Advent Mashup

Truth is, among Christian folk of various stripes, Advent is a mess.

Some say it is the season for preparing for Christmas day, for celebrating the big Birth. In that way, it looks backwards. Others have taught that it is a big block of time for looking forward to what the Bible calls, in the New Testament’s great Greek, the parousia -- a second appearing (some say coming) of the Lord.

Some have said: No carols, no sentiment, no festive celebrations. “Not until Christmas!” Advent is for penitent preparation, a Christian holding-back against the world’s excessive consumption. Fair point. Still others: “Ring the bells, throw your parties, pull out the old familiar tunes sooner than later! Why should Christmas wait until, well, Christmas?” I suppose.

Backward or forward? Restrained or festive? In the words of that great holiday philosopher, Charlie Brown: “We're obviously separated by denominational differences.” 

From the Latin adventus, the word basically means “coming.” The implied arrival indicates a spacial movement that is intended to fire the Christian imagination. “Come, Lord Jesus,” cries the ancient bidding prayer. Whether one imagines the familiar first coming (the nativity scene) or an inexplicable second (the world yet to come), the point of Advent is this: He comes from a place quite other than our own. “[Let it be here] on earth as it is in heaven,” we pray each week in the Jesus-taught prayer. Implication: What is already true there, where he is, is not yet thoroughly true here. 

That fact remains baldly obvious in Newtown, Connecticut; sometimes more subtle in our town, Pennsylvania. But whether there or here, whether wounds are gaping or closed or somewhere in between, still we Advent believers learn to pray, “Come, Lord Jesus. Make it so in our space what must surely be real in yours.”

For what’s left of Advent: Lay off the sweets and swags and be mindful of a strained, stained world. Or put out the party platter, cue up the Steamroller, and celebrate with all your pals a blessed baby boy. Remember Mary and Joseph and the angels way back when, or ask yourself about tomorrow, “What would I do if I only had one more day?” Backward or forward, doleful or merry ... Either way, until and beyond the 25th of this now ambiguous month, just keep praying,

Lord Jesus ... come.

Guest

Sweep the walk.
Clean up the bathroom. 
Vacuum around the living room.
Finish preparing another casserole.  
Put fresh sheets on the bed in the guest bedroom.

Most of us—But we might note, not all of us!—have worked our way down this sort of mental list before.  Preparing for guests in your home is no small task.  There is always much to do, assuming  you intend to treat your expected visitors as special guests.  Then again, ‘special guests’ is surely a tautology.  Is there another kind of guest other than special?  (Okay … other than your in-laws.)

I suppose one could choose not to prepare for guests at all:  “Come on in, friends.  Sit on our couch all hairy with cat fuzz.  Rest your feet on our crummy rug.  Enjoy some tasty leftovers, from March.  Come, get some rest on the same sheets you used during your last visit.” Of course not!  None of us would think twice about welcoming a friend or family member into that kind of house if we could help it.  We would go out of our way to make sure that all is ready.  Special guests deserve at least that much.

Perhaps it is not so different for the season of Advent.  In his volume Worship Is a Verb, Robert Webber likens Advent to a time when we anticipate a special guest coming to visit our home. Much hard work and preparation spans several weeks.  But the real burden of that work is offset by the hopeful expectancy of spending time with someone special.  Webber:

I am sure that you, like me, have spent weeks preparing for a visit by loved ones, knowing full well that when they come you will be ready to relax and enjoy their presence. This change in mood from preparing to enjoying is not unlike the shift in spiritual mood from Advent to Christmas. Simply put, Christmas is a season of joy, festivity, and fun. It’s a twelve-day festival from December twenty-fifth to January sixth, the day of Epiphany. And our spiritual experience during this time should be similar to that of enjoying a visit from someone special. It is a time of celebration, of singing Christmas carols, of giving and receiving gifts, of enjoying fellowship with friends and loved ones...during this time we are truly alive and free in the presence of our Guest. And the good news of Jesus Christ deserves a shout, a party, a frolic!

