Conventional wisdom says the right time to celebrate the new year is January.  To be sure, that’s when our Gregorian calendar changes and our attentions turn toward the year ahead.  But that’s backward from the way we mark the passing of our personal time passages.  This March, I’ll celebrate my 40th year of living, but in truth, I’m already living in it.  Am I only to celebrate upon its completion?

Advent time is screwy.  It’s liminal time, in-between time, not-quite-but-just-about-time.

For Christians, it is the beginning of the new year.  The season of Pentecost ends with a celebration of Christ’s reign as a different kind of sovereign.  Advent takes us all the way back to the beginning of the Jesus story as his world and ours prepare for his coming.

My friend J.D. Glick, pastor of the Sunrise Church of the Brethren in Harrisonburg, Virginia contributed the devotions on the back of this year’s Advent bulletins.  I really like his thoughts on preparation.  He observes the ways athletic teams prepare for games, students prepare for exams, and travelers prepare for a journey.  In each case, preparation is essential for success.  He goes on to recall biblical times of preparation: Israelites in the wilderness, John the Baptist calling people to repent, Jesus fasting and praying in the desert before beginning his public ministry.  In every case, the energy and environment of preparation builds the capacity for what is to come.

Christmas is the celebration of the Divine becoming flesh and blood.  We can view that as a historical event, but as followers of Jesus, we’re each challenged each Christmas to invite the Divine to dwell within each of us.  J.D. asks, “Why do we deceive ourselves into believing that we don’t have to get ready?

So how do we get ready for that?  How do we prepare for God to dwell within us in a new way?

This last summer, I spent a week sleeping under the stars in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  Honestly, I didn’t get a lot of sleep.  The uncanny brilliance of the heavenly bodies were just too exciting.  Often, I’d not really drift off until a little after 3am, when the light of the coming dawn would begin to ‘pollute’ the night sky.

Advent is the pre-dawn time.  It’s still night, but barely.  The dawn is coming, but not quite yet.  Advent people live into one certainty, the dawn will come.  Our reality will change.

Advent isn’t a party, it’s more like a wake, a time to lick our wounds, grieve our losses, acknowledge our needs, and nurse our hopes for a better year ahead.  But it’s also more than these.  It’s a time to name these in each other and in the world all around us.

In January, most of us will resolve to better ourselves in some way.  It may be one of our culture’s more spiritual forms of ritual.  But it doesn’t rise far enough to honor the true significance of Christmas.  Christ didn’t just come so that you could be all you can be.  He came that the whole world might be all it could be.  Advent preparation time means aligning our personal awareness with all of creation.  Consider the Jesus story as told in Luke.  From Herod to Zechariah, from Elizabeth to Mary, from Joseph to the angels, shepherds, and Magi, all dread or proclaim that the one who is to come will change the whole world.

Conventional wisdom might not expect that Jesus would be able to accomplish much change in the flawed and faltering lot of followers living 2000 years after his death.  But that needn’t concern us.  Advent people are already making plans…