Tag: advent

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Adventing God

Eberhard Grossgasteiger

Adventing God,

I’ve heard Gaza called a “graveyard for children.” They say 7,870 children are dead. 7,870. Some say the number’s inflated. But even if we cut it in half, God, then we’re saying only 3,935 children lie in that cold earth. What relief is that? And the children mark only the beginning of all the death.

And God, in Israel, whole families and kibbutzes are obliterated, shattered. Families of 1,210 murdered daughters, fathers, babies, and friends engulfed in the shroud of grief. And so many hostages trapped in terror’s grip. Will they ever come home? What home will they have if they return?

God, when I ask you to advent, to arrive…when I join the prophets and the ancients and ask you to pierce the night with a blinding, potent love, to crush every evil and to somehow remake our horrors into something we can call good — I’m praying about exactly these nightmares.

And I’m praying about all the evil that has touched me. And all the evil that I’ve done. I’m praying about all the evils that we have done to one another, and all the evils that we keep doing.

God, give us a vision for the shalom you promise is coming. But God, would you hurry up and bring it? Truth is, the waiting’s impossible to understand. And since I can already hear you asking me what exactly I’m doing to live your shalom, I’ll also pray for you to start with me. There’s a lot to be undone in me, a lot to be healed. I suspect the healing will hurt, but I need it.

We need the healing, God. Forgive us. And so, I’ll ask once more: Please, Advent. We’re killing, and we’re dying.

Amen.

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Advent Ache

Artem Balashevsky, Vitebsk, Belarus

Olga Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s mother-in-law, was disillusioned by the emptiness of the new ideologies and in her latter years returned to her Russian Orthodox Christian faith. Of course, only fools from the old, naive world clung to such fairy tales. Humans had evolved to higher truths. They didn’t need God anymore.

While Stalin and the adults seemed to have ignored her as a simpleton, the grandchildren mocked her. “Tell us, Babushka? Where is your soul? Show us where your soul is.”

Olga answered quietly: “I can’t show you your soul, but you will know it when it aches.”

I can’t exactly explain Advent to you, but you will know it by the ache.

In Advent, we voice the ache. In Advent, we name how the sorrows have piled up, how the wars (despite all our prayers and policies) grind on, how despair closes its icy grip. The marriage is still dead. The child still hurts. We’re enraged. Or disillusioned. Or numb.

And beneath it all, steady burns the ache. Yet if we let this weary throb do its deep work, we may find ourselves praying alongside the prophet. God, rend the Heavens and come down. Rip the sky, God. Rip my heart. Do something in this aching world.

We lift our eyes. We lift our eyes, and we ache.

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Advent: Piercing the Dark

We’re experts at taking the very best things and grinding them into the ground, hacking at them until we wear away all the life and the wonder. It’s no different with Advent.

Advent’s hope and unease arrive like a bolt of lighting. God catches us off guard. Advent disorients us, sends us reeling. Reading the thundering, weeping prophets (the readings assigned during the first weeks of Advent), every cliché melts. Here, we encounter God aflame. Our future relies entirely on the mercy of God’s sturdy promise — that God will dismantle evil, overwhelm sorrows, and once again speak light into the stifling darkness. Our hope rests in the furious love of God. But this encounter makes us tremble. We’re deluding ourselves if we think we can package or control the fury.

So how then does Advent sometimes feel like yet another intrusion of religious industry? The products. The quotes. And yes, the blog posts too.

Then the wrangling that kicks up every year, all the finger wagging around how we’re supposed to properly observe these Advent days. I have my opinions with these things, but Advent isn’t primarily a celebration to enjoy or a Christian season to “get right.” Advent is the cataclysmic story of God’s disruptive, creative action in human history. Advent renews our heavy souls by insisting that God does in fact arrive in the midst of our pain and worry, right in the middle of our despair and dismay.

In Advent, light pierces the darkness. Pierce — this is not a gentle word. The Light disrupts and scatters, and then the Light renews and heals. In Advent, God confronts us. God makes us promises. In Advent, we tremble and laugh. We lament, and we are overcome by wonder. Advent lifts our heart and rekindles hope’s fire. Advent offers more than we know to ask. Advent is gentle as a child, and Advent blazes like the sun.

Thank goodness, Advent is not what we make of it. I need something more than what I can muster. Advent pierces. Advent pierces the dark.

