My kids can make a party out of anything. For them, any reason big or small is cause for raucous celebration. We’ve worked it out where we pretty much just keep the costume bag close at hand and the box with the streamers and candles loaded and at-the-ready. Just in 2010 alone we’ve partied for every reason imaginable from lost teeth to landing the role of “Herod” in the school nativity play. My wife and I are two introverts raising three extroverts; trust me, we were outnumbered when it was only two of them.
So I recently gave Jesse (7) and Luci (5) a choice: they could either go hear their mom sing in the church Christmas Carol service or help me set up dinner at an emergency night shelter for the homeless of London’s East End. I figured they’d take the easy out and leave the heavy lifting to me; but I should have known they’d hear “set up dinner” and their eyes would flash wide-open with the potential for a party. (Sorry mom, maybe next time.)
Every year, Jesus followers in our area team up together to pull off a rotating night shelter, providing dinner and an overnight in a warm church building as a simple form of hospitality and shelter from London’s bitter, wet-cold winters. As a multi-church collaborative effort it’s fairly complex, but at its heart it’s pretty simple: a warm welcome in from the cold, a cup of tea, a hot meal and a clean and safe bed. Honestly, the best part of it is getting to work alongside former homeless and recovering addicts themselves – often the best volunteers you’ll ever find.
I’ll admit: I’ve been helping out with this kind of stuff for years and can basically do it in my sleep. Unfortunately, at times I’m afraid that’s exactly what I end up doing.
You should have seen the joy, energy and enthusiasm my kids brought to the task. My daughter squealed with delight with every chair she managed to arrange around the tables. My son, ever the efficient manager, made sure all the knives and forks were pointed in the exact same direction from the plates. We spent an hour arranging a cozy little coffee and tea station in a make-shift living room made of plush chairs and game-tables. In my mind we were just setting up another night at the emergency shelter; but to the kids we were arranging a feast fit for the Queen.
Advent reminds us that this is exactly what the Feast of the Incarnation is about: Jesus the Messiah was born, not into the palaces and promenades of empire, but in the Bethlehem back-alleys where the homeless were no doubt lining up for the soup kitchen. How many other people do you think were sleeping in stables that night?
Somehow we’ve managed to cover over the ramshackle corners of our Savior’s beginnings with our tinsel, our mistletoe, and our decked halls until somehow Christmas is all just fa-la-la and figgy pudding. But I have a feeling the nativity looked a lot more like my kids and I shoving some aging chairs around a church hall, setting up a few folding tables, and trying to get the boiler working again.
We celebrate, after all, a God whose big event launch was to a hillside of smelly shepherds and their flocks. How’s that for pomp and circumstance? I chuckle when I picture the heavenly host putting on their grand performance, no doubt rehearsed for half an eternity, for the benefit of a half-dozen illiterate nomads. And yet, there they were, with the “glory of the Lord shining around them” . . . hillside, front-row seats to the Heavenly Host’s Incarnation Jubilee Spectacular.
There goes God, strutting God’s stuff for the least of these, again!
Kind of like those rascally kids of mine: setting up for the Feast of the Incarnation with precision and pleasure while the rest of us sleep-walk our way through another hustle-bustle holiday.
Advent reminds us to keep watch, to be mindful, and to be on the lookout for opportunities to celebrate small things in big ways and big things as small people.
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