If we are not careful, our Advent and Christmas traditions can easily slip into the realm of the purely sentimental: something good to celebrate if one so chooses, but not altogether necessary for the soul. Yet preparing to receive the Savior is hardly a sentimental trip.  By remembering Christ’s advent (coming) in the past, we learn to “remember the future”— to ready ourselves for the good and great day of the Lord.  Webber’s analogy of preparing for a guest reminds us that there is indeed work to be done – soul work, you might call it.  We are learning, year by year, to live in the expectancy of God’s promised future.

Preparing the heart and mind for the advent of Christ is as important a task as preparing for Christmas guests in your home.  Are our hearts ready for the coming of one who resides among us by his Holy Spirit?  Perhaps the five candles of our traditional Advent wreath – the wreath that always adorns our sanctuary in this season – will serve as a kind of spiritual to do list for preparing for Christ.  With each new candle lighting there is new reason to have good hope.  Let us then prepare, expect, worship, and wait with all that we have to give.

May God grant us an Advent season full of hope and peace.

Narnia

So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.  -- Colossians 3

(Congregation, overhearing this brief interpretation of scripture for these two dear friends of mine on their wedding day will make much more sense when you learn that they have been teaching together a class of Jr. High youth on Sunday mornings here in our congregation.  As a couple, they have been leading their little flock of young believers through the famous wardrobe and into the fabled world of The Chronicles of Narnia, that masterpiece of children’s literature by Christian apologist C.S. Lewis.)

And so I want to say to you two, you brave new explorers (Or should I call you Pevensie siblings?) ... Welcome to your new Narnia. That is to say, welcome to the landscape of a staggering new world, a strange and wonderful country known as Christian marriage.

Try to imagine with me that this familiar place, these four walls so well known to both of you — For it is here in the space of word and sacrament that you have worshipped and shared fellowship and served the Lord, here were you are met week to week with the bath, book, and banquet of our generous Jesus — try today to imagine this good place as ... a wardrobe, a divine armoire, a covenantal closet.

Because here, in this time of glad worship, by your outlandish promises to one another, and by your confidence in those outstanding promises God has made to you, here you step into a new world.

It is not the land of Lewis, not the land of Calormen, Telmar, or Narnia.  Rather it is the territories of compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline, and love … all those Christ-shaped arenas laid out on the dependable map that is Colossians 3, your favorite passage.

These are your new domains, these make up the new world you will now inhabit.  Welcome to space for following Jesus through this life, together ... as the Son leads you ever closer to the Father, by way of countless neighbors and communions and even enemies ... all there for you to bless, together.  Dare I say it (and don’t spoil it yet for your class), but Jesus is your Aslan ... the lion of your shared life, that great one who laid down his life for you, whose word is your guide and whose life is your power. 

Now to be clear, and this should be said often among believers, one need not be married to be Christian. There is a long and important and noble place for singleness in the Christian communion and for the ministry of Jesus in the world.

But when Christians marry, that marriage becomes the primary territory in which Christ-shaped faithfulness and ministry are practiced and exercised and brought to perfection. After all, when our Lord calls us to “love our neighbor” — no less than the second great commandment — who else is a closer neighbor than the one beside whom you wake up each morning? In marriage, Christians practice daily that basic ministry to which we baptized folk are called in every other territory of life: faith, hope, and of course that all purpose garment ... love. 

So it is then that your vows send you packing today, through the wardrobe of this wedding, away from your former existence, and out into the land where you will learn to handle the good gifts of God’s in-breaking kingdom: 

Gifts such as forgiveness, when the checking account is overdrawn ... Patience, when the dirty clothes remain piled on the floor ... discipline, to keep you in your vows, when hot dates and hand holding give way to stomach flus and overly-short haircuts ... grace, when you are not the prince or princess you so desire each other to be ... How about mercy, when work in the world has been demanding and there is little left over for love at home ... and especially humility, lest you forget that you are not your spouse’s savior, nor do you need your traveling companion to be one for you.

