Falling: Advent Day 19

Magi

Matthew 2

I am a king-maker. A wisdom-wielder. A keeper of dark mystery. 

For hundreds of years we have shaped the world. One might even say we have controlled it. Men seek us out. They rely on our wisdom for guidance, as they have for generations. I understand ambition. I know well the pull for prominence, the quest for power. I have seen kingdoms rise and fall. I have watched men ruin each other and all they live for. I have myself lusted, devoured, plundered, and destroyed.

And then came the star. This thing so bright, so unmistakably new, dominating the night sky. We knew. Here is a great power. Something to change the world. 

Some of us searched the old, dark ways. But some of us readied for the pilgrimage we did not realize we had been waiting for. For there are promises we have clutched close in secret, remembering a people who offered a better way. 

Prophecies of a king. 

This star is what drove me across long deserts and days in search of the source of such a light. Night after night the light of that star burned into me, driving me on. For too long the things I hold inside me have darkened my heart, sickened my very soul. I feel myself rotting away, crumbling to dust inside my trophy walls, my gilded life. 

I am not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this.

I didn't look for peace in a peasant's hut. I wasn't seeking strength in the composure of a quiet girl. I did not expect to find such joy in a powerless place, such glory in this stillness.

But I know a King when I see one. 

And I know holiness when I step into the presence of something that sears the soul, that instantly exposes me for the fraud I know I am. And though I tower over this Child, I find myself collapsing before Him, face to the earth. 

Ashamed. Elated. Afraid. Hopeful. Undone.

How do you describe this feeling of being scooped out, scoured clean by love? How explain the emptiness filled by light, like a dark sky lit by a star you could never imagine? Like a longing burning its way through every thread and thought and breath until you feel you might die of it? Like a death and a rebirth all at once? 

How do you offer this King the gift you are now ashamed of? How do you get up off that patch of dirt where you belong and go back to the shadowlands? How do you tell this craving, thirsting, grasping people that they have it all wrong, that there is this holy hollowing, that the way lies not in rising but in falling? 

I do not know, but the falling is where it begins. The falling before Him and the giving way, again and again, to this surrendering. 

On whom his favor rests: Advent day 10

Shepherd

Luke 2

He was good at watching.

He had to be. Once he had fallen asleep on his watch and several sheep had been lost. He didn't want to fight off those wild dogs again--or endure the angry muttering of the others. 

Watching was about the only thing they were allowed to do these days. The world didn't like shepherds. Maybe because they smelled like sheep. Maybe because of their poverty and powerlessness. Maybe because they reminded people of something they didn't want to know. 

The world needed someone to step on, someone to take the heat of their scorn. They moved around the shepherds distastefully, acknowledging their necessity but rejecting their need. And so the shepherds watched, together in the knowledge that they were unwanted, unnoticed, and alone.

He had gradually come to accept the nobody status. Most days, out in the field with no one but sheep to talk to, he felt like a nobody. But then there were these nights with the million million stars pressing down. There were the drinks from the cool stream and the wind rushing through tall grass. There were thoughts he didn't know how to express or to whom to express them. Some nights, like tonight, he found himself holding his breath, waiting, though he didn't know why. 

Then the angel appeared with brightness unendurable. He and the others cowered, pressing themselves into the earth they knew and not daring to look up. The angel said what angels almost always say. "Do not be afraid."

Your life was formed of fear, but not anymore. You don't have to be afraid.

"I bring you good news!" This is no accident. God has come directly to you--you outcasts--to tell you the greatest news in the history of the world. 

God is here. Right over there, in fact, just a few miles away. He has come, and you are invited to go see. You.

One angel isn't enough for this kind of announcement. Thousands and thousands of them now, sky light as day, voices splitting the night with music. How could the whole world not hear, not wake to see this? But only those who watch for him will be ready when he comes. 

"Glory to God! Peace to those on whom his favor rests."

That means you. Yes you, cowering there behind your sheep. Peace. His favor rests on you.

Go and see him. He's a shepherd, just like you, and he will be an outcast too. The world will move around him and rage at him and scorn him to death. And he will be the one who watches over you and saves you from the wild dogs. 

