Thoughts about Advent from Neil Moseley:
Christmas movies are here! My wife, Elizabeth, and I watched It’s a Wonderful Life on Saturday night. And on Monday night, to celebrate my birthday with family, we watched the musical Scrooge with Albert Finney. Now, many of you may never have seen this movie, but for my family it is a Christmas tradition. When I was a kid, we would go to church on Christmas Eve, come home and get everything ready for Santa Claus, and then pop Scrooge in to finish off the night.
As we got older, things changed: my sister moved away and her family wasn’t always around. She’s added three children to our family. My parents divorced when I was 24, so that doesn’t look the same either.
My brother’s family lives in Atlanta, and they are very rarely here for Christmas. My brother-in-law was killed in Iraq in October 2006; that was our hardest Christmas without a doubt. My brother and his wife added my nephew to the Moseley clan in 2008; they have another son on the way.
Elizabeth and I got married last year; that changed things, especially holidays. And we both work at churches, so we will be working on Christmas Eve. My sister remarried this past summer. Instead of doing so on Christmas Eve, we watched Scrooge on Dec. 13.
Things change, even the things that we hold most dear. And though this time of year always stirs in me a contemplation of all that’s changed, I am struck by the fact that so much has endured. We still celebrate. We still sing songs and light candles. We still give gifts, and we still love each other. We hang the old ornaments and watch old movies and call old friends, but we’ve also added a lot of new.
In Senior High Sunday School this past week, we discussed Emmanuel, Hebrew for “God with us.” We discussed how the Jews believed that Emmanuel meant that God was on their side. We talked about how the disciples believed that Emmanuel meant that God was physically present with them in the person of Jesus. We discussed how the earliest Christians learned that Emmanuel meant that the Holy Spirit worked within them, through them and between them.
And we talked about how hard those changes in understanding, those revelations, must have been. But with all that change and the crises of faith that must have resulted, the enduring truth was and is still Emmanuel—God is with us.
Those revelations were all given long before we were born; but the revelation of God with us: on our side, incarnated in Jesus Christ, and present with us in the Holy Spirit, is made new each and every day in the way that we love and care for our neighbors and glorify God. The ways in which we see and feel and understand God’s love will change, of that we can be certain, but God’s love will always endure.
Blessings,
Neil
