How do you come to Christmas?

Beloved of God,

I hope you are making plans to join us for a couple of important dates in the coming weeks:

First, we will be having our annual Christmas party/dinner on December 10th, at 6:00pm. We will need to get a headcount for the meal, so please put your name on the signup sheet along with the number of folks you are bringing. 

Sunday, December 12 will be a very full day for which I hope you make plans. We will be having a congregational meeting to set our budget for the coming year as well as to elect new members for our church council. If you are a member of this church I hope you will attend and help us as we make these important decisions.

On that same day at 6:00pm in the Great Room our children will be putting on a production of Crazy Busy Peaceful Holy Night which critics are calling an off, off, off, off, Broadway smash. These young folks have worked hard for several months, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they have prepared. 

    This Sunday we will be meditating on peace together, but it is a peace that is predicated on purification. We get a glimpse of this in the Scripture reading for this week from Malachi 3:1-4.
     But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. Mal. 3:2

I sometimes wonder if we come to Christmas with a bunch of extra stuff mixed in. You can probably identify some of it: commercialism, business, worry, materialism. But I think there’s other “stuff” that needs to be washed out of us at Advent. Have we found ways to grow in holiness this year, or have we been content to muddle along as if our discipleship were fully formed? Have we been properly grateful about the year we are about to finish, or have we complained about it as if it were rush hour traffic rather than  a precious gift? 
We can’t really receive the wonder of the Christ, either in a manger or coming with the clouds, if  we’re perfectly content, or perfectly miserable. The former attitude signals a misunderstanding of ourselves. The latter misunderstands the world. Advent is a time where we can deliberately seek out the great Refiner of hearts, and come to know Him more clearly.

Please join me this week in praying for:

• An end to this pandemic.
  
• Those among us confronting their own medical challenges, or challenges for those they love.
• Peace, within the Church and in the world.
• Folks for whom this season will be stressful, lonely, or long.
• Doctors, nurses, PA’s paramedics and others working to keep us all well.
• Those who respond to emergencies on our highways, in our wildlands, in our towns and even our homes. 
  
• The millions who will be dragged along with family into a church for the first and only time all year; that God would be present and real to them in ways they didn’t expect.
  
• Each other (please email [email protected] if you’d like to be added to our prayer list).
  

You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world,

Marshall