(ginger) bread house.

What's in a name?

Good question.  I wonder what we can say about that, because the Bible really is, at least on first glance, all about names.  Part of our problem is that we read the names, and assume that these names just have to be that way just because.  Like, the town is called Bethlehem, because that's what the town is called.  In many ways, that treats this like Star Wars, where the home planet of both Luke and Anakin is Tatooine, because that's what it is.  There's no reason why it had to be there, had to be a desert planet, or had to be called Tatooine.  That name doesn't mean anything, it's just a Star Wars-y name.  You could call it something totally different, and it wouldn't change anything.  We feel that same way about the places in the Bible, like they're just Bible-y names, so that's the way it is.  And the more often we hear names, like Bethel, Bethphage, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, all those names just seep into our brains, and leave us thinking that that's just the way names are don't you know. 

But here's the thing.  Bethlehem means something.  It means, literally, house of bread. Gosh, why is this important?  Why is the pastor wasting our time with ancient place names?  What does this have to do with real life? Well, I'll tell you, because it's actually important.  Here's the thing, folks, you need to think about why Bethlehem is a big deal.  Why is it important?  Well, its importance is related to what happens there.  David and Jesus are from there.  That's it.

Bethlehem, on its own, actually isn't too interesting.  It's the bread house, to be sure, it's in a fertile area, a farming centre, nice and all, but that doesn't make it the centrepiece of history.  The thing that makes it important is because Jesus was born there, and ironically enough, he was born there precisely because it was so unimportant.  It was a nowhere nothing place, a podunk backwater (sort of like Tatooine, if there was a bright centre to the galaxy, this is the planet that it's farthest from) full of nobody people.  Not the glittering jewel of the ancient near east.  And yet, and yet, this is the place that Jesus came to, to be incarnate in.  This is the environment that Jesus appeared in, to begin his ministry from this unassuming place.

The message that he sends is obvious.  Bethlehem is a backwater nothing place.  It's a farm town in the middle of nowhere, with people in it who are just people, nothing overly special.  And if this is what Jesus can do for them, imagine what he can do for everyone else.  For you see, in the real world, we're not the highest and best.  We're average, common scrubs.  We're everyday people who eat too much, spend too much, pay our bills late, tell off colour jokes, and forget birthdays.  This is who we are.  Where would Jesus come to earth if he came to earth today?  Bethlehem?  Or Regina?  Or Winnipeg, Ogema, Frankslake, or any of the other places that God's peopel gather around word and sacrament.

And this is the other thing.  Now that Jesus has convinced you that on earth he would be surrounded by the average common people of the world, it's time for his greatest statement of all - that he elected to come to a place that even the Bible recognizes as a nowhere place.  Bethlehem is important because it's important to us, not beacause it was important to begin with.  It's important because of what God did there, marking it as important to us for all time; it definitely wasn't a vital centre of the universe for decades before that.  That space was special because Jesus was born there.  He wasn't born there because it was special.

And that brings us to church, as most things ought to do.  It brings us to church and our time there.  What is it that makes that space special?  What is it that makes church into a sacred space?  Perhaps you've never thought about it too much, perhaps it's just an arbitrary holy ground, that people just decided to put somewhere, and say 'okay, let's worship God here.'  Perhaps.  Or perhaps there's something bigger behind it.  When Jesus came to earth, he did so at Bethlehem.  At the house of bread.  And if you were ever thinking to yourself that you wish you'd been there, that you wish you'd been there to worship that newborn king at Bethlehem, to have that certainty to see and be sure of the messiah, well, I have good news.  The church is still, for you, Bethlehem.  It is a house of bread. 

What makes church special?  Because Jesus is there.  The same thing that made Bethelem special. Because Jesus was there.  The holiest part of the church is the altar, not because that block of wood is by definition special, nor does it have magic properties, but it is holy because the body and blood of Christ are actually there, in with and under the bread and wine.  This church is still a house of bread, and every time Holy Communion is celebrated, we encounter Christ again.  He is every bit as present as he was in the original Bethlehem here in this new one, and his body and blood are truly present.  If you're excited for Christmas, for the coming of the savior, then we have good news, which is that he has promised to be present where two or three are gathered together in his name, and physically present where the body and blood of Christ are. 

People miss this, you know. We talk a lot about Catechesis, about getting things right from the beginning, and folks roll their eyes, complain, and feel as though we probably spend too much time
talking about the Catechism, and Holy Communion, and the real presence, and all that.  They look at all that stuff, and say to us 'why can't we just talk about God without all that dogma?'  Ah yes. But to quote Dorothy L Sayers, the dogma is the drama.  If you thought it worth celebrating the arrival of Jesus in a house of bread two thousand years ago, then prepare to celebrate the arrival of Jesus in a house of bread today, wherever his people are gathered around the bread and wine. All Christianity is incarnational Christianity, and as such, we need to remember that the big deal about Christmas is not that a baby was born, it's what he does in life.  And what he continues to do.

