Thoughts on Advent from Steve Bauman….
A recent Advent sermon from Steve Bauman struck a cord:
How this season before Christmas has devolved in our time is quite pathetic. The post-modern Christmas phantasmagoria is all about escape, distraction and consumerism and has little to contribute to the living of our days beyond a bit of merrymaking, which is alright so far as it goes, I suppose. Those of you that know me, know I’m all for some excellent merrymaking.
Merrymaking is one seasonal obligation, the other concerns buying lots of stuff and whatnot to keep our economic engines humming — especially this year. Don’t you find it darkly ironic that one our most sacred ritual seasons has been so completely subsumed by global consumerism that our political class would just as soon all of us spend ourselves into oblivion as the year comes to an end as a kind of sacrifice to the economic gods?
You can read the whole thing here.
Each year I walk through the elaborate displays at my local mall. In the center of the mall is a fantastic altar to the Consumer Gods of Christmas and their symbols: Santa Claus, reindeer, candy-canes, gingerbread houses. No sign of Jesus. No sign of anything that might transcend the mall itself, let alone the limits of our lives and the powers that be.
What if the church offered a real alternative? What if we refused to be complicit with all the simplistic merry-making and saccharine sentiment and destructive overindulgence and instead simply offered a baby, born in a manger, born to transform the world, born to show us a new way of living, born so that we might have life – abundant life – not discounted, mega-sized, tinsel-wrapped life – but authentically abundant life? What if we were faithful to that?
