The Work of Christmas

We think of Advent as a time when we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus and wait for his second coming. He said he would return, after all…what’s taking him so long? Someone once suggested to me that we are still waiting because God is merciful and thus is giving us every opportunity to repent of our self-centered ways and choose instead to participate in the life of God. Thus it is not just we who are waiting for God, but God who is waiting for us!

In his book “Praying the Truth,” William Barry says, “God humbly waits for us to pay attention; God is looking at us, waiting for us to look back.” All our preparations for Christmas—practicing music and readings for our liturgies, decorating, cooking—are really tools to help us to pay attention to God, who is already in our midst and asks us to participate in the work of the Messiah. In the words of Howard Thurman, this is the work of Christmas:

To find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people,
to make music in the heart.

Let’s not keep God waiting. We have work to do.