Prepare

Prepare

I must confess that when I first looked at today’s Gospel, I was disappointed. First, because it’s the fourth Sunday of Advent, not Christmas Eve. I’m just not prepared for it to be Christmas yet. Wasn’t it only yesterday that it was December 1st?  And second, Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus is pretty minimalistic. No Angel Gabriel coming to Mary to receive her “yes” to God’s plan, no travel to Bethlehem to be counted in the census, no stable full of hay, no animals, no shepherds, no angels glorifying God, no star or wise men (yet), and only the barest hint of joyous wonder that something universe-altering has just taken place. 

Instead, we get bare-bones reporting. Mary gets pregnant. Joseph, being a really decent guy, decides to break off the engagement quietly, since the baby isn’t his. An angel in a dream tells him to marry her anyway because the child is from the Holy Spirit. So he marries her, and Jesus, the Savior of the World, is born. Done. Oh, and Matthew wants to make clear that Joseph didn’t have marital relations with her until after Jesus was born. Did we really need to know that?

Yes. Yes, we did. Matthew’s eight-verse nativity narrative is so tightly woven that we can be pretty certain that everything he says is there for a specific reason. As Matthew understands it, Jesus could not be fully human and fully divine if he had two human parents, so Mary “became with child from the Holy Spirit.” They had no marital relations before Jesus was born so that nobody could question the authenticity of that claim.

But it is also important to Matthew that Jesus be firmly grafted on to an impeccable human Jewish family tree. And that is where Joseph comes in. Immediately before the part of the Gospel we heard this morning, Matthew provides an impressive list of Joseph’s ancestors going back 42 generations – all the way back to Abraham. By Joseph taking Mary as his wife, Jesus automatically became part of that family tree when he was born. 

And just as the Lord spoke to Joseph’s ancestor Abraham in his old age to tell him that Sarah, equally as old, would bear a son, so an angel of the Lord spoke to Joseph to tell him that Mary would bear a son. God made a promise to Abraham that he would be the father of many nations through the son that Sarah would bear him. The promise made to Joseph was that Mary’s son would be called Emmanuel, God is with us, and that he would save his people from their sins. Wow. Both of these promises definitely fall within the “go big or go home” category. I wonder how receptive I would have been to such news.

Abraham and Sarah laughed when the Lord told them that they would conceive. They were old, and they knew what God said was physically impossible. The older I get, the more sympathy I have for Sarah….some things are just, well, inconceivable. But Mary and Joseph did not laugh. Instead, they believed God, and opened their hearts to whatever God had planned for them. They had no way of knowing what lay ahead for them, or for their son. They could only make the preparations all parents do who are expecting their first baby. But how do you prepare to raise a child who is yours, but also the Son of God? How do you even wrap your head around that?

What Mary and Joseph were thinking, or praying about, and how they prepared to receive this child is not something that concerns Matthew. For him, the important thing is that Joseph believed the angel he heard in his dream, took Mary as his wife, and that Jesus was born, fulfilling the prophecy.

But I wonder about it. About preparing. Not so much about the daily preparations we’re so used to that we don’t give them a second thought. Most of us don’t need to think very hard about preparing breakfast, or showering and dressing for the day, or getting the kids off to school. We just do it. 

And not so much about what I call the medium-level type of preparing, the kind which makes life enjoyable for oneself and others. Decorating the house, or even putting up the Christmas tree before Christmas. Gardeners who already know what they’re planning to plant in the Spring. People who know when the sap will be running in the Maple trees, and plan days off accordingly, or who schedule complicated vacations a year in advance. Wow…I did not inherit that gene, but I certainly admire it, and think the world is a much nicer place because of you.

I’m thinking about preparing in a larger and wilder sense. A more dangerous sense…an Advent sense. The kind of interior preparation that makes room for our barren inner spaces to teach us something, for ideas and words and prayers to take root, and for clearing the mind to receive the unexpected unfolding of grace in one’s heart. 

This kind of preparation is hard work, because it calls us to be nothing but ourselves. To take a step back from the music and the malls, from Facebook and smartphones, and embrace stillness. To allow the mind to chatter itself out into silence, and give the eyes permission to stop searching for what they know, and the ears to cease craving distraction. And then invite God to come and sit beside you. Some people do this best by sitting – others while running or walking. I do it best when I am drawing. How you choose to prepare yourself is not what is important. That you choose to make time to prepare a place for God is. 

This is my own personal Advent image: becoming as round and open and empty as a beautifully woven basket, waiting, like Mary, for Christ to come and fill me. That’s not an image that will work for everyone, but I do think that God will gladly provide something that speaks to each one of us, if we’re prepared to ask…and wait to see what grows.

Although preparation is an essential part of the Christian life, it is not an end in itself. I was tickled by Oliver Wendell Holmes’s negative observation that “some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.” We prepare for something. The quiet spaces we make for God are meant to refresh us and fill us with life and energy, so that we can go out and be Christ in the world. After all, Mary didn’t stay pregnant – at the appointed time, Jesus was born. 

But not just yet. It is still Advent. 

A few weeks ago I came across a poem by Jan Richardson, which burst through a wall in my thinking about Advent, and what it means to prepare. Perhaps it will speak to you, too:

Prepare

Strange how one word

will so hollow you out.

But this word

has been in the wilderness

for months.

Years.

This word is what remained

after everything else

was worn away

by sand and stone.

It is what withstood

the glaring of sun by day,

the weeping loneliness of

the moon at night.

Now it comes to you

racing out of the wild,

eyes blazing 

and waving its arms, 

its voice ragged with desert

but piercing and loud

as it speaks itself

again and again.

Prepare, prepare.

It may feel like

the word is leveling you,

emptying you

as it asks you

to give up

what you have known.

It is impolite 

and hardly tame,

but when it falls

upon your lips

you will wonder

at the sweetness,

like honey

that finds its way

into the hunger

you had not known

was there.

from Circle of Grace ©2015 Jan Richardson.  janrichardson.com