"Getting Ready for Christmas"

Over at Our Redeemer, the people are starting to get ready for Christmas. It's a hard time of the year for Lutherans, since we'd really like to put up our Christmas trees, and get out the ornaments, and especially sing all of those beautiful Christmas Carols we so dearly love. Everyone else is doing it except us, it seems. Walk in WalMart, and they've already been playing Christmas Carols since Halloween. In the church, however, we're singing Advent tunes - soulful tunes in minor keys, like "O Come, O Come Emmanuel," or songs that remind us that Christ came to die, like "Come, Precious Ransom," old Teutonic hymns with dark melodies. While everyone else is already singing in the birth of the baby Jesus in lullabies and happy carols we're deep into another penitential season. It seems like we can't be happy unless we're sad first - like having to have six weeks of lent before Easter. We judge the heights of our joy by the degree of sadness that precedes it.

Everyone else skips right past Advent - they go from Halloween, to Christmas, to the white sales in January with barely time to take a breath. They get to this season and they don't want to take time to sit down for the main course - just a little fast food, a little Frosty and Santa Claus, and a quick dessert of Jesus in the manger, before they're off to other things. Meanwhile we're still savoring the appetizers, preparing ourselves for the feast to come, laying on Micah and Amos and Isaiah and John the Baptist and the rest, quietly readying ourselves to enjoy the deep flavors of the Advent and Christmas seasons. Not that we don't complain about it; sometimes, it seems, we're afraid the dessert will all be gone by the time we get to it, or perhaps we think we'll be too full by that time, ready for our long winter nap, and we may just sleep through the grand finale of the season. So we do like to slip in a few carols now and then, and get a few decorations up, like kids stealing a finger full of icing from the cake while dinner is being prepared.

The Thorelson twins, Betty and Irma, are getting ready for the season. They still live on the old family homestead, and prepare for the season pretty much the way their folks used to years ago, putting the tree up in the parlor, but not lighting it until Christmas Eve, and putting a wreath on the door. There's no lawn ornaments or twinkle lights for them. Each night, they put another figure in the nativity set and read a lesson for the day. When it was just Irma living there, she carried on the tradition by herself - it was her way of remembering her mom and dad, who died many years ago, and reliving the joy of her Christmases with them and her sister as a child. After Betty's divorce six years ago, she moved back home too, and being together again seems to make a happier holiday for both of them. In fact, since Betty came home, they now spend their evenings stringing popcorn and cranberries, and making ornaments with peanut butter and seeds for the tree outside, and Betty even got Irma to make little paper ornaments that she'd seen in a craft magazine years ago, which had become part of her celebration with her husband, Charlie, before he ran off with his secretary. Betty still loves him, and for a few years still held out the hope that he'd come to his senses and come back to her. It's been a few years, though, now. Now she still makes the little paper ornaments, and tears trickle down her cheeks as she hangs them on the tree.

This year they'll be adding a new tradition. All year they've been working down at the Food Pantry dishing out hot lunches on Wednesdays, and they've gotten to know some of the folks who come in, and have gotten to be fond particularly of a couple of the guys - Bob and his brother, Ray, who both drink too much and mostly live outside, under the bridge, down where it crosses over Route 22, about a mile outside of town. One day the two saw Irma and Betty gathering blackberries at a patch near the bridge, and came over and said hello, and the women recognized them from the pantry. It didn't take the two men long to discover that they could trade a few quarts of blackberries for a couple of pieces of fresh blackberry pie and a sandwich, if they stopped by the house late in the afternoon. The two ladies weren't sure of their gentlemen callers at first, but didn't want to be rude. But the two men were always polite and courteous, and have even fixed a couple of things around the house for them, like the back screen door, which wasn't closing properly, and replaced a rotten board for them in the front porch, and painted the porch rail. Sometimes they even show up with their own tools, which they say they barter for. The two women don't really want to know where the tools come from, and often Bob and Ray leave the tools in the garage, since they have no place to store them in their little camp. The women have even tried to get them jobs, and found one doing some demolition work. In fact, their boss, who was getting ready to retire, liked their work so much he offered to give the business over to them. But they refused. Ray told him that he and his brother weren't reliable enough, and would probably ruin his business, which was probably true. Once they got a little money, they tended to drink it up, and forget about what else they were supposed to do.

The two women decided to invite them over for Thanksgiving dinner, since they had nowhere else to go, and the two men accepted the gracious invitation. Then the women invited them over to help them put up the tree; and afterward, for Christmas dinner as well, and the boys were happy to oblige. It doesn't have anything to do with romance. It's just two women with big hearts, who'd like to see some good things happen in the lives of these two men - who aren't bad men - just a couple of guys who have a drinking problem that has taken over the better part of their life. They don't remember many good Christmases. And they are getting a bit tired of living out of doors - in their mid-forties, they're getting a bit old for it, especially when it gets cold. Ray has even been suggesting to Bob that maybe they ought to get themselves dried out, and see if they can make a life for themselves as sober men. He'd like to do it together with his brother - to support one another, just like these two sisters do. I think he's wondering if he got dried out, maybe the girls might take more than pity on them - maybe take a shining to them instead. At least, he'd feel a bit better about accepting their kind invitations. So, who knows - maybe something will happen there. But inviting over people who don't have anyone else - especially homeless people - for Christmas is a nice kind of tradition to start - the kind of thing one could imagine Jesus doing. After all, he had to do a lot of camping outdoors, and rely on the good graces of some kind women to feed and care for him.

At any rate, the women are layering on traditions this year - some from their parents, some from something Betty read in a craft book while she was married, and now this new one, taking in homeless men and sharing their Advent and Christmas celebration with them. Something old and something new. Like layering the hope of the Old Testament promises we hear this season, with the joy of the fulfillment of those promises in Jesus' birth, with a nice helping of Paul on the side. When we stand over these lessons, and read down through the layers, there's the Gospel, in all it's glory, shining like the star on top of the Christmas tree they'll light on Christmas Eve. Just like when you read down through the layers of these two women's lives - two women that grew up as twins, each going their separate ways, living lives composed of both joy and sorrow, lives that hold onto the traditions of the past and yet also live in promise, lives which hold on to the memories of their remembered loves, yet continue to live into the hope and promise of the future.

That's how Advent and Christmas are put together - tradition, memories, old loves, layered thickly with hope and promise - things old and things new. Advent is the time when we bring these things together - when we get them out of the old box in the attic, and dust them off, and decide where they will belong in our story this year, and how we will celebrate these things that compose our life. It is a time when we take time to carefully arrange all the parts of these wonderful stories - the stories told by prophets and evangelists, and our story as well, stopping to examine each element, like precious, old glass ornaments, one by one, so that we don't miss anything along the way. We carefully layer them with hope and promise, put them on the tree, and when we get to the end - well, then, it's Christmas, and the meaning of all these things comes shining forth like the star over Bethlehem's stable.

That's what the Thorelson twins are doing - how they are living out the promise and hope of Advent and Christmas this year. And that's what's happening over at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, where the Reverend George Shulz is the pastor - a little parish, not very far from here, which seems to not be much in the eyes of most folks, but which is infinitely precious in the eyes of God.