Why? Because you already have a Savior, both of you, and he has gone on up ahead of you to prepare a good place, a lasting place, and he has left you his Word and Spirit to guide you along.

That news — that you both already belong to him — that is enough to see you through this journey. 

N. and N.,
it has been an honor to walk with you to this day.
Welcome to the threshold of a terrific new world.
Go on now. 

Go on through, 

together.

Godspeed.

Assurance

Ready?
Really ready?

for those unrealistic vows
for gold bands and a bond
for a lifetime of “us”

How can I know?
How to be sure?

about paying the bills
about sticktoitiveness
about death do us part

What about this?
What about that?

in sickness or health
for poorer or richer

in ebb as much as in flow

Is she for me?
Is he the “one”?

dirty clothes all in piles
Disney movies, again
incompatibility!

Will the old spark abide?
Will the heat stick around?

that first fine fire
that once-kindled want
those original longing looks

Am I ready?
Really ready?

®

Wrong question

You’ll only discover “ready” in time
Better to ask now: Am I willing to grow?

Ready?

One is never ready!

for growing up
for being stretched

for learning the height, depth, breadth

of faith, hope, and love
the Jesus kind

What makes one ready for marriage?

Marriage!
Marriage does it
Only marriage makes you ready

for marriage

Get It?

God has blessed me with laughter
and all who get the news will laugh with me! - Genesis 21

There’s just something funny about the Lord announcing to Sarah and Abraham, their 30-year AARP membership pins notwithstanding, that they will soon be parents to a child---the beginning of an impressive, promise-shaped family. Sarah looks at herself in the dim mirror, then down on her dresser at the fading retirement photo of Abe, and secretly snickers before the Lord.

Stuttering Moses gets the call to speak to Power. Empty-nest Hannah is promised a bouncing baby boy. Jonah, running from the Lord’s demand to love unlovely neighbors, gets a lesson on unmerited favor in the briny stomach of a fish. The Lord walks Ezekiel down to the Pile-o-Bones cemetery for a theological discussion about new life. Teenage Mary discovers via angel-gram that she will push salvation into the world. Let’s just say that Peter was not named “rock” because of his top-of-the-class IQ, yet the risen Jesus decides to build the church on him. And the guy the Holy Spirit conscripts to plant the seedlings of Jesus-shaped communities all around the Mediterranean basin? The same dude who, beforehand, quite drunk on his own religion, attempted to uproot the Easter movement before it spread like the kudzu he would later water.

The Bible is the best joke book going. 

For that matter, there’s something hilarious about the Lord co-opting a bored, depressed, and wayward teenager into the business of preaching the faith “once delivered to the saints.”

Sarah and Abe and Moses and Miriam and Hannah and Jonah and Mary and Peter and Paul: They are all waiting for the resurrection, laughing it up in the lobby. In that way, the gospel of Jesus is like a good joke. If someone has to stop snickering in order to explain it to you … Well, never mind. 

Says Paul: If you only look at us, you might well miss the brightness. We carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives. That’s to prevent anyone from confusing God’s incomparable power with us. - 2 Corinthians 4

I wonder, where is the Christ-shaped laughter in your testimony? What’s funny about the Father calling you “saint” by including you with the Son? What unlikely part of your pilgrimage will the Holy Spirit turn on its happy head?

(As you ponder all of that, would you mind going down to the Dollar General to pick up some baby diapers for Sarah and Abe? They need all the help they can get.)

Permissive God

God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and separated the light from the darkness.  And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.  - Genesis 1

I always imagined God physically engrossed in the hard work of creation, putting in long hours on the job, overalls covered in sticky chaos … the way my father looked at the end of every day, the summer he decided to take off a week from work to repaint the chipping exterior of our two-story home.  Work is, well … work.  No wonder God needed a break and a beer on Day Seven.  Or so I imagined.

