40 Day Fast

Merry Christmas!

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Bah Humbug! It’s the season to fight off my Scroogeness. I’m ‘fessing up. Do I see any other hands?
 
In the days before Christmas I constantly battle the bah-humbugs! Every year I feel pressured by expectations that are not Christmas. I revolt against traditions for the sake of tradition. Is Christmas supposed to stress me out? How real am I really if I have to forcibly maintain the merry and cheery when I am feeling weary and leery?
 
The clincher is no one wants to be accused of being Scrooge
I battle the sorry stereotype that anyone who lodges a complaint, whimpers a worry, just doesn’t feel up to it, not now, not this year, not that, has been seriously scrooged.
 
I fear that if I don’t show appropriate fa-la-la-la-la someone will say, “What happened to your Christmas Spirit?” I’ll be scorned and branded. Brainwashed by songs like It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Have a Holly Jolly Christmas, Winter Wonderland, Jingle Bell Rock, and It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas, I feel knuckled every time I’m not having a holly, jolly holiday rocking through a winter wonderland.
 
Am I a frugal, stingy, no-joy, kill Santa who ought to be tied to an armchair to watch The Muppets’ Christmas Carol? (Not a bad idea–love that move.) I’m not against gifts, Christmas trees, lights, wreaths, parties, or even fruitcakes. I like waking up Christmas morning with half-dressed family members to unwrap presents around the tree. I just don’t like feeling forced to do Christmas as dictated by someone else.
 
Sometimes I get the feeling that someone stole Christmas and it’s not the Grinch.
Or maybe, I let it slip through my fingers. Perhaps I let it go. In the spirit of “love and joy come to you and to you a wassail too,” I have complied with the laws of tolerance, political correctness, and what’s true for me doesn’t have to be true for you. Let’s not offend anyone. I call it Christmas, you call it Hanukah, they call it Kwanzaa. Hey, peace on earth, let’s all call it “the holiday season.”
 
Can we just call the whole thing off? Bah humbug, Mr. Scrooge!
Or let’s just make sure that everyone has their choice of prophets and get on with it:

Door Number 1: Allah
Door Number 2: Buddha
Door Number 3: Joseph Smith
Door Number 4: L. Ron Hubbard
Door Number 5: Whomever Oprah’s following this week
Door Number 6: Satan
Door Number 7: Jesus
Door Number 8: Nobody…because Nobody’s there

But that’s not Christmas
We should practice religious tolerance—literally tolerate others’ different religious beliefs. You can’t make people believe anything anyway: we all have to choose. But Christmas. Christmas is different.

Jesus IS the reason for the season, and Christ is in Christmas, and maybe the discomfort I feel, the frustration and my Scroogness is my fault. I have succumbed. I have surrendered. I have laid down my holy reverence for what Christmas really is and have let the holiday train steamroll me back and forth jingling its ho-ho-ho bells until I am as poor and crippled as Tiny Tim.
 
Christmas revolution
I’m not calling for a revolution of anywhere except my heart and my actions. I have to take back Christmas – not for others, not for the world, not for Jesus. But for myself.
 
Why? Because I do know the reason for the season. I know the story in history. And I know my story about why I honor the baby born in tiny Bethlehem to a virgin girl engaged to a clueless but faithful man. I know that hardly anyone knew the first Christmas was worth celebrating —some uneducated shepherds, some astrologists from out of town, some angels who descended from on high. No one hung wreaths, or made eggnog, or decorated cookies, or created any holiday sales.
 
And I know that I celebrate Christmas because Jesus Christ’s coming signified the end of the end and the beginning of the beginning. Jesus changed everything forever. He did what only the Son of God could do—collapse the unfathomable Creator of the limitless Universe, all his power, all his being, all his extraordinariness into a man who came to live among us with the sole purpose of telling us how much he loves us.
 
I have to do Christmas in ways that don’t pay someone to keep the holiday spirit but replay the original story of Jesus coming into the world—and how that has made all the difference in my world.
 
I need to change my playlist from Merry Christmas to Mary Had a Baby. From It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas to It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. And I have to let Christmas carols ring in my ears:

 Hark the herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!
Peace on earth and mercy mild
God and sinners reconciled"
Joyful, all ye nations rise
Join the triumph of the skies
With the angelic host proclaim:
"Christ is born in Bethlehem"
Hark! The herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!"
 
Christ by highest heav'n adored
Christ the everlasting Lord!
Late in time behold Him come
Offspring of a Virgin's womb
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
Hail the incarnate Deity
Pleased as man with man to dwell
Jesus, our Emmanuel
Hark! The herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!"
 
Hail the heav'n-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Son of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings
Ris'n with healing in His wings
Mild He lays His glory by
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth
Hark! The herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!"

I have to not think about Scrooge.
Scrooge was a fictional character. I am haunted by the Scrooges of Christmas past, present, and future, and I need to close the book on him, pull the plug, let him take a backseat to the main character in the one and only Christmas story – Jesus's birth.
 
And I have talk about Jesus
It’s my choice to talk to people about Christmas and not about “the holiday season.” It’s okay to see retail stores’ decorations for what they are—bait for bringing in the bucks. It’s my prerogative to seek to enjoy Christmas for what it is, and not for what it isn’t. It should be my joy to rightfully make Christmas the opportunity to share about my Savior—and not apologize for it.
 
