It is the day before Advent Sunday and I am pondering the reports of shoppers gone mad in "Black Friday Sales" all over the country. Black Friday is an import from America, a day, the day after Thanksgiving, when stores discount goods and sales are "traditional", those longing for a bargin go shopping, very often they are marked by crowds and certain amounts of pushing and shoving. It is not surprising that Asda had the brain-wave of importing Black Friday, they are owned by the American Wal-Mart Company, and it is not surprising that shoppers are hungry for bargins for our consumer driven society runs on an impossible dream, encouraging all of us to build castles in the air, hopes that will never be satisfied.
As I think on this I am concious that I have spent far too much energy and effort, and wasted far too much of my life in pursuing that impossible dream. It is a dream that tells us that we need to define ourselves by what we have and how we look, a dream that can never be fulfilled because there will always be one more thing, a dream that creates an insatiable hunger within us because it feeds on our insecurities. Too many of us have bought the lie that we are not enough, and that we need to prove ourselves in some way in order to be considered worthy and acceptable, we fail to see our value, and even when we hear them we all too often block out messages that tell us we are loved.
We should have learned that we are precious and cherished and loved from our very first days, and even before that, but our parents and their parents before them have also been infected by the "not enough" virus, they too have been pursuing their own castles in the air, they may have bought the lie that to show love is to give things and to provide more rather than to spend time, they may simply have been struggling to survive in a world gone mad. I believe this is largely a Western virus, but it is one that effects the whole world as we "sell" our aspirations and insatiable longings, and we are rendered unable to see a common humanity because our castles are costly and consume our energy and resources.
I have to admit that some of my own time and energy is taken up these days in wondering how I will "provide" Christmas...
That thought pulls me up short, what am I talking about, how on earth is it that I am missing the point, could it be that within me is the same spirit that became apparent in the man in Liverpool;
"..... eyewitnesses reporting in the latter (Liverpool) store that a man had to be restrained by security guards after becoming annoyed that he could only buy a single TV."
I have to conceed that the answer is yes! I don't want to buy multiple TV's, but I do want to provide...
What I am forgetting of course is that Christmas is God's initiative, we may have covered it with tinsel and surrounded it with demands and strange customs, we may have pushed it to the edge of madness until it has become one of the most stressful times of year, but at its heart it is Gods gift to us. At its heart lies the story of a life given, a tiny baby as the greatest symbol of love possible. God is with us! God has come among us, and is still with us....
God has come wrapped as a gift in human flesh to show us another way, a way of simplicity and love, and yet with our "Castle building mentality" even the church which is supposed to be the herald of this message has so often got it wrong. Somehow we have been consumed by a desire to be right, to get it right for God and to show the world how it is done. Our "Castle" becomes harsh and hard in the hope that somehow we will overcome the world. Somehow we forget that God loved the world so much that he came into it, he does not call us to seperate ourselves from it but to love it, to live within it and towards ourselves with an attitude of grace, humility and compassion. I love these words from Pope Francis:
“In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid. And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements. The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people. But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh? "
And there it is, we are not called to follow Jesus by putting the world right, we are called to follow him with love and compassion and into love and compassion, we are called to share that love and compassion with the world arround us, to break through the consumer frenzy, and even to break out of our own consumer frenzy and allow him to break in.
We are called to follow Jesus with love and compassion, to break through our harsh and hard ideologies and to break into the harsh and hard ideologies that make so many demands upon the lives of too many to receive and to give love...
We are not called to an impossible "castle building project", neither one made of posessions and status or one that sets us apart from others by somehow making us "good", we are called to see the one who loves and receives us, who tells us that we are the apple of his eye, that we are valued and precious, and then to share that message, to be heralds of the good news. That might mean that we need to let go of the building project that we have been engaged in, to allow its walls to crumble and fall around us, and that might mean letting go of what makes us feel safe or good, or at the very least vindicated.
Letting go is not easy for it requires a deep honesty from us that we might not be ready to face, it is in a sense an act of repentance, a turning towards God or back towards God, it might even be something we fear. But the whiper of Advent is a whisper of hope, a whisper strong enough to blow away the "castle" walls if we dare to hear it, and a whisper in which the open arms of God are revealed...
I won't apologise for ending with my favourite quote from Matthews Gospel, I simply pray that you and I will be able to embrace the invitation within it:
"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out ...? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” (Matthew 11: 28-30 The Message)
