How can it be the season of Advent already – just 26 days till Christmas? Are you ready for it? Gift buying done, I suppose? The final flourishes on the Christmas letter underway? Do you know where the family is going to have Christmas dinner at least? I know, some of you haven’t even thought about it yet – that’s me! How about Christmas decorations? Are they up yet? Ann just hauled the Tupperware box out on Thursday.  Are you ready for Christmas? That’s an important question and all these preparations are an important part of the season. But there’s an additional question we ask ourselves around here: “Are you ready for Christ?” In the Christian calendar, that’s really what the next four Sundays are all about.

 

Some people are surprised to learn that this season wasn’t originally even about preparing for the birth of Jesus. How could it have been? Jesus had already been born and executed. In fact, the early church didn’t even have a Christmas celebration likely until the 4th century, when they appropriated the celebration of Saturnalias from the pagans and gave it a Christian overlay. Saturnalia was the most important Roman festival of the year, celebrating the season of harvest, which was completed by mid-December. There was a school holiday, the exchange of small presents, especially wax candles to light against the darkness, and a special market for the week. Gambling was allowed for this week, even by the slaves. Interestingly, there was a mock subversion of the social system: masters served the slaves for Saturnalia. Generally speaking it was a time of relaxing the rules of the existing order and letting go to all forms of merriment.

 

The ancient Roman, Lucian, writes: During this week the serious is barred; no business allowed. Drinking, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of frenzied hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water—such are the functions over which I preside." 

 

I’m not entirely sure what “the ducking of corked faces in icy water” entailed, but it sounds painful! Perhaps he meant, “the ducking of corked bottles in icy waters” – something we’re more able to relate to in this season. In short, when we’re “preparing for Christmas” as a cultural event, our activities actually more closely reflect preparations for the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia. And that’s a whole lot of fun – or it can be – no doubt about it. But the question I want to explore is what it means to prepare for Christ.

 

Here’s another tidbit some people are surprised by: what the early church was actually preparing for was the return of Christ, not his birth. That is what our reading is always about on the first Sunday of Advent. It’s Mark’s mini-apocalypse. They were hoping that Jesus would soon tear open the skies and come back down to earth on “clouds of glory” to gather up the “elect”, turn the tables on the existing social and political order, and usher in a new age of God’s reign. Well, it didn’t turn out that way and so over time, the expectation of his immanent return was softened with lines like we heard read this morning:

 

“But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”.  

 

What does it mean, then, to prepare for Christ? Let’s explore this from a few different perspectives: the social/political, the interpersonal, and at the individual level of personal consciousness. From each perspective, the Advent of Christ is an apocalyptic event. It is a “breaking through” of love that moves the existing order to its next evolutionary expression. And part of the preparation involves what Mark calls “staying awake” or “staying alert” to this new expression of Spirit at each of these levels.

Social/Political

It comes as a shock to some people to hear that Christmas has anything to do with social and political systems. I realize that given how our current Parliament is acting, we want to distant ourselves as much as possible from politics! But we can’t escape it. Mark uses apocalyptic language to make the point. (And remember, apocalypse doesn’t mean believing in a literal return of Christ to earth. It means an unveiling, a “break through” – the metaphorical meaning of Christ coming on clouds of glory from the heavens – of a new and higher order.)

 

Mark writes: "But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory” (Mark 13:24-26).

 

In ancient cosmology what happened in the heavens was mirrored on earth, and what happened on earth was mirrored in the heavens. Thus Jesus taught his disciples to pray: “On earth as it is in heaven”. When the “powers of heaven” are shaken, it correlated to the shaking of earthly powers. In Jesus’ day those “powers” were represented by Rome. And Rome did many wonderful things for the advancement of civilizations – but they didn’t do much for Jesus’ own class of people – the peasants. They were nobodies as far as Empire was concerned – mostly sources of tax revenue and food. The advent of Christ in the early church was associated with the subversion of that socio-political and economic arrogance which denied dignity to the bottom rungs of society.

 

Notice that the festival of Saturnalia itself involved a mock reversal of social class and power, with the masters serving the slaves for a few days a year. This represents an intuition of the unsustainability of this power differential. Romans, of course, didn’t take it too seriously. But Christians did. Where Christ is born, there is an inexorable evolution of social and political systems toward an ethic of equality.

 

We prepare for Christ, from this perspective, by staying “alert” to those apocalyptic shifts in society that just might signal an advance toward increased justice, in the human realm and I would add in the realm of creation. We may be living through such a time. The economic and ecological crises of our day are clarion signs that our existing systems are unsustainable. This is an unprecedented opportunity to evolve a more complex system that is intentionally structured to honour the dignity of the marginalized, human and other-than-human. We need to be alert, now more than ever, as citizens of the global village, to ensure that the solutions we generate are more than simply a return to the status quo. This is part of what it means to prepare for Christ. It is an advent practice.

