which are real problems,

for which we should have a sense of guilt,

and then repent …

and the things which are really someone else’s problem,

and we need to let go of.

Which could just make our lives better year ‘round.

‘Tis the season to prepare.

‘Tis the season to repent.

Add it to your list,

so that we can be ready when Christ comes.

Amen.

© 2005 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)