Go and see him, and find your voice. His love will make you brave, will give you words to tell the world. 

God is here, and nothing will ever be the same.

No answers: Advent Day 8

There are days when you feel you are just mouthing the words to something you don't really understand anymore. There are days when the sun of your hopes sinks behind the mountain of hurt looming large, and you walk in the shadows. There are days when the rounds of laundry and dishes and paperwork swallow up the laughter, when you look around at the word-wounded, the lonely, the poor, the dying, the rejected, the left behind, and you have nothing more to say. 

For all the big plans, for all the good intentions, for all you know you are supposed to say and do, sometimes Christmas is just about surviving. Sometimes the fear behind all that pain just swallows up the joy. 

And then it is easy to just go shopping. To bury all that sorrow under a mound of presents. To feed it lots of chocolate and sugar. To play bright music and cover the world with color and sparkle. To pretend you are a child again, innocent, happy; to fulfill every desire for every thing you ever wanted. 

Except that one thing. That aching thing that just won't go away. 

For that, you have to wait. 

You have to keep giving the sacrifice, day after day. You have to keep mouthing the words. You have to stand still under a night sky as vast and heavy as all your disappointment, and you have to look up.

And then God comes when you least expect it. Maybe you hear angel voices or see a star you never saw before. And you can choose to listen and believe and follow. You can take those incredulous, halting steps to a stable where a baby sleeps. And is this really the way God meets us? In the muck? In a nowhere place with a bunch of nobodies? As a helpless nobody himself?

But then you touch him. You feel the tiny weight of him in your arms and you think, This is God. And you sit aghast in the knowledge that the God who formed universes wanted to come this way, to fit in the crook of your elbow just so, and to be held. 

There is a longing in a God who comes like that. A yearning. And there are no easy answers. But there is a God who put on skin, who pushed his way small and bloody into our world, who grew up poor and walked dusty roads and slept in strange places. A God who touched our sores, who put his arms around our little ones, who struggled with his family, who made both friends and enemies.

There is a God who lived a whole life here and conquered it. All for love of us. He defeated death, but first he lived a life. Our life.

There are no easy answers, but he doesn't ask us to have answers. He asks us to follow the light, step into the stable, and hold him near. He asks us to sit still with him and let him be with us. 

He longs for us, yearns for us. If we wait for him, he will come.

A new name: Advent Days 4 & 5

Elizabeth

"Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!" (Luke 1:45)

Barren.

That name had been hers for so long that she didn't know how to let go of it, how to not be that woman, empty, dried-up, hollowed-out with sorrow. 

She knew God could still use her, a barren woman. She served him in all the ways she could, doing things for other women that they often couldn't do for themselves. Because they had children. Because God had visited them and not her. Blessed them and not her. 

But he had blessed her. Her life was rich, even without children. She had even found a measure of peace in her old age.  She believed in her God, believed he would someday show her why. 

Still, her childlessness was like a robe she wore. An identity. Elizabeth, the barren woman. It was who she was. The emptiness was an ache in her, a sorrow that was now simply a part of things. 

But now. Now Zachariah looked at her every day with mute wonder. Now they couldn't stop smiling. Now she felt her womb swelling with life, and she realized that all along she had been waiting--holding her breath--for this. 

When Mary came and the baby within her leaped for joy, all those empty places in her flooded with light. God. In this woman, in this very room, overshadowing them with holy fear. 

These two mothers--one of a herald, one of a king--huddled in that holy place and watched the coming of God. In the waiting a love swelled and grew, a light that would fill the barren land and the empty, dried-up hearts of a people hollowed-out with sorrow.

And of course the name of her son would be John. His message--that God remembers, God rescues, God redeems his lost children--would begin with his name, spoken as a promise fulfilled. A name on the lips of a people who needed to know.

God is gracious.

No more words: Advent Days 2 & 3

Zacharias

Words, words, words. 

Sometimes he felt that all he did was speak words no one believed anymore, words he himself struggled to cling to.

