When Philly Lutaaya melodies are going off in the neighborhood, and the room next to you is littered with shopping bags. When you are thinking about how many people in the car also enjoy the Lukaya chicken, it’s hard to settle down into meditating about an obscure Old Testament passage.

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Every Christmas, it gets harder thinking about Jeremiah’s promise at the same time you are thinking about juice vendors.

That’s why I found it abit weird reading Obadiah in the week when my WhatsApp status was buzzing with images from people’s office Christmas parties.

How was I going to connect the dots? This is the time I’m supposed to meditate on the three wise men (by the way, I just learned scripture doesn’t say they were three).

Okay, this is the time I’m supposed to ponder Bethlehem, frankincense, gold, and maybe the kind of sandals they wore. (Or at least many Christmas plays (and sermons) want me to.)

Yet few Christmas celebrations will help us ponder the promise of Christmas, where it came from, and why it was necessary for God to become flesh in the first place.

Yet slowly reading or meditating on the Old Testament, I’ve discovered, incites a hunger that only gets satisfied when you read the nativity story. Until then, it seems to me, you can easily indulge in a sentimental story that has no need to happen.

And the reverse is true; rushing into the Bethlehem story without long pondering the events that made it urgent can reduce you into a shallow, if not sentimental, Christmas celebrant. The Old Testament was designed to prevent us from an induced advent.

See, reading Genesis familiarizes you with the nature of the first Adam; you even notice the Trinity amidst creation. You notice the oversight and privilege the first Adam had: the image of God in him, the wild birds submitting, paradise as his setting, and most importantly, direct communion with God himself. Only then can you appreciate when Paul describes Jesus as the second Adam.

Meditating on Obadiah for me awakened the fact that God was passionate about the messianic line in Israel, even going to lengths to punish those like Edom who gloated over it, chiefly because the promise of Jesus was to come through Israel, no matter how heinous their sin!

Seeing Amos’s frustration with secularized worshipers as he asks them to seek the Lord and live reminded me, no one. No one naturally seeks after God; all have fallen short, and until God supernaturally makes us love God, we are on our own trying to connect with him.

Speaking of “being made to love God,” you notice Jeremiah’s choice of words in speaking of those in the coming ‘unbreachable’ new covenant. “I will cause them to walk in your ways.” Jeremiah wants me to understand that walking in God’s ways under the coming covenant is a consequence of God “causing me to” be influenced by his Spirit, whose outpouring can only be, because Jesus was born, for starters”.

This Christmas, our waistlines may get a little larger from the extra red meat in the bowl. Thank God for Christmas bowls and red meat! Yet my prayer is that my appreciation of Advent will also grow larger, too, to include the Old Testament events that made it urgent. The inability of stone hearts to obey God, as seen in Samaria, and the frustration of life under kings like Solomon, who started off building magnificent temples for God, yet ended up straying from Yahweh through sexual appetites.

The hope is that my Christmas meditations will grow to make me realize I can’t make it either, without God’s Spirit, who was poured out at the ascension of Jesus, the son of God, who did not remain a baby but died in my place to fulfill his mission of seeking and saving the lost, like me.

Lord, do it!