You would pull out the vacuum cleaner, and the bag full of wrapping paper scraps for every possible occasion – because you never know when you might need a one-foot square piece of sunflower-print paper (slightly crumbled). You would start sorting back through layers of Snook family history. Old Halloween costumes, craft supplies for crafts not yet complete. Posters made for school projects, explaining fine points of biology and literature. The box of my old elementary school papers, artwork, and photographs that my parents decided would be better gathering dust at my house than theirs. Boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations. Supplies for goldfish and birds we no longer have.
And after you got all of that out of the closet, you would be almost to the back. And there you would see it: under the shelves at the very narrowest back part of the closet, gleaming and white and still looking new: my bread machine: relic of a Christmas long ago, when I was sure what I wanted more than anything else was a bread machine.
I had gone to a friend’s house, she had made fresh bread, the house smelled divine, the bread she made was delicious – and she explained that she just dumped flour and water and yeast in, and the machine did the work, and I decided that even I could do that. I think I actually used it once or twice, and the bread it made was wonderful. But somehow it got put in the back of the closet, and never used again.
And I think back on that bread machine, and I realize: it wasn’t the machine I wanted at all; and it wasn’t the bread either. What I wanted was the smell: the smell of bread baking. Smells can take you back in time in a very immediate way – more than just a memory, a smell connects your brain to experiences, to feelings. I think that humans must have some ancient primeval gene connecting the smell of fresh bread with the love of our mothers.
That smell of bread baking reminds me of my mother, who in my childhood every now and then would bake fresh bread, the old-fashioned way, without a machine, dusting the countertop with flour, plunging her hands in, kneading and rolling and kneading again. My sweet, kind, generous mother, who could easily have bought Wonder bread at the grocery store, but who every now and then wanted to do something special for her family. It reminds me also of her mother before her, who taught her how to do it: my smiling, cheerful, hardworking grandmother, who was a farm wife in the Depression and who knew how to do things the hard way.
What I was longing for, all those Christmases ago, was not bread, it was the feeling. The feeling of being with those wonderful women, of being surrounded by family, of being loved in that very particular way. I was longing for that feeling of love.
What are you longing for, this first Sunday of Advent? The holiday season has officially begun, the Thanksgiving feast has been shared, the Black Friday crowds have stormed the stores. The shopping frenzy escalated on Friday to the point where 9 Wal-Marts reported violence, including fights, a shooting, and an incident where a woman pepper-sprayed the competition to get her hands on some electronics.
Somehow I don’t think this is why Jesus was born in a stable.
And even for those of us who didn’t darken the door of any stores on Friday, many of us are creating Christmas lists, desperately searching for ways to fulfill the Christmas wishes of the people we love (or are obligated to buy for).
And yet, I have to think, those items on our Christmas lists aren’t really what we’re longing for at all – we’re longing for something else entirely.
So what are you longing for? Are you longing for a better job, are you longing for the presence of someone you love, are you longing for healing, longing for relief from stress and worry? Are you longing to go back in time and see someone you loved a long time ago, or do something differently than you did the first time? Are you longing to skip forward to the future and see how something you’ve already set in motion is going to turn out? Are you longing for new relationships, new emotions, new hopes? Are you longing for the world to become a better place, for wars to end and poverty to be defeated and diseases to be healed?
Are you longing, quite simply, to be loved?
This Advent season, that begins today, is the season of longing. It’s the season when we recognize that we have a longing for a perfection we never quite achieve, a certain empty place even in the most contented life. I am convinced that all of our Christmas buying frenzy is our way of attempting to address this emptiness, this longing, this recognition that things are not quite right in our lives, that we have not reached perfection yet. Few of us would say that a bread machine, or any other Christmas gift, would make our lives complete. And yet we always hope that we might come one step closer to filling that empty place in our hearts.
Advent is the time when God says to us: wait. Wait, hope, expect, pray. That empty place in our hearts is a place that ultimately, only God can fill. Jesus came to us as God’s gift of God’s own self, the gift that fills our longings. The promise of Christ is the promise that he has come to us to bring perfect love to birth; AND he will come again to bring his kingdom to completion: that kingdom where the world will be made right again, where suffering will cease, where people will learn to walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us.
In the meantime, the time of waiting for God’s Kingdom, when the world is still imperfect, when our hearts are still longing – that is, that time between Christ’s first and second coming, when we will almost certainly live our entire lives – during this time, our calling as followers of Christ is not only to seek Christ who came long ago, not only to wait for Christ who will come again, but also to look for how Christ is entering into the everyday events of this world today, to look for how Christ’s kingdom is even now breaking into this world – and to JOIN CHRIST in that work.
Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians today, counsels the church in Corinth to wait, with longing hope and expectation – the same way we are asked to wait today, in Advent season – adopting spiritual disciplines of waiting, hope, prayer, worship, community, generosity. All of these things are grounded in what Paul points out: the discipline of gratitude – recognizing God at work in our lives, and understanding the grace God has given us. In our spiritual state of gratitude, we realize that God’s grace comes with spiritual gifts that allow us to do what God has done, to pour ourselves out as gifts to the world, to join God in his kingdom work of bringing love to birth.
I am convinced that all our striving to buy the perfect gift for everyone, that activity we spend so much time and stress on every Advent season, is merely our way of diverting ourselves from our true longings. I think what we really long for is the gift of love. And I think the best way to experience the gift of love is to give it.
So what if we adopted God’s kingdom as our gifting project this year? What if we decided to devote our Advent season to giving the gift of love? Honoring Jesus with the gifts we give? By finding out what Christ is doing, and joining in?
You can do this by giving to help those in need – our Advent outreach fair next Sunday will give you an opportunity to find out about the many ways we help people in need here at Nativity, and if you wish, to make a donation in honor of someone on your Christmas list.
You can do it also by being or becoming a steward – giving money to God’s work – here at Nativity, in our ongoing operations and mission work, and in our building project. The ultimate purpose of everything we do here is to spread Christ’s love, and when we join together in community, we are joining God’s work.
And, you can give the gift of yourself to the people you love – not trying to satisfy their heart’s longings with mere presents, but giving your time, your words, your service. What would it mean to give dinner at your home to someone who is lonely? What would it mean to do a few household chores for someone who has little time to do it themselves? What would it mean to write a Christmas letter to someone who has meant a lot to you, letting them know how much you appreciate them?
It would mean not trying to fill the emptiness in our hearts with mere things. Not trying to say “I love you” with a mere bread machine, or a tie, or a shirt, or something else that might end up at the back of a closet. But instead, doing what Jesus did – joining Jesus in his mission: pouring our love into the world.
Because this Advent season, and every season, I believe that what we are truly longing for is Christ. Christ who has come, Christ who will come, Christ who is always coming to us, to bring the gift of himself: the ultimate gift of love.
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