So, bah-humbug, Mr. Scrooge. You’ve been scrubbed.

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Bad weather today.
 
We’re having the first winter storm. Heavy sheets of rain drench everything, pouring off roofs, spewing out of gutters, turning yards into lakes. Wild sluices rampage down the mountainsides, drowning valley streams, issuing flash floods. In the high water streets, cars move like boats piloted by novice captains. Rogue gusts push people around, deform umbrellas, and deface clothes. Outside is one big soggy mess. Thankfully, inside it’s dry, calm, safe.
 
However, every once in a while, the lights flicker and sometimes we lose power completely for a few seconds. During the day, recovery amounts to the simple but irritating task of resetting every blinking digital clock—bed stand clock radio, TV, stovetop, microwave.
 
But night is a different story. In the few moments of utter darkness my slow processing mind goes from “Who turned off the lights” to “I think we’re having a power outage” to “Omigod, I can’t see!” Neurotic people like my husband station flashlights in every room of our house for just that reason. Non-neurotic (stupidly stubborn) people like me grope blindly in the dark trying to remember if the strategically placed flashlight was there or there—and then yell for help.
 
Few of us in this day and age experience pitch black. We have become accustomed to having light at all times of day. A flick of the switch, or even a flip of a cell phone, and we feel like God on the first day of Creation (And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. Genesis 1:3)
 
Used to be that when the sun went down, people stayed in. Now the setting sun is met by the twinkling start up of city lights. Cities change persona after dark. The dirt so obvious in broad daylight blends into the shadows while high above, skyscrapers dress the skyline like women in sequined gowns. Ablaze in electrifying trim, they become titillating, tantalizing, glamorous, glittering, gaudy spectacles in the night sky. New York’s Times Square, Tokyo’s Ginza, The Bund in Shanghai and Hong Kong Harbor, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and the Queen herself, Las Vegas, call out, “Look at me!” and defy the darkness.
 
But what happens when the lights go out? What if all the lights went out? What if they didn’t come back on for a very long time? And what if the thank-God-you’re-neurotic-I-love-you-because-you’re-crazy neurotic’s flashlights began to fail us?
 
Well, that’s kind of what happened in the 400 years between the end of the Old Testament prophets’ writings and the coming of Jesus Christ – an era known as “the intertestamental period.”
 
There were no electric lights to go out, but the Word of God, the voice of God through his prophets that had illuminated people’s lives, guided them, offered hope in shadowy situations, that had said there is still a way, my way, when you can’t see two feet in front of you—the sound of comfort and exhortation, promise, a future and hope—went out, went silent, dark, blank.

A long, uninterrupted nothing.

For 400 years, God was silent. He sent no prophets, crazy as they appeared, who did weird things like walk around naked (Isaiah 20), eat bread baked with cow dung (Ezekiel 4), take back his promiscuous wife multiple times (Hosea), survive the belly of a whale for three days (Jonah), or build a great, big boat for two of every living creature (Noah).
 
For 400 years, the lights went out on the world. There was no new news from God, no word of encouragement, no reminder of His promise that He would someday send a Messiah to save the world from utter darkness. Nada. Those who waited lived on the fumes of faith. They clung to old prophecies, such as the last words issued in the last chapter of the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, where God says this:
 
"Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and that day that is coming will set them on fire," says the LORD Almighty. "Not a root or a branch will be left to them. But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings. And you will go out and leap like calves released from the stall.” [Malachi 4:1-2]
 
And then the light broke. After 400 years of darkness, Jesus came—The Light of the World, the Messiah, Emmanuel – God with us, came with, as promised, healing in his wings! As Matthew, who wrote the first book in our New Testament say, Jesus came to fulfill the prophecy by Isaiah:

The people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. (Isaiah 9:1-2)
 
Jesus came to be the way for all people through the ages, across all cultures, men and women, slave and free, to have a permanent connection with God that God Himself would maintain.
 
Jesus came to shine a light on our lives that would, yes, point out the unsightly, blemished, broken down, damaged, scarred, mean and far from perfect parts of us that we would rather hide. And he came not to condemn but to free us from them.
 
Jesus came to restore us and restore our relationship with God. That is what we celebrate at Christmas.
 
So I have to ask: Have you discovered that part of Christmas yet?
 
If you feel like the lights have been turned off in your life, or maybe like you could never find the switch. If you feel like you have a little light but it’s just never enough and you long for more so that you can see clearly for once. If you have been living in darkness and in the shadow of death. If the world seems silent and without meaning. If you have no hope to grasp onto and see no future. If you question what love is. If you have been groping for a flashlight and now want to yell for help…
 
May I introduce you to Jesus?
 
It’s not hard. It’s simpler than any of us can imagine. Just say:
Jesus, I want you to come into my life. I want your light to shine in my darkness. Come into the empty and deserted places of my heart that no one has been able to occupy. Let me know that I am never alone because you are here. Forgive me for the things I have done and the things I have failed to do. Show me God’s love and open the heavens for the miraculous to occur in my life. Let me experience the power of the Holy Spirit to do the things that I cannot do. I want to live in the light, Jesus. Show me how. Show me now.

May your lights be turned on perpetually from this moment on.

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