Cleaning & Decorating for the Lord

Back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, before the energy crisis and high inflation struck, back when energy was cheap, almost every house in my neighborhood would have their Christmas lights up just about this time of year. They were the old type of light, the big bulbs that were bright, colorful, and hot. It was fun to come home from football practice or some other evening activity to see the entire neighborhood swathed in brilliant color. It really set a festive mood. Most homes had lights strung along the roofline and others also had Christmas lights in their trees and bushes. As it is today, some people really put a lot of effort into decorating their homes in preparation for Christmas. They have to break out the ladders, untangle the strings of bulbs, and often they would spend hours trying to find the burned-out bulbs. Of course once Christmas came and went, the decorations were taken down and the strings of bulbs were carefully packed up in the hopes that they would not be hopelessly tangled like they were this year, last year, and the year before.

All of the effort to haul the decorations out of the attic, to untangle the strings of bulbs, to put the lights up, to find the burned out bulbs, and to undo all of it after Christmas drove some people to leave their lights up year round. Next year all they would have to do is plug them in and maybe find the burned out bulbs. No doubt this was a whole lot easier, but it seemed to my young mind a betrayal of the whole Christmas idea. The process of decoration was part of the preparation for Christmas and to skip that process seemed to me to be totally contrary to the whole Christmas Spirit. If you take a shortcut or skip most of the process, it just seems to cheapen the whole thing.

Which brings us to the question of why we clean and decorate for Christmas. It sets the mood, makes things festive, beautifies, and creates an atmosphere of anticipation. It tells us something important is happening. It prepares us spiritually and emotionally for the celebration of Christmas. In a certain way, we can see the cleaning and decorating of our homes as a method of taking the mission of John the Baptist to heart. Cleaning and decorating is a means of preparing the way of the Lord, that we might grow in anticipation and readiness to celebrate Jesus’ birth and for His return at the end of time.

So, what are we doing to decorate and cleanse our souls so as to prepare the way of the Lord? What we do to our homes should be a reflection of what we are doing with ourselves. As believers it would be a shame for our homes to be prepared and decorated but we leave ourselves spiritually untouched. Yet, if you think about it, those who left their Christmas lights up year round might have a good idea in some respects. If they fail to take them down out of laziness that is one thing, but what if they keep them up so as to be continuously prepared for an unexpected arrival of Jesus?

Shouldn’t we remain prepared for Jesus, shouldn’t we continue preparing the way for the Lord in our own lives the whole year and not just for a few weeks? After all, did Jesus ever say He was going to return or that we would die only during the seasons of Advent and Lent? No, He was emphatic that we would not know the time or the season for His return in glory. The same applies for our own deaths, we generally do not know when it will happen.

So unlike the people who put their lights up and take them down after Christmas, we need to remain prepared and decorated throughout the year. Our faith should not be stowed away in the attic. Unlike those who leave them up but just unplug their Christmas lights until next year, we need to keep preparing the way for Jesus in our hearts, minds, and lives, being better prepared this year than last year. In other words, the seasons of Advent and Lent are not just periods of preparation, they are a reminder that we need to build upon the preparation that went on last year, the year before, and the year before that. We need to be replacing the burned out bulbs in our spiritual lives, to keep our spiritual strings of lights untangled, and to take our spiritual preparation further and further throughout our lives. Indeed, when it comes to preparing the way of the Lord, can we ever be prepared enough? Can we ever be over-prepared? So let us take John the Baptist as an example. He prepared the way of Jesus from within his mother’s womb until the day he died. Shouldn’t we do the same?

—Fr Booth