Advent

The story is told that Franklin D. Roosevelt and one of his close friends were talking late into the night one evening at the White House. Toward the end of their conversation, President Roosevelt suggested that they go out into the Rose Garden and look at the stars before going to bed. 

They went out and looked up for several minutes, peering at nebulae with thousands of stars. Then the president said, “All right, I think we feel small enough now to go in and go to sleep.”

We need that sense of wonder to keep our lives in perspective, don’t we? It’s part of what it means to be human. In today’s world we live among so many amazing inventions, various machines present in our own homes and offices, amazing technology that wasn’t even envisioned not that long ago, that often we fail to marvel at the most basic wonders of creation – the way babies are born, or the way our minds and bodies work, or the wonders of a sunrise. 

Our schedules are so tight that we lose sight of some of the most amazing miracles that present themselves in the midst of our lives everyday – the crispness of the air on a brisk fall morning, the way the sun warms our faces, the opening of a flower, or the song of a bird. We are such creatures of habit and routine that often we fail to see and hear the most astounding sights and sounds that are part of our world.

The poet-playwright Christopher Fry once wrote an essay on the miracle of the way our hands work. Have you ever thought about that? Look at your hand. All those nerves and muscles and bones work together simultaneously to bend and flex your fingers, to form a cup, to become a gripping tool, to make a fist, to fold for prayer – and we don’t even consciously think about the commands we send to the hand to make those things happen. Touching, holding, grasping, waving – we do all of these things without even thinking them through.

And that’s just the hand. What about the rest of the body? If we really thought about it like this very often, we’d rarely miss a day filled with amazement, aware of the wondrous miracles that God has brought into being.

We have entered the season of Advent once again – that season of the church year during which we prepare our hearts and our lives to celebrate the birth of the Son of God into the world. One of the wonderful things about Advent and Christmas is that they serve as an annual reminder of the importance of seeing the miraculous in our midst.

Let’s agree not to miss it this year. Let’s agree not to miss the experience of the miraculous. Let’s look more carefully than we did last year at the manger scenes and the festive trees and the lighted streets and the brightly wrapped packages – let’s look beyond them and see in a new and meaningful way the miracle of Christmas, the miracle of God’s love that entered the world in a tangible way through a baby named Jesus.

See you in church!

Grace and Peace,