Presence over Presents: Let The Rush Cease This Christmas
This year, we're collaborating with writers across the Augustine Collective, a network of student-led Christian journals, to bring you a series of short devotional articles during this season of Advent, the season of anticipation leading up to Christmas. Find this series also published by the Penn Epistle.
by isaac hernandez, University of pennsylvania
Christmas preparation often gets a bad rap. Some quotes that I found include Maya Angelou: “You can tell a lot about a person by the way he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.” [1] Cassandra Clare writes, “Waiting for a special occasion to kill me? Christmas is coming.” [2] And this proverb, “Putting up Christmas lights: 5% decorating, 95% questioning life choices” (great work, ChatGPT!).
I feel their pain. Growing up, my family was (and still is) the “host” family, and thus we bore the annual responsibility of cooking a feast for over a dozen people, generating Pictionary questions for the Christmas Eve games, preparing beds for uncles who were spending the night, and grabbing last-minute White Elephant gifts for all the guests to pass around, in addition to purchasing our own gifts.
When December 24th/25th looks like this every year, I can understand why many people harbor an underlying exasperation about Christmas. Unfortunately, the Advent season has become a chore for humanity rather than a cherished celebration of the coming of our Savior.
Our busyness, even when it’s well-intentioned, often leads us to missing the presence of Jesus. No passage of the Bible illustrates this surprisingly not-so-modern truth better than Luke 10:38-42. Here, Jesus visits the house of Martha, who “had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made.” Eventually, in her rushing, Martha bitterly calls on Jesus to chastise her sister for not doing more to lavish the Lord’s presence, but he instead tells Martha this: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Wow! I find it profound that someone who knows how important he is would tell others to stop doing things for him, and instead simply be with him. This is a directive that our 21st-century consumerist, social media-infused society ought to heed carefully as well.
There are striking biblical examples of busy people dropping everything to be in the presence of Christ. Shepherds in the fields of Judea “hurried off” to Bethlehem, without a gift, to simply glorify God in the presence of the baby wrapped in a manger. [3] The Magi did bring a few house-warming gifts (if indeed gold, frankincense, and myrrh qualify as that), but the primary reason they traveled for months by caravan to a foreign country was not to win “Most Jolly” at the office holiday party, but to “bow down and worship him” (they understood the value of this as pagan astrologers!).
Advent is truly about celebrating the presence of Jesus in all 3 tenses: past, present, and future. Jesus showed himself to select people in Israel before his incarnation, such as when he saved Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fire in Daniel 3. He also promises to recreate Earth into New Jerusalem at the end of time (Revelation 22:1-5), where “there will be no crying, nor pain anymore,” and he will sit on an illuminating throne, providing his creation a paradise. But equally as important, Christ stands with us now in our broken world, offering salvation, hope, and the promise that “I am with you wherever you go” to us anxious humans who need more than a “Happy Holidays” to keep going in life. [4]
So, this Christmas, magnify the importance of Christ in the holiday with your time and stop only doing “mas”. Action steps: cut the lengthy Christmas Eve itinerary, give a few more thoughtful gift cards (when appropriate), and crank some of TobyMac’s Christmas album (or some Jackson 5, or Donny Hathaway) as you glorify Heaven from your couch.
Isaac Hernandez is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, studying Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Sources
[1] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/533170
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/222317-waiting-for-a-special-occasion-to-kill-me-christmas-is
[3] Luke 2:8-16
[4] Matthew 28:20