Stepping into the Sanctuary during the season of Advent is like stepping into a uniquely beautiful time and space. For those who have a love affair with the church, it’s a time that’s sweetly beautiful in an indescribable way that struggles for words adequate for the moment.

I walked into the Sanctuary a little before our Christmas Eve service was to commence. Our service started at 11 pm so when we get out at midnight, there’s the late-night magic of thinking about Jesus’ birth and that first day of his life among us mortals. The cold night air at midnight startles the senses and one can’t help but look up at the night sky and imagine what it must have been like hearing angelic voices singing the news to shepherds standing vigil over their sheep.

Ministers are quirky by nature. I like walking around in the sanctuary before the crowds arrive soaking up the place so when the time for saying the holy words arrives, I feel ready with something worth saying. Holy habits of soul preparation before worship are hard to describe to the uninitiated but they must be sacramentalized if one is to do the work of ministry.

I turned around and saw Birdie watching me like a cat about to pounce on an unsuspecting mouse. The look on her face was comical because she knew I was doing the oddities of habit that were uniquely mine.

“Preacher, are you waiting for the Great Spirit to speak to you? You look like a high school kid who didn’t study for the big test praying for God to perform a miracle. I tried that once and found that method of education shaky.”

“Birdie, you couldn’t be more wrong,” I shot back. “This is the season when we don’t lack for the right words. The sermons are all simple and plain. Even you could get this right. All we have to do is what the angels did when they were summoned to form a choir on that holy night when Jesus was born.”

“Well, Rev, you wouldn’t qualify for the choir even if you were angelic, but you’re right about the good news. It couldn’t be easier to announce than this. Nothing better than a baby being born to make us shape up and take notice.”

The sanctuary never was prettier than this season of Advent. “Birdie, why is it so beautiful?” I asked. “Why is it that every year something special happens when we think long enough about it?”

“Preacher, you live so close to it you don’t get it. You’re like the mouse that lives in the cheese factory. You don’t get out enough to know it’s a season with something to offer anyone brave enough to draw near.”

“Why don’t folks connect the dots between the birth of Jesus on that night and the kind of life he calls us to live? Shouldn’t our tender feelings for him as a baby compel us to want to follow him as an adult?”

Birdie took off her coat and draped it over the back of her pew. “Maybe it’s like those days when I take my turn in the nursery. I really look forward to that day ‘cause it gives me a chance to hold a fresh, new baby and sit and rock. Something stirs in my motherly bosom that reminds me when I did that with my own kids. But holding a gurgling little baby doesn’t make me want to take one home. Been there, done that! Parenting a baby until they’re old enough to vote is largely overrated in my opinion.”

“You’re right,” I answered, “I’m right in the middle of hatching my two teenagers into the world and it’s been a long haul getting them to this stage without doing time in jail. It’s bittersweet though because I know I’ll miss them after they’re gone.”

“Preacher, don’t give up. Just because the room fills up with hordes of people you haven’t seen since Easter doesn’t mean that they’re not touched in some deep way. ‘Let ‘em be,’ Jesus said, ‘Let ‘em come like children.’ I suspect even Jesus knew that for some, taking that first step could lead to them taking a second step and then maybe even a third step. But I think he also knew that only a few would go farther than that with him. You remember the scene at Golgotha … not even his best buddies stuck it out to the end.”

The organist had now arrived and softly played that old favorite, Silent Night, Holy Night and the mood in my heart lifted. I knew the crowds were on their way. I had a role to play and it was to help those who came to find the spirit for this one night. Birdie gave me a wink and I knew what I had was enough. That’s the beauty of it. The Christmas spirit draws us all like children into a sacred place. Hallelujah! Let ‘em come!

Back in the early days of television, the announcer would claim, “there are a million stories in the naked city …” When I became a pastor I finally understood what that meant because within every congregation there are stories unfolding minute by minute. While I’ve never counted the hits, I call Sunday “the morning of 200 conversations.”

