"Fear and Foreboding" | Shana McCauley | December 7, 2025

Shortly after my parents got divorced, when money was super tight, my dad and I went to a tree lot on Christmas Eve. We were on our way to midnight Mass, so we were dressed nicely and I was wearing fancy, smooth-soled white patent leather shoes. As we walked around looking for the best tree among the sad leftovers, I slipped, and slipped again. And eventually my dad had to hold me up by the arm as I shivered and skated around this lot.

That tree was so ugly. It was small and we didn’t have any of the right things for a fresh tree. It had only white lights and no ornaments, tinsel, or garland. It sat in the corner of our living room, long into prime fire-hazard territory. And still, that Christmas was so special.

It was a hard time. We lived in a drafty old trailer. My parents were particularly tense with each other. And my dad was building a new life. But this ugly tree and midnight Mass parted the darkness of that familial moment. And for a few days, we got to have a bit of unrestrained celebration. My dad loved Christmas, and I think of him a lot this time of year.

Although in the church this is the season of preparation for Christmas, of all the church seasons, Advent stands in greatest contrast to mass culture. It is the four Sundays before Christmas, most of December, when secular culture is full of reindeer and mugs of cocoa and visits to Grandma’s house. There are lighted deer and construction paper Santas. And the most serious disagreement is mulled wine versus eggnog.

In church, though, our scriptures are fear and foreboding and repentance. We change our vestments to blue or purple instead of the blingy white and gold of celebratory seasons. I recognize that it’s easy to lose this thread with Trinity’s beautiful sparkly blue, like dusted-blue vestments. So trust me when I say it’s a more introspective season.

It’s a season of prophecy. Isaiah and John the Baptist shout into a broken world for the people to return to God. Both of them preaching to people who are being unkind, unforgiving, and selfish. And maybe in the midst of the capitalist festival that is Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the sermons reach a little close to home.

It’s hard to balance and honestly easy to tune out. My romantic heart would rather skip the judgment of scripture and lean instead into the early sunsets disrupted by twinkling lights in every color. Give me Mariah Carey and Wham. I’ll do the weighty scripture when I’m not going to Christmas parties.

But John the Baptist and Isaiah before him made the hard choice of prophecy. Isaiah is talking to people who have broken faith with God. They are not taking care of widows and orphans. They are worshiping idols and false gods. They are making meaningless offerings — something akin to thoughts and prayers of our time. So God sends Isaiah to the people: “Wash yourselves. Make yourselves clean. Remove the evil of your doings before my eyes. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Rescue the oppressed. Defend the orphan. Plead for the widow.”

The people do not listen. Isaiah spins poetic verse after poetic verse, warning and begging the people to fix their broken world. You can almost hear the “Yeah, right,” as Isaiah tries again and again to keep them from exile.

Seven hundred years later, long after the exile has ended, God sends John the Baptist to another time when God’s people are ignoring the poor and the sick, the widows and the orphans, and making empty offerings. John is the kind of prophet that people would recognize. He’s wearing camel hair and eating locusts and wild honey. He’s messy and loud and mean. He comes like Isaiah calling the people a brood of vipers.

They know this kind of prophet. Many of them think that he is Elijah returned from heaven. He’s the Messiah that they imagined was coming, and they are following him around and treating him as such, getting baptized and repenting. It must have been disorienting then when he rebuked them:

“Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor.’ For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is lying at the root of the tree. Every tree, therefore, that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

I bet he was fun at parties.

In a week, your clergy will begin to grind their teeth as Costco and Macy’s begin the 12 days of Christmas, which are commercially the final 12 days to shop before Christmas Day. In case you don’t know, the 12 days of Christmas — the partridge and the pear tree and all that business — starts on Christmas Day and ends on Epiphany.

I know, I digress.

This is not yet the Christmas season. This is Advent, a quiet season of waiting and preparation. And maybe this is what we need culturally — to pause and reflect, to take stock. How are we caring for widows and orphans and the poor and the prisoners and the lonely? Does everyone have enough to eat? Are any cold or wet or without housing?

What would John the Baptist call us?

In a few weeks, we celebrate the coming of Christ, which is a miracle so unbelievable that people did not recognize it when it happened. The hope of Advent is not merely the hope of a car or a ring, nor the hope of a better life, but hope for something that is beyond imagination.

Jesus’s birth, God’s coming as a baby, was so unimaginable that when it happened, people didn’t understand. That kind of hope requires a robust faith and work to maintain. Cynicism is so very much easier. Skepticism and doubt would make us believe that by expecting little, we have some semblance of control. “If I don’t expect anything, I can’t be disappointed. Right?”

But hope is dangerous and hard and requires work. Not the work of accomplishment, the goals that we press on toward. Real hope — that real hope understands that God’s miracles are not bound to human imagination.

Isaiah casts a vision for what could be:

“The wolf shall live with the lamb.

The leopard shall lie down with the kid.

The calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and bear shall graze.

Their young shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”

And Isaiah said how we could get there:

Cease to do evil.

Learn to do good.

Seek justice.

Rescue the oppressed.

Defend the orphan.

Plead for the widow.

If we make righteousness and faithfulness the belt that holds our community together, a shoot will come from the stump. Something that looks dead will show that it is very much alive.

But the hope that I’m talking about takes all of us — you and me and the guy outside and the Pacific Northwest that does not recognize religion. It takes all of us fighting off the dishonest control of cynicism and pettiness and anger. It means the terrifying work of lashing ourselves to the Holy Spirit in her wisdom and understanding and counsel and might, knowing that she will for sure take us to places we never could and maybe never would go on our own, to a world that only God can imagine for us.

I love the secular part of this season. And though I know and love many purists who wait, I have already put up our tree. I will not self-flagellate, nor do I think you should. Because there are things that we can take from mass culture:

The strength of a dad parting the tension of a divorce and dragging his daughter around a slippery parking lot on Christmas Eve.

And the gentle and mostly safe arguing about eggnog.

And the way that even when our family irritates us, we still show up.

These are the lessons for Advent as much as Christmas. And those lights on houses and fences and around windows — each small light is pretty, but together they pierce the darkest, coldest night, drawing the gaze of all who pass by.

Could we together be a string of lights in this dark world?

Could our love and our shine and our light be the thing that draws people in? A thing of beauty.

Paul wished this blessing for us. Let us pray:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.