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Advent: The Long Dark Night

Photo by Johannes Roth 

It was early December, cold and dark. Elms and maples, bare and silent, stood lonely watch over our neighbor’s home. In each window (10 or 12 at least), a single white Christmas candle lamp burned, a red bow hung from each window sill. No lights strung across the roof. No candy cane paper wrapping the mailbox or lamppost. No blow-up snowman in the yard. Just those single flickering lights, holding out against the darkness, refusing to be devoured by the night. Warm, spare beauty amid so much barrenness, chill, and gloom.

Watching that illumination, I felt such sadness and emptiness–and such beauty and gratitude. All at once. How could these emotions coexist? The interior conflict felt familiar, an old friend I’d never named nor understood. I remembered the December morning when I still lived at home, listening to an old rendition of the Nativity story on my Sears stereo, when my mom found me overcome by tears. I could not tell her whether they were tears of joy or tears of sorrow. Often, they are the same. Often, if we live honestly, one requires the other.

Advent pulls these tensions taught. Advent fixes our fatigued, jaded, sad eyes on hope and joy, but first it requires us to reckon with our longing for what we lack, with our despair over all we’ve lost, with the fear, isolation, and heaviness weighing on the sagging shoulders of this weary world. Advent is where the Christian story begins. And Advent begins in the long, dark night.

“Christian art began in grief,” David Bannon reminds us. The earliest Christian imagery exists in catacombs, stories of cross and resurrection carved into stone and painted on walls–all of it buried in graves alongside the dead. They needed a way to embrace their tears, and a way to remember Jesus’ impossible promise of a brighter day and a new world. We still do.

Christian art…the Christian story…Christian hope–they are all embedded in a world gone mad, in a life that seems abandoned or ruined, in a heart that’s shattered. That’s not where this whole thing ends, mind you. We’re heading toward goodness and wholeness and blinding love. But we begin in the sorrows. There’s no other way.

“The celebration of Advent,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come. He is, and always will be now, with us in our sin, in our suffering, and at our death. We are no longer alone. God is with us and we are no longer homeless.”

During these days, we don’t go looking for sadness; we merely enact the courage to acknowledge it wherever it appears. There’s more than enough to mourn, more than enough to rattle the optimistic cheer of even the most stalwart souls. We enter the long, dark night, trusting not our own capacity to rekindle hope or our own ingenuity to overcome our many troubles. We trust the One who has come among us, the One who has become one of us (what wonder). We entrust our hopes and our futures to the One who has taken upon himself all that threatens us, the One who is trustworthy and true.

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The Problem with Advent

Lake of Carezza, Carezza, Nova Levante, Italy by Alessandro Viaro on Unsplash

The problem with Advent is that it comes around every single year. Again. And again. And then yet again. As best we can tell, Christians have kept some version of preparation for Christ’s appearing among us–days of repentance and longing and holy stillness–since the late 400’s. Generation after generation, names and stories mostly forgotten, have fasted and prayed and lit candles and set their hope on One coming who would make the world right, who would tend to every tear, snuff out every injustice, and lift every weary heart.

But of course there hasn’t been a single Advent in all these centuries when evil men did not stalk the innocent, when disease did not steal the young, when our heartaches over our broken relationships, broken dreams, and broken promises did not crush and maim. This Advent is no different. Sadly, by all accounts, next Advent will be the same.

And yet we press into these days with steady hands and a faith that seems almost belligerent in its audacity. We touch flame to wick, and we hum those haunting hymns. We bend in prayer, and we steel ourselves for our night-watches. We return again to this story, enacting once more the long, hope-filled narrative–not because we have certainty that this Advent (or any hour before we breathe our last) will finally make all the promises come true. We do not embrace Advent as a kind of elaborate denial, a way to play-act that the harshness or sorrow are not so bad as we’ve feared.

Just the opposite. We return to Advent again because of exactly this problem, an inescapable predicament as old as humanity. No matter how hard we try, no matter how ingenious our leaders, no matter our advancements, no matter our triumphs, no matter our very best intentions–we cannot ever, ever undo all the harm we repeatedly do to one another, all the pain we have set loose in our world.

In a dinner conversation recently with someone I love, we shared our heaviness and disappointment. There was fear of the future, regret over the past. After we finished our bowls of soup, we sat quietly, realizing that words failed. There were only tears. Tears over what we could not fix. Tears over the helplessness we must own, and tears for the grace we must cling to as our salvation.

This is the problem of Advent, and this is why we again light the candles and sing songs of hope in the long, long night. We do not need to “feel” Advent–that is not the point. Rather, we allow ourselves to be embraced by Advent’s true story. We trust the One who promises to be God with us, even amid our many searing pains. We relinquish our life into the hands of the One who promises to hold us near–and to one day undo every sorrow, mend every wound, and make the whole earth aflame with love’s fire.