It's sort of like the birth of a baby in your own family.  If you have a child in your family, your relationship doesn't stop there.  It continues onwards.  If there's a baby born into your lives, you don't just celebrate, applaud, then see them again in a year.  Birthdays are a way of marking your continuing relationship, your growing family, where you've come from, and where you're going.  It's the same here.  We celebrate Christmas not as a day in a vacuum, not as just a day, but as a reminder of how things got started, how this incarnate word came into our world, and a way of continuing to celebrate his presence, not just at a Bethlehem two thousand years ago, but at a Bethlehem very near you on a weekly basis.  Take courage and confidence in that, that the light of the world came to us, and didn't leave.

Rejoice!

Hot off the heels of repentance, comes rejoicing!  This is something that, God bless us, as human beings, we aren't really used to.  We'd like to hope that we are, of course, but we really, desperately aren't.  Joy is something that, unless you're Riley, you're not used to.  That is, we aren't used to the feeling, the experience of joy, and we try to make up for it.  We try to make up for it by making do with happiness instead.

But happyness is not joy.  You'd never know it, but that's the real deal.  Happinesss and joy are two different things, and they don't meet up always.  They're easy to mistake for one another, but as Denis
Leary says 'happiness comes in small portions.  It's a cigarette, or a chocolate chip cookie.  You smoke the butt, you eat the cookie, you go to sleep, you get up in the morning, and you go to work.  There you go.'  Cynical, but there you go.  And as such, the happiness that we seek is by definition fleeting, and it gets away from us pretty quickly.  And what we do when we substitute happiness for joy is to swap the permanent for the fleeting. No wonder we're all so frustrated!

Rejoice always, says Philippians, Again, I say rejoice!  What do we rejoice in?  We rejoice in the Lord.  We rejoice in his presence, and in his promises.  And his promises are what makes this time of year have a veneer of joy.  It's what makes this time of year a time of joy instead of a time of drudgery. 

Otherwise, it would be the opposite.  Have you ever pondered what this time of year is all about, really?  It's all about a bunch of really heavy things.  You have so much to do, and so little time.  And as the things that you have to do this year close in, you can be forgiven a distinct lack of joy in your life.  It seems unlikely that any of us can sustain happiness in the face of the responsibilities of this season.  But the pressures the difficulties, that's where we end up missing the forest for the trees.

I'll elaborate.  At this time of year, there are a great many things to do, lots of stuff to take care of, and these things that we end up doing, well, they're like the anchor, the bailing bucket, the rope, the steering wheel, the oars and the fishing rods, all of which are great as long as you're in a boat.

The way the Bible talks about it, we are to seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto us, and that all sounds hopelessly backwards, doesn't it?  Doesn't it sound topsy turvy to imagine that God would ask us to seek first his kingdom, then the joy, the happiness, the family, all that will follow?  Well, that means that getting the first detail right makes all the rest of them matter.  Think of that like the boat, like the canoe, in that if you have that, then the anchor, the bailing bucket, the oars, the fishing rods, they're all wonderful helps, but without the boat, you'll just drown faster trying to hold them all.

The baby in the manger colours everything.  He changes how we feel about everything, how we relate to everything, what everything in our lives means.  It provides us with joy, the real joy that surpasses all understanding.  Christ provides us with the promise of eternity, gives us the guarantee of forever.  In him, and with him, we have the promise that we are and will be forever people.  That makes not just this holiday season, but all year round, into more meaningful, impactful times. 

As the offertory says 'grace our table with your presence and give us a foretaste of the feast to come.' That's what this time is, that's what this is all about, which is a foretaste of the feast to come, the feast everlasting.  The promise of eternity, of paradise, is what makes what we do here so meaningful, it's what changes our Christmas dinners from being a family gathering to a foretaste of heaven.  It's what changes our office gift exchange from being a fumbling awkward swap of trinkets, to the bestowal of gifts from the Magi to Christ.  It's what changes the interaction with the waitress at the fifteenth meal out this week from drudge and small talk, to talking with the saints of God.  I'm not overstating the case, either.  This is real, and it's what really happens. Once the rock of Christ has been built up on, then everything else means more.  The people you see are eternal, your decisions consequences, the gifts you give, though quickly forgotten, will be an act of eternal charity.  The meals you prepare, though tasted albeit briefly, have fed the saints of God, and no one who gives one of these little ones a cup of water in Christ's name will lose his reward.

Jesus is the reason for the season, the reason for our joy.  And like all things that bring us joy, he spills the bounds that we have set for him, and colours everything else.  All other things in our lives are made more meaningful and impactful due to his work on the cross.  Because he lives, we shall live also, baptized into his death, we are also baptized into his resurrection.  Bear that in mind when you sit down for Christmas dinner - this is but a glimpse, a foretaste, a picture of everlasting life that Christ offers.

That's what lets us rejoice.

Repent!

When you go to a buffet, no matter how good your intentions, there is a still, small voice at the back of your head that is demanding you get your money's worth.

This still small voice is a jerk.

For this still, small voice will whisper to you 'Hey, you know you paid $17.99 for this chinese food. you'll eat until you feel sick.

