"Our Welcome becomes His Welcome"

The season of Advent is already upon us. Easter seems like it was only yesterday and already the Christmas season is upon us. As we enter this season of preparation to welcome our Lord Jesus, we at RLC have already accomplished a great deal. Thanks to your efforts we will celebrate Christmas this year in a church that looks and feels new! The warmth and welcome that we feel as we worship together in our newly remodeled sanctuary welcomes the strangers around us as well. There is no better way for our church to welcome Jesus this Christmas, who even as this birth was a stranger who depended on the kindness of others, than to welcome others in his name. Our welcome becomes His welcome and Christ once more enters the hearts to a needy world.

Advent is a time when we prepare to welcome Christ into our hearts as well. This transformation of our sanctuary is a good metaphor for this. The Christian life is all about sweeping out the old to make way for the new. All of us have things in our lives that need to be cleaned out. Welcoming Jesus into our lives means we have made a commitment to seriously address that part of our lives. We don't address these difficulties by ourselves though. From Moses, through the prophets and culmination in Jesus himself, are about the cleansing, transformation power of God. Paul assures us that God is active in this process.

Now the Lord is the Spirit,
and where the Spirit of the Lord is,
there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror,
are being transformed into the same image
from one degree of glory to another
for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
(NRS 2 Corinthians 3:17-18)

Though God has promised to be with us in this transformation much of it depends on our willingness to trust God and be a willing participant in the process. A significant part of this process of transformation is to see ourselves as we really are. This can be a pretty uncomfortable experience. None of us are the person we would truly like to be. Yet only God can truly accomplish the miracle needed. David's prayers in Psalm 51 is a moving expression of this.

Create in me a clean heart,
O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.
(NRS PSALM 51:10 )

What we prepare for in Advent, sweeping out our homes and our hearts, is not just the babe in a manger in Bethlehem, but Jesus Christ who is the fullness of the living God. He is a God who, with our permission, can transform our hearts and minds so we become the people who God created us to be. This new life, reconciled with God, filled with his presence by the power of the Holy Spirit, is God's gift to each of us at Christmas. It is for this precious gift that we sweep out our hearts and houses for in Advent. It is for this gift that David cries out in Psalm 51, for only God can create a clean heart within us, only God can fill us with his Holy Spirit.

We have swept out our church home and it is wonderful, maybe, like Abraham, we too can entertain angels unaware. One thing is certain, though, God wants to use us to bless every stranger that walks through our new doors.

Even as we open our doors and sweep out our church this Advent season, Let us take the time to prepare our hearts as