Great Expectations

“Tis the season.” After the Thanksgiving Feast had been cleaned up and all the kids from out of town shooed off to their homes, boxes and boxes came out of the attic as we prepare to embark on another season of Advent and Christmas. This season is big in our home, and also at St. Patrick! We bring out a forest of Christmas trees, miles of garland, and wreaths of all shapes and sizes. There are more lights than one can count, and people spend hours making our church look well, enchanted. Why? In honor of the Founder of this feast—Jesus. We celebrate a God who not only created the world, but tore the fabric of reality and became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary. He became like his fallen creatures in all manner except sin. Why? Because love does things! Love drove Jesus down into time and space, into the mud, so that he could rescue us from all our sin and sorrow. So, yeah! With no apology, we will feast like there is no tomorrow, burn the Yule log, drink rivers of eggnog, and live out of a deep sense of gratitude to the One who gave everything so we could know something of joy.Years ago, we themed our Advent season “A Christmas Carol.” We used this Charles Dickens classic Christmas story to walk through some familiar narratives surrounding Jesus’ birth. This year we reach back into the bowels of antiquity and marshal forth another Dickens tale to get at the feel and expectations of Advent. Great Expectations, while not a Christmas story itself, starts with a Christmas feast that sets the tone for the “expectations” of a young orphan named Pip. Pip is raised by his overbearing, sanctimonious sister, and her beat-down husband, Joe. Pip has no real prospects and is constantly reminded by his sister, Mrs. Joe, that he shouldn’t have any expectations. She has raised him “by hand,” and is proud of it. This means she is hard, exacting, and lets him know all the time he won’t amount to much. Pip is encouraged to keep his expectations low and not expect much out of life.For us, it seems like we start out every season of Advent with a romanticized picture of the Christmas season. It sort of looks like a scene from Dickens in our imagination—somewhat Victorian with chestnuts roasting by an open fire, family and friends around the roaring hearth sipping a toddy, and maybe singing Christmas carols. And yet often, like Pip, we end the season with deep inner emptiness, longings deferred, and hope extinguished. Don’t get me wrong, Advent is all about expectations, and this year we will look at the expectations that are delivered by the prophet Isaiah. He tells of the expectations that God’s bone-weary, beaten-down people have for the future. He sings of a long-awaited infant Messiah:

“For to us a Child is born,
 to us a Son is given;
 and the government shall be upon His shoulder,and His name shall be called
 and His name shall be called
 Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
 Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

It is remarkable: all the titles he gives to this coming Messiah are calculated to be the answer to our deepest needs and longings. Of course, as Paul Harvey used to say, we know “the rest of the story.” We know this child would ultimately die to make sure that our deepest needs and longings would be met. So for us, we really do come to this season of Advent with Great Expectations!This is also a season of Great Expectations for St. Patrick, as you heard in our Congregational Meeting on Sunday. We have great expectations that God will provide for our needs as we embark on building more space to fulfill our purpose as a church family, “…to make disciples in the everyday who love God, love people, and love life.” What is so amazing is that, even as we started our last push to raise additional funds for our building, God has provided in amazing ways with unexpected generosity by folk in our church! Even as the Session planned and planned ways to raise additional money, God unexpectedly has sent gifts that make building our addition so much more manageable!December is typically our largest giving month. In this fiscal year, we have budgeted to receive tithes and offerings of $213,000. Our goal and expectation is to put all the money over that budgeted amount toward our building fund so we can reduce or eliminate the need to borrow money for our addition, and we are getting very close to this dream becoming reality. (We will, of course, still need to have a construction loan line of credit till all our pledges and new gifts come in over the next year.)So, I hope we all enter this season of Advent with Great Expectations. But not like you think. Throughout our Advent sermon series, I pray that all of us will ponder the One who is a Wonderful Counselor—that is, who gives us wisdom for our confusion. The One who is Mighty God—who gives strength in our weakness. The One who is Everlasting Father—who is the true Father that loves us unconditionally and who is jealous for our highest happiness and good. The One who is the Prince of Peace—who in the midst of our raging and anxiety brings peace to our souls through the cross.I love the season of Advent. I love the way our home looks, the way the Church looks, and the endless gatherings of friends and family. But this will only have meaning and will heal your heart if you connect all this festivity to the Founder of the Feast—Jesus. Christmas is for many a distraction from real life. The Bible would argue with a loud voice––this is real life. The Incarnation is the signal from God of His endless, never-stopping, over the top, always-giving love. May God fill our hearts with new and everlasting joy.