Quinn Caldwell is minister at Plymouth Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Syracuse, NY. Caldwell is well-known in the wider United Church of Christ (UCC) as a member of the UCC Stillspeaking Writers Group and an author for the Stillspeaking Daily Devotionals. He is a former associate minister at Old South Church in Boston and since January has led the Under-40 Writers Group for the UCC website s Feed Your Spirit section on the denomination s global reach. Caldwell graduated from Cornell with a BS in natural resources in 1999, and received his master s in divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 2003.

All I Really Want

Readings for a Modern Christmas

By Quinn G. Caldwell

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2014 Quinn G. Caldwell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-9017-1
CHAPTER 1

Christmas Calendar

WEEK ONE

1 Go get your Advent calendar. Start opening!

2 Open the next door on your calendar. Stare at the others with longing. Don't cheat.

3 Put a star in your room that you can see in the dark. Fall asleep staring at it.

4 Call somebody fun and make plans for a favorite Christmas tradition: to bake a cookie, to sing a carol, or to trim a tree.

5 Call somebody and say something rare and important to them.

6 Find a recording of "Prepare Ye" from Godspell (check out iTunes and YouTube). Crank it up to 11 and dance around the house while singing it at the top of your lungs and throwing tinsel around.

7 Turn out all the lights and relish the dark for a while tonight. Pray for gestation.

December 1 MORNING

Lead me in your truth—teach it to me—because you are the God who saves me. I put my hope in you all day long. (Psalm 25:5)

Some days it seems like waiting is all you do. For the train. For a reply to your e-mail. For your lunch order. For somebody at the customer service center, which is "experiencing higher-than-normal call volume," to pick up the freaking phone. For the other shoe to drop. Some days it feels like everybody but you is in control of your time, and all you can do—even if they have Highlights magazine in the waiting room—is sit around hoping they'll get to you soon.

Apparently, the malls and stores feel pretty much the same way; these days, they put up their Christmas decorations before Halloween. I hate delayed gratification as much as the next guy, but the fact that all the big retailers seem to be against waiting is pretty much a guarantee that there must be some virtue in it.

So today, since you'll be doing so much of it anyway, see if you can discover the virtue in waiting. Try to pay attention whenever you find yourself sitting around. Don't stick your earphones in or take your book out as soon as you get to the bus stop. Don't go for Angry Birds as soon as you get to the grocery line. Instead, notice: who's making you wait? Why? What are you waiting for? How impor-tant is it? Who's waiting with you? Why are you so impatient; is the next thing you have to do really so important? Why?

And most important of all: what are you really waiting for?

OK, God. You know I'm no good at this waiting thing. But I know you are. So enter into my wait and liven things up. Amen.

December 1 EVENING

"There will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars. On the earth, there will be dismay among nations in their confusion over the roaring of the sea and surging waves. The planets and other heavenly bodies will be shaken, causing people to faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world. Then they will see the Human One coming on a cloud with power and great splendor. Now when these things begin to happen, stand up straight and raise your heads because your redemption is near." (Luke 21:25-28)

There's waiting, and then there's waiting.

Sometimes it's the oh-God-when-will-this-pain-end kind of waiting. Sometimes it's just annoying, like waiting for your turn at the restroom. Sometimes it's worse, like waiting out the period after a gnarly divorce.

But there's another kind of waiting, too, a delicious, shivery kind: There's smelling the almost-done pie in the oven. There's sitting in the theater listening to the opening theme of a movie you've been waiting a year to see. There's feeling the baby kick you in the bladder a week before due date. There's lying in bed listening to your lover coming up the stairs.

Advent—those weeks leading up to Christmas—is about both kinds of waiting. On the one hand, it's about looking around at the state of the world, at the wars and the climate and the corporations and the seasonal allergies, and longing for God to end the wait and show up already. It's about choosing to see God's absence.

On the other, it's about choosing to see God's almost-presence. It's about looking around at the state of the world, at the struggling schoolteachers and rich philanthropists doing the right thing, at the babies being born and the love being made and the ancient stars shining bright as hope in the cold night sky. It's about looking around at all of this, reading the signs, and knowing that everything is about to change.

Advent is about standing in the slop and calling, "How long, Lord?" But just as surely, it's about standing in the shining, shivering with delight and singing, "Come, Lord, come."

Lord, this world needs you, bad. Fill it up with signs of your coming, signs so obvious even I can see them, and set me to work to welcome you. Amen.

December 2 MORNING

Teach us to number our days so we can have a wise heart. (Psalm 90:12)

I just love me a good Advent calendar. Growing up, we got new ones every year, carefully selected for each child. At the end of each day, we would open its corresponding door on the calendar. Some calendars had little pictures of Christmassy things behind the doors. Some were scratch-and-sniff. Some had candy in tiny compartments. Awesome.

Always, the biggest, most beautiful door on the whole calendar was the one marked "24." It was supposed to stay closed until Christmas Eve, when whatever cool thing it hid would be revealed. (Obviously, we always peeked.)

I remember the quiet wonder with which we opened each of those little doors, so much more tangible, so much more engaging than the sedate lighting of the four Advent candles in church. We weren't very good at saying grace at mealtimes, our bedtime rituals in those days had much more to do with toothbrushes than with prayers, and our longings had more to do with the Sears Wish Book than with the redemption of the Creation. But we gathered around those little doors each night with the hushed expectancy that they told us we were supposed to feel in church. As we did, we learned something about waiting, about counting, about longing, and about God.

There are plenty of Advent calendars in the stores, plenty online, and of course there are apps for that (though those won't let you peek). Get on it.

O Holy Mystery, you hide behind every door and peep from every window. In these days, grant that I might learn to pause, to hush, long enough to see you there. Amen.

December 2 EVENING

The Lord isn't slow to keep God's promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient toward you, not wanting anyone to perish but all to change their hearts and lives. (2 Peter 3:9)

Another thing I like about Advent calendars: they dole Christmas out glimpse by glimpse. They build up the picture or the story in slow, random-seeming increments. They don't go all the way in one shot. They require pauses. They require little bursts of delight. They require patience.

Advent is about expecting the coming of Christmas, the remembrance of Jesus' first coming. But it's also about expecting Jesus' second coming, the one that he said would straighten up the world, delight the good, open the eyes of the bad, and fix everything. It's about sinking not only into the longing and trepidation of that promise but also into trust that it will be fulfilled.

Since the earliest days, believers and scoffers...