There are 2,765 stars in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Last week, on December 1st, Macaulay Culkin was the newest person to reach the honor. He was joined with his wife, Brenda Song, his son, and his parents as they celebrated his career in the film industry,
And the timing was perfect. The celebration at the beginning of December was a perfect homage to Christmastime and Macaulay Culkin’s most famous movie, Home Alone.
It’s a Christmas Classic, from the very first scenes. The McCalister’s are preparing to spend their Christmas in Paris, and their house outside of Chicago is filled with aunts, uncles, and cousins, trying to get everything packed, kids organized, and fed, pizza delivery guy paid and tipped, and then trying to find places for everyone to stay for the evening.
The movie opens into chaos- the McCalister family is amid Christmas frenzy- kids are running around, sword fighting, people are yelling, and the youngest boy is upset that his uncle Frank won’t let him watch a movie. PG-13 movie or in his words “nobody is letting me do anything!”
And as parents and teachers know well, our parents and teachers know well, when you bring a bunch of kids together, oftentimes they don’t always get along.
Kevin, the youngest son of the McCalister’s, faces the brunt of this teasing, the teasing,and is constantly ridiculed by his cousins and his older brother, Buzz. The last straw-Buzz eats Kevin’s cheese pizza-and a fight breaks out. Soda is spilled. In the chaos of cleanup, Kevin’s plane ticket is thrown away. Kevin’s parents send him to the attic where he is doomed to spend the night with his cousin Fuller, Fuller, who wets the bed. Needless to say, Kevin isn’t happy. He stomps upstairs to the attic bedroom, telling his mom that he wishes his family would just disappear.
Everyone goes to bed, but a storm comes in the middle of the night, causing the power to go out and, in the era before cell phone alarms- everyone’s digital clock alarms to stop working. The family wakes up late and in their panic to get to the airportKevin is left behind, they -still in the attic, waiting for his punishment to be over. He wakes up to an empty house, and is ecstatic. His prayer came true-his family disappeared, and he is alone for Christmas.
There are a lot of lessons that can be learned from Home Alone – and one of them is the importance of good preparation. It’s that readiness that is the throughline to today’s Gospel lesson.
Today, we hear the beginning verses of the book of Mark The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, followed by a quotation from the book of Isaiah:
Look, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare the way for you.
3A voice of one calling out in the wilderness,
“Prepare the way of the Lord.
Make his paths straight.”
Except for the first sentence, today’s Gospel lesson isn’t about Christ- it instead focuses, like most Advent II texts, on his cousin. – the Messenger sent in the Isaiah text.
is the focus of today’s text. He appears, clothed in camel’s hair, eating locusts and wild honey, and baptizes people after they have confessed their sins. And yet, he is humble. He knows that his ministry is nothing compared to the ministry of the one that is coming after him- the son of God.
John preaches a message of preparation, echoing the words foretold in Isaiah, to prepare for a Messiah that, when they come,
“Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”
John the Baptist tells those who gather around him to be ready for this coming son of Man. Pastor Andrew reminded us last week that that preparation hasn’t changed. Advent is a time of preparation, a time to get ready for the coming of the Christ child 2000 years ago, but to come again in all His glory.
This past week, I went to the December meeting of the Gettysburg Conference of Pastors, held at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Fairfield, under the counsel of one of our members, Rev. Scott Zimmerer. During a chat about upcoming services, preparing for Christmas, and the abundance of sermons we have to write,He mentioned a conversation he had with his wife about where she would be going to church last Sunday. She asked, “Have I heard this sermon before?” Pastor Zimmerer responded, “Maybe twice?”
He laughed, but Pastor Zimmerer reminded me of the difficulty of being a pastor for decades- trying to figure out how to make Christmastime feel special and meaningful after decades in ministry.
And it’s something that is not exclusive to those preaching every Sunday. It’s something that affects all of us- and I think, at its heart, is about how we prepare for the Christmas season.
When we think about getting ready and preparing for Christmas, most of us find ourselves at some point like the McCalister family in the opening scene of Home Alone. Holidays tend to equal chaos. Hopefully happy chaos, but chaos nonetheless. We equate preparing for Christmas to making sure our decorations are out and they look fantastic. We have the right tree and the old family ornaments placed perfectly. We have a list of presents for our friends and family, our schedules are chock full with Christmas parties, plans to see various family members, and community Christmas events. Christmas, a time of peace, turns into a season of commotion with some lights.
And all that preparation tends to include material things- gifts, gas, money, fancy clothes.
But John, the Great Preparer, the first person who celebrated at the announcement of the coming Christ from his mother’s womb, didn;t have a car or money for presents or a tree or plans for a Christmas party in his Sunday best. Today’s text tells us that John wore a scratchy robe of camels’ hair. He was likely malnourished, eating off a diet of honey and locusts. He wore threadbare sandals, attached with a simple strap. Scripture tells us that he was a voice in the wilderness- outside of normal conventional community.
And it’s this objectively strange man that is the most prepared of all for the coming of Christ.
Christmas parties, gifts, and decorations aren’t bad- they’re ways for us to celebrate the season with loved ones. But when we prepare our external home for the coming of Christ instead of our spirits and our hearts, we find ourselves like the McCallister family.
In the midst of all the preparation, packing, and planning, the mcalisters unintentionally forget about the thing that should be the most important-the Son.
And we do the same, often unintentionally. Christ often isn’t at the forefront of our holiday season. Today, we are reminded that we need to prepare for His arrival not just with gifts or candy or miles on the road to see family, but with intentional space for Jesus to come into our lives again in 2023.
For Jesus to come into a world where there are 30 people and nine children in our Gettysburg CARES program, with a waitlist of a dozen more.
For Jesus to come into a world where the United States just broke its own record for the number of mass shootings in a single year – 38 of them.
For Jesus to come into a world where the very places he walked, lived, ate, and preached are being bombed and torn apart.
But what does that preparation look like for us?
At the end of Home Alone, Kevin finds that after the dust settled, he jumped on his parents’ bed, ate mac and cheese and milk for dinner, ate all the junk food he could handle, and fended off burglars with elaborate pranks, that being an adult-and being home alone-isn’t what it’s all chalked up to be.
Kevin gets lonely. He misses his parents and having people around. Christmas Eve comes, and Kevin wanders to the local church. There, he hears a children’s choir singing, and is reminded of the love he has for his family. When the dust settled, when the chaos stopped, and he had time to think about what mattered to him, he was able to find peace in what otherwise is a chaotic Christmas.
And we can do the same. We can find ways to prepare for the coming of Christ, spaces for peace and intention, in this otherwise crazy season.
This week, set aside time for intentional preparation. Not with schedules or confusion about people coming and going, but with prayer, reflection and hope. For Christ will come, not just as a baby in the manger, but again, on that day when he will turn the world on its head. When the poor, homeless, and sick will be no more, when war will cease, and we all will be in God’s glory. And what a day of rejoicing that will be.
How will you prepare your hearts, minds, and spirits for the coming of Christ into your this Advent Season?
Sermons at St. James Gettysburg 