Interpersonal

Let’s shift to the interpersonal perspective. Preparing for Christ in the season of Advent means staying awake to the quality of our relationships. Christians grow in love for one another. This begins at home, with those closest to us and extends outward. The German poet, Rilke, was right when he wrote the words: “To love another human being, this is the most difficult of all human task, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work in but preparation.” To love humankind in a general sense is tough enough. But to love the individual whose needs are different than your needs, whose wants often clash with your own, whose perceptions and perspectives challenge your own, that is “the most difficult task on earth”.

 

Now take this attentiveness to the quality of relationships and extend it outward to a community like church. The surest sign of a healthy church culture is how we treat each other. Are we growing in love for one another? If we are in Christ, this is one of the fruits. Christ is the one who comes on clouds of glory to break through our hyper-individualism – the narcissistic assumption that the rest of the world’s purpose is to get out of my way. One of life’s greatest mysteries is that when two individuals meet, a whole that is greater than the sum of those two parts emerges – a “we”. The realization that the needs of that “we” are as real as the needs of my “I” is part of what it means to prepare for Christ. Church is more than simply a collection of individuals who come together once a week to get their private needs met. Church is as much about staying attentive to the conscious growth and development of the “we”. This attention forms the basis of the culture of a congregation – or the field – and you can feel it when you walk into a church. It’s either a loving, evolving culture or it’s a stagnant field of energy.

 

Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher who has developed a community of practitioners who are spiritually more interested in the consciousness of their collective “we” than their own individual paths. They recognize each other’s individuality, of course, but they are doing leading edge social experiments in the intentional evolution of collective consciousness. It’s a model for the emergence of a new kind of church. In the New Year, Dr. Marilyn Hamilton and myself will be leading the congregation through three intensive retreat experiences with this expressed purpose in mind. Collectively, we will enter into process of discerning the heart and mind of Christ – the wisdom of Christ – that is coming through “us”. As we do this, Christ comes on clouds of glory, breaking into our existing culture and nudging us to what is next. This is what it means on an interpersonal level of prepare for Christ.

Spiritual

But we also are responsible for our growth as individuals. This is the third area of our lives where we need to prepare for Christ in advent – our spiritual lives. And by “spiritual” I mean here a distinct line of personal development. Other lines include cognitive, emotional, social, and moral. Here I am saying that to prepare for Christ means staying alert to our spiritual selves. Beneath our various identities as sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, lawyers and homemakers, athletes and readers we have a more essential identity – it transcends roles and vocations and our various hobbies and all the emotional dramas we find ourselves in.

 

The breakthrough of Christ at this level involves a loosening of our identification with all these partial identities and the emergence of our “made-in-God’s-image” self. As we grow spiritually we evolve in what we identity with: from egocentric (“just me”) to ethnocentric (“us – meaning my family, tribe, religion, nation) to worldcentric (“all of us”) to cosmocentric or  “All That Is”. To be in Christ is to come into a world-shattering awareness that you are one with All That Is. It’s ironic in a way that our spiritual growth in the personal realm has as its goal the awareness that I am a part that presences the whole. My unique self is an expression of the unity I’m calling All That Is.

 

Christmas is a story about God becoming human and dwelling among us. But the little secret that the mystics have been trying wake us up to for centuries is that this incarnational dynamic – the embodiment of the divine – is not restricted to Jesus of Nazareth. The whole cosmic adventure is about God taking form. This is what I was trying to say in Darwin, Divinity and the Dance of the Cosmos. The spiritual foundation for an ecological lifestyle is the awareness that “the whole earth is full of God’s glory” (Isaiah 6:6).

 

The earth is full of God’s glory. And you are full of God’s glory, God’s very being. You are made in the image of God. If we “stay alert” at this spiritual level, the breakthrough that overturns the order of the ego is that God has become human in all of us. Christmas, at this spiritual level of consciousness, is a celebration of the birth of the Christ in us – the birth of Christ consciousness, that is. When Paul exhorts his followers to “let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus” this is what he is talking about. When he talks about the church as the body of Christ, this is what he was getting at. You, who are in Christ, are the incarnation of Christ consciousness. Preparing for Christmas means growing in awareness that the Christ is born through you.

 

So there is nothing wrong with preparing for Saturnalia – secular Christmas. It’s fun, it’s important. But if this next four weeks is going to be about preparing for Christ, then we need to stay awake – socio-politically, culturally through the development of our “we”, and personally through the development of our essential identity in Christ. Nothing to it! Christ does come, metaphorically,  “descending on clouds of glory”, to help us break through to the next stage of our development at each of these levels.