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The Scent of Advent

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

We have a pup in our house, a floppy-eared, mop-haired, black and white bundle of 1/2 Tasmanian Devil, 1/2 vivacious joy. Though Miska is the dog-whisperer in our family, on Fridays I’m responsible for Gus’ early morning walk. Two weeks ago, Gus and I strolled an empty, leaf-strewn street in our neighborhood, silence and the slow dawn our only companions. With sudden insistence, Gus yanked back on his leash, sat his rump firmly on the cold sidewalk and sniffed the air with resolute focus.

We sat for a moment. Then two. Gus sniffed, turning his head slightly to the right, then slightly to the left. I called him, but he wouldn’t budge. I tugged his leash, but he held fast. If I’d thrown a fresh ribeye next to his mammoth paws, he wouldn’t have given it so much as a nod. Gus was on to something.

I looked across the street, in the direction his big, black nose pointed, but all I saw was a red brick house with black shutters, a row of old, caved-in pumpkins lining the steps to the front porch, an empty white truck parked in front. Not a soul. Not a creature. Not a sound. Not a smell. I couldn’t see a thing, but Gus had caught the scent.

Advent encourages me to take a Gus-like posture. Advent provides a stretch of days where we catch the divine scent. Advent’s promise is not that we see God, in this precise moment, exactly as we wish. Rather, in Advent we hear that ancient-yet-always-new promise of God’s sure action, God’s cosmic healing. And then with the eyes (and maybe the nose) of faith and wonder, we brush against that awakening scent of hope and generosity and righteousness.

Advent reminds us that we’re waiting for God. The holy ache in our soul is for God. Our broken heart, our forlorn future, our fears and anxieties and shattered stories and those cannibalistic lies that play in our head day after weary day–these are all signals of how desperate we are for the Adventing One to come and save us. Even our Advent practices, our good attempts at attentiveness (and they are–mostly–good), are not the point. God is the point. After all, my true cry is not for a religious regimen but for the Voice of Love. My fierce need is not for a spiritual discipline but for God.

And in Advent, by sheer mercy, we catch the scent of the One in whom our hope and salvation lies.

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Advent: Aching for Peace

Yesterday at church, mid-sermon, great flakes of snow fell from the sky, as though God were dropping a fresh supply of winter manna. The school auditorium where we meet boasts three grand, 8-foot high windows, always opening to us a vision of oaks and leaves and neighbors. Those windows are, for me, the very best part about our space. They remind us that, as we worship, God’s world ‘out there’ is wholly connected to God’s world ‘in here.’ Our kind, patient folks put up with my dawdling sermon, doing their darnedest to listen while white beauty swirled around us. A wiser pastor would have just stopped and had us all take a gaze at this first storm of the season and then offered an Amen. 

However, this was the Sunday of peace, and lighting the candle, we prayed that God’s disruptive, healing peace might come to us again. Peace – it seems such a pipe dream these days, and it’s a word (like so many good words) that we now feel compelled to clarify and apologize for, to properly signal what we’re saying and what we’re not saying. But here’s where I am: I’m aching for peace.

To be sure, I’m not angling for anything easy or contrived or oblivious – that’s not peace; that’s avoidance. But I do want an end to relational hostility. I do want the hungry fed and the oppressed to be free. I do want enemies to become friends, or at least not to hate one another.  I do want that inner quiet that marks the way of wisdom: the capacity to live in tensions, the courage to refuse the rage of the moment, the open-heartedness that allows us to be surprised, the tenacity to never lose hope.    

So after a cozy winter’s nap, enveloped by the heat pouring out of our clicking, humming radiators, Seth and I returned to what has become our ritual. We pulled on our snow pants and gloves and toboggan caps and went for a walk into the dark, frigid night. We tell Wyatt and Miska that we must brave the cold because we’re on the hunt for grub. However, walking these lonely streets as the world sits enchanted by stillness, and with only the sound of snow crunching under our boots and the conversation passing between us, I think we’re actually out in the silent night searching for peace. 

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Advent: Rousing the Bones

Alessandro Viaro

Here we are again, back to the beginning, starting the story for a bujillionth time. Advent. Can we rouse the bones once more? 

Advent surges with hope — that beautiful, beleaguered word. Some of us have lost so much in our world, and the tally of what we’ve lost grows by the day.  We’ve lost compassion and goodness. We’ve lost our shared humanity, our faith in mercy’s long unfolding. We’ve lost respect. We’ve lost neighborliness. We’ve lost, if we ever had it to begin with, our sense of responsibility for one another.