7:00 am I greet one of our Associate Pastors in the parking lot. We walk through the parking lot together as if we’re preparing to enter the bullring where we’ll encounter the bulls with our staccato dance and not just a little bravado.
7:12 am Our custodian informs me that we had several leaks from the rain that fell overnight.
7:18 am The phone rings. An anonymous caller wants to know what time our services are. Several members of the early worship band walk by my door and yell out their hellos. One of them stops and tells me he’s been up all night with an elderly parent. I settle into my own rehearsal for the two services ahead.
7:33 am A Sunday School leader calls in sick and wants me to pass this along to her class.
7:55 am In my email I discover I’m supposed to meet between the services with a family to discuss a concern they have.
8:14 am Someone knocks on my door: The Sanctuary is too cold. Could I turn up the heat? The custodian and I both know that once a hundred people arrive the room will warm up on its own. If we turn up the heat the second service will be too hot.
8:20 am I greet the Deacon Chair who’s passing out worship guides. His son is looking for a mission program to join next summer and wants my help.
8:35 am The band plays the song that signals to those out in the Narthex that worship is beginning. I walk into the Sanctuary, but stay near the back to greet our late arrivers.
8:55 am I head to the stage to preach; eighteen minutes later, I’m down on the floor describing several ways one can respond to God. Then I pitch several programs for the coming week like a huckster at the fair.
9:25 am I raise my hand for the benediction and speak directly to our worshipers; I’m looking at them and speaking to God.
9:28 am Three people talk to me about issues they want me to know about. Two of them deal with sick reports. I nod as if I knew about them already. I nod out of professional courtesy to show them I care. Sometimes it passes for compassion and other times I know they see through me. The reports are about medications and procedures and honestly, some of it flies right past as I can’t hold onto such details in the middle of the storm of too many conversations.
9:34 am I’m out in the Narthex again and 2 more people talk to me. One describes their search for a new job. The other is concerned about the cleanliness of the bathroom down in the nursery.
9:40 am Bible Fellowship Groups have officially begun although some are still getting coffee. I say hello to a single mom and give a high-five to a little boy that’s only 3 feet tall. Does that still qualify as a high-five?
9:52 am I head back to my office and a teacher comes around the corner desperately needing a TV/VCR. I give her a couple of suggestions of where to look but don’t go with her.
10:20 am I check my email once again. A church member has jotted me a note. I don’t answer as it can wait until I get back into the office on Tuesday.
10:26 am I open the door to my closet and check my tie in the mirror hung on the inside of the door. I make sure I’ve got breath mints in my pocket, pick up my Bible and sermon notes and head out the door. The hallway is buzzing with people who are loud and generally happy. I enter the Narthex once again only there are 3 times the people from 2 hours earlier. I say hello to several people, then I’m swamped with 4 others waiting to get a word with me.
10:44 am After 8 more conversations that include 2 jokes and 5 prayer requests, I take my seat partly to escape and partly to quiet my thoughts.
10:45 am On cue, I step in front of the crowd and welcome everyone. Seventeen minutes later, I greet 16 children for the children’s sermon. Twelve minutes after that, I read the Scripture text for the sermon and launch the sermon. Twenty-three minutes later I repeat the invitation. Six minutes later, I raise my hand for the benediction, look them in the eye and send them out for the week’s work of being the presence of Christ where they live and work.

Twenty-four minutes and 12 more conversations later, I limp back to my office, drop my things, and sigh deeply.

I have a confession to make: I have become the target of a series of dastardly plots of criminal proportions. As a pastor, I must confess I have been tempted to sin and commit crime like no other pastor by outside parties of whom I have no idea how they have found me.

Just since Sunday, I’ve received half a dozen offers to conspire with people who want me to help them secretly siphon off funds from their investment firms of massive amounts of monies that would make your hair turn white! Several of them identify themselves as fund managers for the Fidelity Investment firm in the United Kingdom although others come from Ostad Motahari and even from Luxemburg.

The amounts vary from skimming 1.2% of anywhere from 54 million pounds to 1.2 trillion all the way to a high of 4.2 trillion pounds. By the way, if I agree to help these criminals, could someone help me know how much in American dollars these numbers mean? Even in the conversion, is it still a huge number to think about pocketing for myself? Maybe you’ll be interested in helping me convert the numbers from pounds to dollars with my agreement that I will tithe my cut to the church or include you for a cut.

I love the stories and admire them for their courage!

Ms. Allison Crow of Manchester England has cancer and can’t continue to run her investments on her own and has decided she will help the less privileged. Is that why she identified me to share this with?

Tim McCarron needs someone to enable him to divert the 1/2% excess maximum Return Capital Profit and is looking for someone to trust who will stand as an investor (aka “a co-conspirator”) to receive the funds. Do I strike you as trustworthy?

Dr. Benson Philip of Ostad Motahari has been traveling recently on business adventures (that’s what he says) and has already transferred $800,000 to my account in Luxemburg as “compensation to my dedication, humanity and contribution, as it were.” You can tell Dr. Philip doesn’t know me well, don’t you think?

Why just this morning I received another important message from Barrister Remy Richards of Nigeria who represents a client with my same last name … Echoia Herron. It seems I’m a distant relative. You can imagine my distress to learn that Echoia and his wife and only daughter were all killed tragically in an airplance crash in Nigeria leaving an estate of $14 million dollars, not counting all the “stuff” they owned which is also unclaimed. The good Barrister has been searching high and low and the miracle of the Internet led him to me with an invitation to “contact” him in order to learn how I can make my claim for this estate that I’m surely entitled to receive. I wonder why my dear old Dad didn’t tell me about Uncle Echoia? I also wonder if my two brothers will take offense if I cut them off from getting a piece of the action? See my dilemma?