Don't you think you should have another egg roll? If you don't you're just throwing money away!' Thanks, small still voice for convincing me to eat more than I wanted in the first place!  Now, if you were eating at home, this wouldn't be a problem.  You could just tupperware the leftovers up, and sneak back downstairs in the middle of the night to eat more.  But if you're at the buffet, there are no doggy bags.  You can't take any of it with you.  You have to eat what you've got whilst you are there present.  And this means that if you're like me,

Yes indeed.  To quote an obscure comedian, the meal isn't over when I'm full.  It's over when I hate myself.  And if I'm at an Indian buffet, or a chinese buffet, I will assuredly be hating myself in the near future.  This is when I send my wife a text letting her know that I'm never eating again.  And she responds with an eye-roll emoji, because we both know how I ended up in this particular situation.

And that feeling, a half hour after you're done at the buffet, when you get the meat sweats, and you find it hard to move around, when you want to undo the top button of your trousers, that feeling is the best feeling I could come up with to try to communicate to the secular world the concept of repentance.

After all, what is repentance?  It's understanding that you have done what you didn't want to do, that you don't like what happened, and you're sorry for having done it.  Many is the time after a Christmas or thanksgiving dinner, when a great number of us have regretted eating what we ate, and have promised to never do it again.  Until next year.  When we repeat it all over again.  This festive indulgence is what the Christian conception of sin and repentance is all about.  And I'll illustrate it with this page from Frog and Toad.

This is the way of sin and repentance.  Even while you're in the throes of doing something you don't want to do, you're doing it.  We must stop eating cried toad as he ate another.  No truer words have ever been spoken.

I know repentance is one of those churchy words that people don't take too seriously, but really they ought to, because they are used to moving through repentance fairly regularly.  With the Christmas season approaching, most of us are going to go through probably several hangovers that we can absolutely see coming.  You know for sure that you're spending too much on Christmas, but it doesn't

sink in until the Visa bill comes in.  Then the repentance starts.  You know for sure that you shouldn't have that fourth glass of wine, but everything still seems to be going fine until the next morning.  Then the repentance starts.  You know you're not hungry anymore, but you keep on eating at Christmas dinner, and everything is going okay, that is, until you get to about an hour after Christmas dinner.  Then the repentance starts.

Regular as the tides. You know how predictable this is because unlike talking about 'sin' and 'repentance,' we can talk about the real world things you know, and how your overindulgence in the face of Christmas always leads to that moment, at least, of repentance, in which, like frog and toad, you know you need to stop, and yet you keep on going.

This is what this season is all about though.  Advent is the season of repentance.  John the Baptist says as much when the people come to be baptized by him.  When the crowds assemble, John calls them vipers, snakes, and asks who warned them to flee from the wrath to come.  He runs down with the various people what they have to do if they want to flee from the wrath that is to come, and he's heavy on the repentance.  

Repentance which, as you may have realized, is absent from most discussions about this time of the year.  But this is the time of year when we need to focus on repentance most of all.  It's all about repentance, absolutely all of it is!  This is the time of year, when the baby is to be born in the manger in Bethlehem, when we get to muse through what we are going to bring to him.  No, it's not going to be gold, frankincense or myrrh, it's not going to be the little drummer boy's song, none of that. We bring him our sin.

The angel on Christmas day echoes that same sentiment, telling the shepherds 'unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior, who is Christ the Lord.'  Unto you.  You who bring nothing to that manger but your sin.  Not your gold or ointments, not your performance, but the hangover of all the things that you don't want to do.  The hangover of all your bad decisions, promises broken, shame uncovered.  You bring nothing but the fruit of your repentance dragged forward through the Advent season.  For there is something amazing that happens at that manger in Bethlehem.

When someone tells you they have a newborn, or have adopted a new child into their family, you are happy for them, certainly, you enjoy said child, you are pleased because they are pleased, but it's not the same as bringing a new child into your family.  When a new neice or nephew is born into your family, when a new son or daughter is adopted into your household, there's a whole new impact that it has on you.  This is the difference that going through Advent in a spirit of repentance does. 

If you move through Advent whilst just buying and selling, baking and cleaning, you will hear the angel say 'for born this day in the city of David is Christ the Lord.'  Sure.  Jesus is born, and we are all the better for it.  But if you've been working through this season in a spirit of repentance, if you've been living in a repentant mood, and existing in repentant space, if you bring to the child in the manger your sin, then something else happens, which is that the child has come to take your sin.  Your hangover, the weight of the things you've done time after time that you'd rather not do the first time.  You know that hangover feeling, and you know that the worst possible hangover cure is the proverbial hair of the dog, right, to keep on drinking so you never sober up?  dreadful.

Your best bet is the same as all of ours.  In the hustle and bustle of this time of year, when everything is at a fever pitch, take time to repent.  Realize that you're not who you want to be, you don't behave the way you feel other people should behave.  You feel as though you should be better, and you ought to be.  So your best option moving forward to to do the work John has called you to do. Repent.  Bear fruit in keeping with repentance.  Trust not in a savior, but in your savior.  For he was born for you.