But the grief that keeps me awake in the night, the sorrow I carry in my soul, is my fear that we’re losing the one thing we must never lose: hope.  Some of us have lost heart.

And so here Advent arrives, belligerent and unyielding. She stands amid the rubble of our history, our heartache. She stands unflinching in the face of our cynicism. She receives our wounds, our fears. And she clears her throat, invites us near and begins to recount again the story of Jesus: a crucified man who bore the weight of evil alone before an empire, a religious machine, a circle of friends who abandoned him when everything was on the line. Jesus, though fully acquainted with grief, would never surrender hope, could never surrender hope. Jesus knew that God wins in the end.

If you want to know why I’m a Christian, it’s this: Hope. Advent tells me the story over and over. Advent insists that God is acting in the world and that goodness gets the final say. Have hope. Light the candles. Sing the songs. Push against the darkness. Rouse those weary bones once more. Advent on.

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Advent Everywhere

I had a meeting in New York City last week, and Miska joined me. When we were boarding the train in Penn Station for the trip home, several solo travelers in front of us asked the agent to direct them to the Quiet Car. It’s a nice idea, this “Quiet Car.” One imagines a cabin enveloped in hush calm, a meditative space, perhaps with the soothing scent of Spiced Orange and Huckleberry (it’s the holidays), maybe a few candles, the tranquility only interrupted by the rare announcements of upcoming stops offered from the hushed voice of James Earl Jones. Maybe in the far back compartment you’d find a silent yoga class.

However, I’ve been in the aforementioned “Quiet Car,” and it bears no resemblance to this nirvana solitude one hopes to discover. In my limited experience, half the people want to close their shades and pull their eye mask down and forget the world for a few hours; then half the people don’t give a flying fig about signage indicating quiet – they missed the day in preschool where they learned about the “inside voice” and demonstrate with their boisterous (and very long) cell calls, with their karaoke as the music blares from their headphones, their raucous games with friends to pass the time. Once I watched with growing unease as these two factions, over a heated and tense hour, nearly began WWIII right there in poor Amtrak’s “Quiet Car.”

So Miska and I never even considered that danger-laden zone and instead plopped ourselves right in amongst the rest of our fellow travelers, all of us willing to tamp down our expectations and just enjoy the ride.

And wouldn’t you know a fellow, a sixty-something New Yorker who I’m guessing worked in building maintenance, dialed up his daughter who was picking him up in Philly. He sat 4 feet from me and chatted the entire ride. He told his daughter how he shoveled snow the previous night and then skipped evening TV and went straight to a hot shower and bed, his muscles raging from a day on the job topped off by clearing the driveway and sidewalks at home. He asked how his grandkids were doing, worried as he was about their new school and whether they liked it and whether they had to buy new uniforms and if so if money was a problem. He asked where his daughter’s new school was and if she had to travel any extra distance to get there. He asked again about the grandkids, worried again that they might be unhappy or in need of anything. He asked about his daughter’s back pain and how her massage therapy was going and asked her if the massage therapist “put a towel over her butt” because the whole massage thing seemed like Martian-talk to him. Then (after asking about the grandkids one more time) the conductor announced the Philly stop, and he said, “Well, I guess I need to get off the phone. I’ll see you in probably ten minutes, and if I don’t hang up now, I won’t have anything to talk to you about when I get there.”

I’m certain that either way he’d have plenty of good questions to ask, plenty of love to give. See what we’d have missed if we packed into the Quiet Car? Grace comes to us in all kinds of places, unexpected places, boisterous and cluttered places. It’s a lot like Advent.

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Advent & Wilderness

A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” Isaiah

There’s a reason we must have Advent before Christmas. We must reckon with the dark if we are ever to be truly embraced by the Light. We have to know we’re in trouble before we have the good sense to cry out for help. We have to feel our aloneness in order to open up to the wide arms of grace. We have to know we’re lost in bad country before we gain the good sense to follow the God who leads us home.

Isaiah reminds us that God takes us through the wilderness, not around it. This is good news since life will, sooner or later, carry all of us into the rugged, isolated, despairing badlands. Eventually, all of us will have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

So here we are, waiting. Some of us are waiting alongside a grim diagnosis. Some of us are waiting while our family teeters on the brink. Some of us live in persistent anxiety, a low-grade fever of fear and tension. Some of us think where we are is all we’ll ever know. Some of us have surrendered hope. Some of us have forgotten the God who makes a way through the wilderness.

But God has come to us once in Jesus, and God will come to us in Jesus again. God has led the people through the wilderness once, and God will lead the people through the wilderness again. And again.

 

Photo by Hunter Bryant on Unsplash

 

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