When Love Comes To Town (Christmas Bunch)

Yesterday, while writing a sermon, I spent all day smoking meat for Christmas presents I give to family and friends. I will spend most of this afternoon preparing the meat for a feast for my staff. Just two days before, on Tuesday night, one of my children and his friends were home from college so I spent a good amount of time on a grill cooking them the best food of their lives. And Saturday night will be another family shindig and so hordes of family will descend and, of course, must be feed. Next week too, other children will arrive home and Teri told me she was shooing out one guest to make way for more.Then next week it will happen, the actual Feast of the Nativity of Jesus will arrive, the reason for all this celebration. This will come with a liturgy of worship, singing, reflection, festivities, and more feasting. For the record, when we talk about “feast days,” they are historically not days where an actual feast was celebrated, but days of reflection, prayer, and wonder. Of course, being human, joy and praise can’t be done alone and because God made us to not only need food but delight in it, we gather and eat delicious food, often special food that only comes on a particular day or season of the year.So Advent preparation for me is not just certain reflections, but also a host of cooking for people I dearly love and who do me the great grace of giving me something more interesting and delightful to tend to than myself. I have noticed in my own soul that the cross really is true - the more I think of others and tend to their needs and ponder ways to make their lives more delightful or easier, the more joy I have. Conversely, the more time I pander to myself and my own comfort, the less joy I find.This Sunday is the Fourth Sunday of Advent and we celebrate in a particular way - love; or as I keep imagining it in my mind, “When Love Comes to Town” (I can’t keep the words of the U2/B. B. King song out of my head). Indeed, when Jesus came, love itself, not just the idea of love, but true love, love incarnate, moved into our broken world and took up residence with us to share our dirty streets, eat our special and mundane food, be in relationship with different, indifferent, and down right mean people and to experience all the drama that is life. There is a reason that 1 Corinthians 13 says that of all the virtues love is the greatest, and this Sunday we will talk about just that, looking at a couple of new misfits take the stage - Mary and Joseph. All I can say to you is this, love does things. Don’t believe me, join me Sunday. And we feast before worship with our annuel Christmas Brunch. It starts at 9:15am.Blessings,Jim