A voice cries out: In the desert prepare the way of the LORD!
Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God!
Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low;
The rugged land shall be made a plain, the rough country, a broad valley.

Isaiah 40:3 – 4
There is a billboard that I pass on my way to work that has caught my attention.  It is one of those double-speak advertisements for an American beer. It shows two men and a woman, professionally attired, at what appears to be the office Christmas party. The blazers have been discarded, the top buttons unbuttoned, and the neckties loosened. Each of the three has a drink in hand and the billboard reads: “Celebrate Responsibly.”

If nothing else, it is a wise warning, especially during this time of year.

After so many days driving by this sign, it has become a visual mantra, a two word poem eliciting from me reflections that most likely were unintended by its corporate Mad Men creators.

I began to ask myself what does it mean for us, for people of faith, for Christians to celebrate these seasons responsibly, these seasons of Advent and Christmas which are as much kin to each other as Elizabeth was to Mary of Nazareth? I will offer some thoughts in response to this question in these upcoming days before Christmas.

Talk of “putting Christ back into Christmas” has become a somewhat tired hallmark of sermons and homilies this time of year.  However theologically or pastorally well-intended, they tend to come off as scoldings and another case of preaching to the choir. Of course such orations are aimed Grinch-like especially at those deemed desecrators of the holiday, the perpetrators of the adored baby in the manger being replaced annually by the latest commercial christ be it Tickle-Me-Elmo, Cabbage-Patch, or X-Box 360. I get it. Really, I do.

But in another sense what is being preached, whether to the choir or to the targeted secular vandals of the religious feast, is off-base and unhelpful. The word Christmas comes from the Old English words Cristes and maesse meaning Christ and Mass. The Mass is the celebration of Christ’s presence among us and with us – “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be world without end.” In this sense, every Mass is a Christ-mas.  While many who call themselves Christian point fingers at those who have despoiled the true meaning of Christmas by packaging it as an extended opportunity for gross commercialization, Christians themselves are to blame for reducing Christmas to the birthday of Jesus. This rather puny or anemic view of Christmas has found its accompanying quaint and cute ritual in the form of the jolly man in the red suit, uncharacteristically serious and reverent, coming forward for all to see at the Family Mass or the Christmas eve service to kneel at the crib of the Christ-child thus making sure in rather unpoetic fashion that those of us in the pews know who is who, as if the way to put Christ back into Christmas is to put Santa in his place.

I hear the groans and moans already, the hissing and booing and the accusations of scroogism. Bah-hum-bug! So be it.

What I want to suggest is that rather than talking about putting Christ back into Christmas that we would be better off concentrating on how to put ourselves back into Advent, and then into Christmas. Advent is the preparation for Christmas, the season of making straight the way of God who is in our midst and ever-coming. What I want to suggest is that there really isn’t anything quaint or cute about Advent or Christmas. And although they are seasons for waking in us childhood innocence and wonder and creativity this needs to be accompanied by the realization that these seasons and commemorations are also at their core very adult seasons and feasts not meant for the faint-of-heart but for the fiercely faithful and heroically hopeful.  Lest we forget, we might ask for next week off and walk from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles in primitive pre-Birkenstock sandals or ride not a Dodge Colt but an ass with thirty pounds of extra weight not in a saddle bag thrown over the donkey but between our chest and our crotch. Lest we forget, these seasons hinged together like a diptych are seasons of long dark journeys, of homelessness, of water breaking and contractions and giving birth on hard ground in a home for barn animals, of the slaughter of innocent children, of fear, and of blood, sweat, and tears.

To be continued . . .