Look deeper for a new spiritual dimension

Look deeper for a new spiritual dimension

In just a few short days the aisles of our churches will have been fully transformed into the road to Bethlehem; our chancels into stables and our altars into mangers. And we ourselves - God willing – will also have been changed – if only for a few moments - into reverent shepherds and gift bearing magi. Advent will have done its job and, yet again, all will be rightly and fittingly prepared for this special celebration of the birth of our Saviour.

The rituals of advent - like all rituals, in fact – can help us to see with new eyes. They bring us within touching distance of a spiritual dimension of which we are, for the most part, quite ignorant and can help us to enter into a new reality. We see and experience something we couldn’t previously see or experience in quite the same way.

Science, of course, has long acknowledged the existence of such realities. We know, for instance, that insects can see further into the ultra-violet spectrum than we can even imagine – seeing colours that we don’t even know exist. Migrating birds traverse the globe with a precision that we can’t begin to duplicate. And any of us who has owned a dog knows that they can smell and hear worlds-more than their supposed masters! They are dwelling within a dimension – within an expression of earthly existence that we have no way of entering.

It’s a story we know well – perhaps too well! It’s been well rehearsed and practiced and most of us know with reasonable certainty what the next several days will bring. Some harried, last minute shopping.  The rush of last minute preparations. The excitement of Christmas Eve candlelight services, the opening of gifts. The fellowship of family and friends. And probably too much to eat and drink!

But because it is so predictable, so practiced, so according to script – it’s that much more important that we quite deliberately work at flicking on the switches that will help to reveal other realities that are also coming to pass for us today.

How, for instance, will the Lord be made present to us in the midst of the angry, stressed out faces that are fighting for the seemingly non-existent parking spaces at the shopping mall? How will you deepen your faith on Christmas Eve when you arrive at church and find your regular pew inhabited by Christians who might only worship at Christmas or Easter? How will our children be helped to make time for Jesus in the rush to open gifts and compare them with what their friends got and with their own secret desires? What new reality is Christ working for you – what special gifts is he offering you – building and bringing to completion for you in this huge, mad, marvellous monstrosity that we call Christmas?

You see, it’s by asking those kind of questions that we start to uncover those new realities. It’s like turning on a light in a darkened room. The things in the room were there all along. They were present – they were real – but they weren’t fully part of our lived experience. Faith and life start to connect in a new way. We enter into the new reality of a life that’s been made different by the newly revealed presence of a living, breathing, incarnate God who - though hidden - has been there with us all along!

Friends, we don’t need to wait until Christmas to start looking for the one whose birth we celebrate. God is alive and well and doing great and wondrous things on planet earth here today, right in the midst of normal, regular, everyday life. That is the heart and soul of the Christmas story – the story of a God who loves creation so intensely that he chooses to enter into the very heart of our creaturely existences – not just one day of the year – but for all three hundred and sixty five! May we be blessed to experience that blessed reality in the midst of our celebrations of Christmas this year.  AMEN