By the time you read this, the Christmas lights will already have been switched on for a week or more. Advertisements for Christmas catalogues and presents for all the family abound on television, and restaurants have been booking for Christmas meals since late September. And every year the countdown seems to start further back.
In a way that's a pity. By the time Advent Sunday arrives - on the 27th of November this year - Christmas is already old news. We in churches may feel the need to make ourselves artificially enthusiastic for the countdown to Christmas all over again, behaving as if we'd not noticed the world around us gearing up to it for months. Alternatively, we may find ourselves immunised to Christmas, so overwhelmed by preparations for celebrating with family or friends that we have no time to consider what it means for us beyond overdosing on mince pies. But if we look at it another way, it's not so surprising that Christmas is being anticipated further and further back in the calendar year. For the focus of our celebrations is the birth of a child. And a baby's arrival is the culmination of a series of events going back much further than four weeks.
Children come into the world with a history - stories of past generations, of cultures and of traditions, maybe stretching back for centuries, which can help shape the years to come. This is true in our generation, with many genealogical resources at our disposal, but it was even more true for Jesus. Whether with Matthew we trace his ancestors back to Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation, or with Luke back to Adam, the first human being, this baby had been anticipated for millennia.
More prosaically, children announce their arrival for months beforehand; both through their mother's bodily changes in pregnancy, and through their family's and their community's reactions to the anticipated birth. Some pregnancies are joyful, long-hoped for events. Some are unlooked for, embarrassing, potentially dangerous. Mary's was both. As a teenager in a relatively primitive society, her chances of surviving childbirth would not be good. And though her betrothal to Joseph was an expected first stage before marriage, news of a child with some doubts about its paternity would not be met kindly in her community; had Joseph not supported her, she might have faced stoning to death. Through nine long months Mary may have wavered between joy at the coming of a new life into the world, discomfort with the process and concern for her child's uncertain future. Compared with her experience of waiting for her child to be born, any annoyance we may feel with signs of Christmas in September is a bit of an anticlimax!
So how can we prepare ourselves for the coming of Jesus into our lives this Christmas? Well, we can actually take advantage of the commercial world's early signalling of the coming of Christmas as a wake-up call for our own spiritual preparations: reflecting on how the prophetic promises and the Gospel stories surrounding Jesus' birth may connect with our own lives. But this is no sentimental journey. If we travel with Mary towards the birth of her baby, like her we may pray and long for new life to come into our own lives, our church, our world: that new life anticipated in the Old Testament and described in the Gospels. But new life brings with it change, disruption and uncertainty as well as joy: think of all those sleepless nights endured by new parents!
So as we prepare for Christmas, my prayer for all of us is that, whether in the middle of noisy celebrations, or in moments of solitude and quiet reflection, God may give us hope, joy and courage to welcome Jesus' birth.