Recipe for a Perfect Christmas

So how are you advent preparations going? Tree up? Presents bought? Wreaths hung? Made room for Jesus to be born in your midst yet or have we relegated him to the storage shed out back? On Sunday, Pastor Dale, the other pastor I serve with, asked the congregation where they would rate themselves on their JOY meter, if they were to rate themselves from 1 -10 to how much joy they were experiencing during this season. One being the lowest and ten being the highest. There were several vocal 8's and 9's mentioned in the congregation, but more significantly those whose heads tended to drop and mumble a 3 or 4. Joy is hard to find sometimes in the midst of the craziness of the season. Immediately I began to sing in my head, "I've got the Joy, Joy, Joy, down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart." For some the joy seems buried under the burdens of the preparations, down, down, down and rather then answering with the affirmative, we're wondering where it's gone.

Christmas preparations have been difficult this year for me. I have struggled with family conflicts, my grandmother has gone for an extended visit to her daughters so part of our normal family life is missing and more days then not have been hard, have been difficult to find the joy in my heart or in the world its self. The perfect Christmas seems like a fairy tale in a far away land where sugar plum fairies and nutcrackers dwell and yet it is into this hurting and broken world Christ came.

Beautifully carved or ceramic nativities may now be a symbol of the perfect Christmas but in all reality a barn is a barn and it certainly wasn't the perfect place for a baby to be born and yet it is there God chooses to enter the world. We need not to sanitize and make pretty the reality of what God did in that stable long ago because it was not to a perfect world God was born nor was it a perfect location and there is a reason.

For it is to this world where pain and loss and grief are real that God choose to be born. It is to this world where people are judged unfairly that Christ was born to love unconditionally. It is to this hurting, mixed up, crazy people that Christ came to die on a cross to take away all pain, to give hope to the hopeless, to show us just how much God loves us in spite of how easily we mess things up.

Joy is found not in the perfect tree, the perfect presents, the perfect family but in the knowledge that we are enough for God, enough to enter into humanity and take on our pain, our hurts, our loss, our grief. Joy is found in an incarnational God - God in flesh and blood, God in the vulnerability of baby born in the most imperfect of settings for you and me. I think my Joy meter just went up and I hope yours did too!

Full of grace...just not very graceful,

Pastor Jill