The Season of Advent is upon us.  A season that the church tells us is a time to prepare for the coming of Jesus.  And although we begin preparation for the season of Christmas, the celebration of the first coming of Jesus, we prepare by reflecting in our readings about the second coming of Jesus when He comes at the end of time.  How are we to pull these two together?

It’s not unusual these days to find the secular world out of “sync” with the church calendar.  We all know advent begins today – but when did preparation for Christmas begin out there?  That’s easy, the day after Halloween – take down the orange and black – get rid of the pumpkins at cats - and put up the red and green, get the plastic trees out of the closet and dust ‘em off.  The longer the better, that many more shopping days.

The question I have heard as a greeting more than any other over the past three weeks has not been “How are you?”, but rather, “Are you ready for Christmas, have you done your Christmas shopping?”  I haven’t had anyone ask me yet, “Are you ready for Christ’s coming, have you done your Christmas praying?”

Mark warns us, “Jesus is coming again, and we will not know when or where, so we must be ready!”  When we celebrate Christ’s birth, we celebrate that He was with us in the flesh.  I’ve always thought that if God was fair, the best time for Jesus to come again would be on Christmas Day, when the whole world is waiting for him, thinking about him and praying to him.  Or are we?

Christmas is a wonderful time, we get to hear children singing hymns like “While Shepherds washed their socks by night”, or listen to them describe the gifts of the magi in the school play as “Gold, Frankenstein and Myrrh.”  We use the excitement and the ritual to transport ourselves out of our daily lives to something we hope is better.  We celebrate and prepare for the coming of the Prince of Peace.  But if Jesus had a title to match what is really going to be going on out there for the next three and half weeks in our typical North American cities, someone might say his title should be the Prince of Stress.

No one wants to be the Grinch who stole Christmas, or put a damper on the excitement that the children feel, but we have been warned and we need to keep things in perspective.  Would we be ready if Christmas dinner was called off by the blowing of the last trumpet?

I heard of one man who was so stressed that he didn’t have enough presents that he told his wife he had to dash off the Square One for some last minute shopping.  His wife was listening to the radio a few minutes later and heard the traffic announcer say there was someone driving the wrong direction on the 403, so the woman phoned her husband on his cell phone to warn him of the trouble.  He said to her, “One person, you gotta be kidding me, there’s hundreds of people driving the wrong way!”

My wife Barbara and I decided that we would sit down this Sunday afternoon and look at what had to be done and to put together a plan for the season.  What I’m hoping is that we don’t forget to put time in there to pray as well as to shop.  Some time for quiet reflection on the wonderful gift that God gave us when His Son became a human being just like us and lived His life to teach us and gave us His most precious gift to save us, His very life. 

We all know what the real spirit of Christmas is, and it’s not just about presents.  When we pray we need to pray for peace, especially in this world and not like the little boys who were staying over at their grandparents house.  Grandma put them to bed and said, “Don’t forget to say your prayers!” and as she left the room, the little brother got on his knees and began to pray at the top of his lungs, “Dear God, I pray for a new bicycle, Dear God, I pray for a new X-Box game, …” and his older brother said, “Why are you shouting so loud, God isn’t deaf!” and the little brother said, “I know, but Grandma is…”

One way to tell if you are getting out of perspective is to ask yourself I you are worrying more about preparing for way a room will look, or a meal will taste or a present will fit instead of planning about how you will spend the time with those you love who have taken the chance to be with you.  Christmas shopping can be a warm and rewarding experience if the love we feel for those on our shopping list is uppermost in our mind and we enjoy the service we provide them through our gifts, but it can be a gruesome chore when all we are doing is fulfilling some resented obligations to make sure our duty is done.

One of the saddest commercials on television shows a man in front of his computer screen, picking out presents on the Internet.  In six seconds, he says “done, done, done” as he selects adequate presents anonymously with no thought and no effort and then he drives to mall to gloat over others who were so silly as to take the trouble shop in person.

Is this where life is taking us, where we live in isolation, in front of computer screens, devoid of human contact and fulfilling some industry model of the perfect shopper.

We have been blessed here in North America with a staggering abundance compared to the rest of the world, as Mark says in the Gospel, we are the slaves who have been left in charge of the wealth while the master is away.  We can spend our time trading these gifts among ourselves behind the gates of the fortresses we have built or we can open the gates and share the wealth as the master would have us do, as the King ordered us to do in last weeks Gospel “to the least of his brothers and sisters”.

Our very best preparation to begin to be ready to meet the Lord when he comes again is to come forward and receive the Lord Himself in the Eucharist, His own special gift to all of us.  What better way for us to be strengthened to behave as we really should than to have him inside us, guiding and empowering us to do the right thing in this season where we are especially called to be mindful of Him.  When I asked at the beginning as to how we can pull the celebration of the first coming at Christmas and the preparation of the second coming in the future, the answer is the Eucharist because it guarantees that Christ is always with us, in the flesh, that the second coming becomes an eternal NOW that will keep us always ready since we are with Him and He is in us at all times.

- Deacon Steve