In returning as a preacher to the first chapter of the Bible, paying attention to what few precious descriptors we are really given on the whole matter of producing a planet, I realized that, in fact, God sweats very little throughout the first work week.  (Some say “week,” others say “a million years.” I say tomāto, tomato.”)  In truth, in the text, God doesn’t really make all that much in making the world.

What God does do is speak.  It is apparently enough for God to say, surely with a tinge of delight, “Let there be _____.”  God has only to give permission for the world to exist and the summoned sphere cannot help but be.   Me, I can’t even get this chick “Siri” who supposedly lives in my smartphone to call my brother at work.  “I’m sorry Ralph, I don’t understand ‘Haul your mother a smirk.’” Geez.

Genesis 1 is less a proof text for an all-powerful god as it is a hymn of praise to One (in Three) whose very speech contains the seed for a million stars in the southwestern sky, gives permission for a thousand-and-one sunsets over Evangola beach.  God’s words do that sort of thing.  Should we be surprised when a little later, our older brother Jesus subdues a storm, sends some nefarious spirits into a pack of pigs, and invites a little dead girl to get up and get back to the business of living---all through the uttering of a few potent, permissive words.  (Luke 8)

Let there be Ralph.  Let there be Wayne.  Let there be Dan and Jan and Stan.  Let there be Debbie and Bob and Judah.  Let there be Walter, and Will, and Elaine.  Let there be you.  It would appear that the triune God has gladly given you permission to be here just about now.  In the words of the poet Mary Oliver,

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Stomachs of Trust

“This one is for all you doubters out there in sanctuary-land. We know who we are.”

Is doubt a sin?

Depends. I suspect there is a kind of head doubt that can lead one into temptation. Standing comfortably over on the curb of faith, scoffing at the blunders and excesses and misinformation of those passing by you, struggling in the religious race: That’s a sin. Tossing out vexing questions that call for impossible answers, just to make your parents (or anyone with whom you cannot yet connect) squirm and worry about your salvation: That’s likely a sin, and kind of cruel, too. Dressing up your naked dread in a coat of Christian Confidence, always ready with the right comeback or explanation or verse: If that’s not a sin, it surely is annoying. Imagining you are a spiritual island, all alone on your own comfortable terms, doubting your need for the mainland of those who have gone before you, insisting that “God” wash up on your shore just the way you want: That’s probably a sin, being so cut off. If nothing else it’s lonely, always being right.

But there is another kind of uncertainty in the Christian pilgrimage, what Frederick Buechner once dubbed stomach doubt. That may well be hope in the Lord, only upside down. That creeping numbness you carry after watching too much World News Tonight, too many Google news feeds. That comfortable self-loathing (or church-loathing) to which you retreat when the pilgrimage proves harder than you had first imagined. That pinch you feel when your friend confronts you with a calamity that sent her reeling away from any sanctuary or its god. The fear of failure when a 9-year-old smacks you with a theological puzzle you cannot explain. That dread that settles in your bones at the end of the day, horizontal in your bed: when life is not coherent, the way forward not at all clear, the coming of another morning not at all certain.

Garden variety anxiety notwithstanding, I suspect that knots in the stomach exist to bear witness to the fact that all is not yet right with God’s good world. The gospel is already true, and yet that news has not yet worked itself out in every place and time. We feel that in our gut. See Romans 8. In that way, the Christian should likely pull up a chair next to stomach doubt and get to know it better. Befriend it, hear it out, invite it over to the party that is Jesus’ resurrection and see how things go between them. By paying attention to stomach doubt and not castigating ourselves for it or dressing it up in the drag of faithless surety, we learn to trust in the sure promises of the Triune God: whose light and life will eventually find its way into every corner of every abdomen. That’s a Holy Spirit-born truth we are likely to learn in our bellies before we are convinced of it in our heads.

The opposite of faith is not doubt.
It’s too much of the wrong kind of certainty.