This is just a sample of the weird and strange stories I’ve heard since Sunday. I hope you’ll understand if the good members of my church arrive some Sunday and see the note on my door claiming my good fortune has allowed me to take a sudden and protracted vacation in Tahiti. Someone please pass along my wish to them offering good luck as they search for a new preacher!

Honestly, I get these messages everyday and so do you. Thank God for the SPAM button but it doesn’t seem very effective in stanching the flow of junk emails just like this. Who answers these messages anyway? For those of you who might be tempted to call me on the phone and scream out, “Don’t do it!” Calm down. I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck.

This is the season of bright shiny lights and the overly incredible human stories of greed. I keep blocking these crazy messages as SPAM and they keep coming, almost as if my blocking only makes them grow like weeds. It would be easy to be down on the human story of true need and to become jaded to the point of quitting as someone God has sent out into the world to share God’s goodness.

Jesus knew about this kind of helper’s fatigue but he still saw his role in the world as “God’s agent” to bring hope to all the weary and wounded souls in the world who were tired of their burdens. Jesus knew he was sent to love the world by showing us a new way to live. He came to tend to “the least, the lost, the little, and the last” in the world as Robert Capon would say it. Jesus came to deliver us from ourselves and to help us learn to enjoy peace with God and with one another.

Ours is not to judge for all of us are in need of God’s grace. That’s why it’s called grace. Grace means we are the recipients of God’s great love no matter what we’ve done, no matter who we are. Ours is to do as Jesus did. Ours is to serve and include just as Jesus did. It’s a good season, isn’t it?

Every time I lift the brass lid on a stack of communion trays, I’m startled by the intensity of the aroma of the Welch’s Grape Juice. It’s as if the smell has been held captive and needs desperately to be set free. Monthly I stand behind the communion table and speak of the incredible mystery that’s ours by the invitation of Jesus to “do this in memory of me.” It’s the sweet bite in the smell of the juice I inhale like a drunkard getting a whiff of hard liquor. No telling what might happen if we used real wine!

I love the first Sunday of the month when we share communion. There is not one boring thing about it. I have heard the complaints of folks who grew up in the liturgical church who describe the staid habits of saying the same words and doing the same things when communion was shared. I think it should be a sin to make boring the mysterious communion with our Lord and with one another and with all the saints. I firmly believe we should take the pastor who makes it dull out into the streets for a good flogging!

Rote words are where we lose our way. Saying the same words like a holy, rigid formula is enough to make Jesus rise from the grave in utter protest! If you don’t believe me, try poking the preacher with a stick in the middle of the night and shining a flashlight in his startled eyes; then command he say the words of the communion from memory; if he can say them, he should be bound and gagged and banished from the table until he can say something fresh and creative.

Nowhere is there a book of words and actions that must be followed. There’s not a book of rules and regs considered as holy script. Neither is there a liturgical police force that will shut down the operation and haul the violator off to liturgical jail if the words and actions don’t fully conform to the “way it should be done” whatever that is.

But for many, that script exists because people have been raised in churches where the same old thing was said and done every time the pastor led them through the same routine. The pastor unknowingly trivialized and tamed the sheer power of the sacred memory that exists in the hearts and minds of believers.

The communion of grain and grapes has a power I cannot explain nor do I ever think I’ll fully comprehend. I believe its power comes in invoking the congregation to holy memory. I don’t remember this being taught in seminary, but I’ve come to believe we have a collective unconscious memory of the night Jesus broke the bread and poured the wine that must be enticed to the surface to be re-experienced.

A while back at one of the art fairs that visits our city twice a year, I met an artist who carves his images in squares of linoleum and then uses those carvings like a wood block. The smooth and generally soft surface of the linoleum is easy to carve and particularly effective in transferring the inked image to a page. Once it dries, he uses watercolors to breathe life into his creation. That’s the process. What makes his work so powerful is his use of Jungian imagery that has a profound appreciation of the inner world beyond the conscious mind.

The last time I saw his work, I was struck by the image of an outstretched arm with a ribbon loosely wrapped about the arm with the saying, “My hand remembers the hand of my grandfather.”

Sacred memory resides in all of us. Somewhere in the mysterious folds of our brains is a river of memory whose source flows from that table and those disciples on the night of the betrayal. The words of blessing and goodness flow from the lips of our Lord and somehow fall across our own ears as fresh as the night they were first said. If we welcome that memory, it will visit us.

Recently a church member looked at me and said sweetly, “You’re a different person when you step down from the pulpit and stand behind the table. Something’s going on inside you, what is it?”

All I could muster to say was, “When we gather around the table I have the best seat in the house. When I invite us to the table to tap into the sacred memory and hand off the plates of bread and wine, I stand back and watch the church serve itself. It’s amazing … there’s God’s goodness being shined on us in our hearts and on our faces. It’s the sweet aroma of the presence of the Jesus who broke the bread and poured the wine. It’s a powerful, good thing that happens in us and among us. Sometimes it’s sheer holiness that’s happening in our midst.”