BE BORN IN US TODAY
December 2006
for the Collect, publication for St. Thomas Episcopal Church,
Medina, WA
The day of one’s birth is a momentous occasion. But after that, every subsequent birthday is a little less exciting. Nothing special happens on a birthday. It’s not like a graduation day or a wedding day. It doesn’t alter your life in any significant way. Yet we celebrate birthdays fervently, especially as kids, and especially at the round-numbered milestones to which we attach the most significance.
Jesus, being human, had birthdays. For many years, our culture has started celebrating his birthday months before the event. In a Peanuts cartoon dated October 23, 1959, Charlie Brown complains to Lucy that he went to buy a Halloween mask, but they were all out. Lucy asks if they’ll be getting more in before Halloween. Charlie Brown bursts out, “No – they’re putting out the Christmas merchandise now!”
If you think Halloween and Thanksgiving get a little lost in the Christmas shopping season, stop and think about Advent. The season of Advent is the beginning of the story of Jesus. We hear ancient readings from Jeremiah, Malachi and Isaiah, prophets who lived centuries before Jesus. We re-appropriate their words to demonstrate that Jesus truly lived what these men spoke of. Advent season is a time of pregnancy; we wait and prepare for the birth we anticipate.
We hear the story of John the Baptist: of his birth and his early ministry in the wilderness. Jewish culture was besieged on all sides by the more dominant Roman culture. The religious leaders dealt with this oppression by walling themselves in with wealth and security. Religion and politics worked together to bury the poor in hunger and disease.
John called the religious leaders a “brood of vipers,” asserting that God didn’t care how faithful they were to Judaism, or even that they were Jews in the first place. He reminded them of the message all the prophets preached: religious identity means nothing if you’re not being compassionate to those in need.
As Christians today, we need to hear this same message, and we need look no further than Jesus’ own words to find it. Jesus taught again and again that purity of religious intent, following the rules to the letter, means nothing if your actions serve to hold others back. Jesus’ compassion cost him his life. So it is this compassion that we allow to gestate within us during Advent. “O holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray. Cast out our sin and enter in; be born in us today.”
Yes, a date of birth is a big deal, and nothing really happens on subsequent birthdays. But Christmas isn’t just a birthday. Every year, we invite Christ to be born in us—every year! Every Christmas is the day Jesus is born—not figuratively, not literally, but super-literally, in the most real sense possible.
May your Christmas prayers help make Jesus’ birth real. As you pour out compassion and love, Jesus will appear more and more clearly, a light in the darkness for those who need it most.