Are we prepared to Recieve the Greatest Gift?

Advent is not an easy season for us to get to grips with. Even though our politicians closed the session of the Australia Parliament with niceties it is a season fraught with much passion and emotion that is not positive. It is a time that people seems to get caught up in and involved with its harried pace and busy schedule. Even non-Christians are surrounded by the holiday patterns of shopping, partying, decorating, and hurrying. 

Yet if we truly look around there are many people on and around our streets who are haunted by grief: lamenting broken family relationships, deceased loved ones, and failed friendships. Even non-believers may find themselves yearning for connections. And for many that desire for connection is for God and a community that they seldom notice at other times of the year.

John the Baptist comes preaching not just repentance, but forgiveness. God’s gift of love is not just for perfect people, not just for loving people, not just for Christians or Jews or Muslims or Buddhists. God’s Christmas gift of love is for all people, so that “all people shall see it together.” We are given this season of waiting as a gift. For in the waiting, we are all invited to hear God’s glorious promise of love. In the waiting, we are all allowed to grieve absent loved ones and lament unfulfilled hopes. All the while, God is waiting with us—waiting for the godly and ungodly alike to hear God’s tender voice, to perceive God’s constant presence, and to accept God’s steadfast love. 

While others are making lists of things we have enough of, our God comes to offer us salvation, the one gift we cannot purchase. As the world prepares to entice us with more and more, our God comes to fill our hearts with all the hopes that have been dreamed about. When scepticism and fear callous our hearts, or God comes to bathe us in the soothing lotion of compassion.

When stress scoops out potholes for every step we take, our God comes filling the emptiness with serenity as tough as God’s grace. As the clock turns faster and faster each day, our God comes to swaddle us in a shawl woven with patience. When others push past us to get to the front of worry’s line, our God comes, so we can clasp that gift so close to our hope. So at this time we ask our God to come to us.  At as our God comes to us we receive his gifts of “Comfort! Tenderness! Peace!” God’s voice has spoken. Sure, it may sound unlikely, even impossible. 

However, we can no longer play dumb. We not only know the lives we are called to lead; we are well aware of how we fail— through our words as well as our silence, by our deeds and our unwillingness to act. Yet our God continues to cry out to us, broken heart, speaking to us of the great love that is offered as a gift. Forgiveness is the gift for every moment, not just one day; hope is our constant companion as we journey with Jesus Christ, whom we celebrate as God with us, Emmanuel.