He was a man of reason. He had been as faithful as he knew how to be, earnestly following the teachings he had received. Even under the heavy rule of the Roman Empire. Even in the years of Elizabeth's barrenness. Even when he watched many of those he served halfheartedly participating in these religious rites, knowing they were only playing along. He saw that they had long ago lost faith, though they didn't realize it. He had continued to seek God, for himself and for these lost children. He knew how to speak the faith he wasn't always sure he possessed. He knew how to say the words that would soothe troubled hearts, though not his own. He clung to the words as his only lifeline.

It wasn't as though he were asking for great things. He only wanted what other men had. That gleam in the eye when they spoke of their sons. The joy of leading his boys to the temple to teach them the ways of God. The laughter of scooping up a giggling girl with golden hair. Those little arms around the neck. Those earnest questions. The roughhousing, the boisterous meals, the songs in the dark at bedtime. These things seemed even more precious than the freedom they all longed for.

He had watched it all unfold around him again and again. He had served these families as their priest for many years, seen the children grow up and begin families of their own. And each day he had lived with the knowledge that they spoke of him in whispers, shook their heads and wondered what he had done to earn God's disapproval. Each day he went to his quiet home, his faithful wife, and tried not to question God.

He had long ago given up asking for a son. He had accepted the look of pious pity in the faces of his congregation. He no longer expected joy. He had stopped praying for the deliverance of his people. 

Now he was just waiting. 

He didn't know what he was waiting for, exactly. He still believed in this God he served day after day. He knew that God was there. He had felt it, experienced it in ways he couldn't describe. But he didn't understand this God. He wasn't sure this God understood him. So he just did his duty, waiting to see if God would show up. He was old enough now to look forward to death and to the end of all his questions. To peace. He read the words again and again, spoke them over and over as a wall to hold back the tide of despair. And when the people came to him, broken, confused, afraid, he gave them the only answers he knew. But lately those answers had begun to ring hollow.

His turn came to burn incense before the Lord. He prepared the sacrifice that would burn continually throughout the day, thinking of how it symbolized the prayers of the people going up to God as a sweet fragrance. A pleasing aroma. What exactly would God be pleased about? he wondered. The halfhearted prayers of a people poor and oppressed, a people who hadn't heard from their God in hundreds of years? And maybe this God is just a God who takes and never gives, who commands worship but who never responds. 

When he looked up and saw the angel, the fear came from knowing the angel saw right through to his very soul, and he instantly felt that all his thoughts were lies and that he was longing for something he didn't understand. He felt the weight of God's presence. He felt his frame of dust crumbling under all that glory. 

But the angel did not strike nor condemn. "Do not be afraid, Zacharias. Your prayer is heard."

The words washed over him like pure love, like power. And as the angel described the son he would bear--he, a father!--he could only think of his faithlessness. He was afraid. How could he be the one to father such a child? 

Words sprang from his fear. "How shall I know this? I am an old man, and my wife is old also."

And Gabriel said, "I stand in the presence of God. I was sent by him to tell you these glad things. And because you did not believe my words, you will be mute and not able to speak."

So Zacharias was given a pregnancy of his own.* His wife's belly swelled and the people marveled and whispered. All the while this unspeakable joy swelled and grew within him, this holy stillness. Words were taken from him and for once he didn't have to have the answers. God himself was the answer. And God was coming, he realized, because God had been there all along. It was they who had stopped looking. His unbelief was silenced as the wonder of it all filled him. In the quiet God came near. 

Finally the day came, and oh, holy miracle, a son. And more than a son. Hope. Life. Salvation. And all those words that had been building in Zacharias came out like a flood, and he said things he didn't even know he knew, things that could only come from God, and his words held the life of belief. His words didn't have to be enough, because the One who was coming, he was The Word, and it was all we would ever need. Now his words could simply praise, rising up like a sweet fragrance of faith. 

All those days of emptiness? The hours of waiting? They filled with purpose and holy joy. The people who had whispered judgment now cried aloud at the grace of God. And had things been any different--had Elizabeth borne children at an early age, had Zacharias kept his speech--well then the miracle would have slipped by unnoticed. The sunrise is always brightest after the darkest night. The things he had longed for paled in light of what he had been given. This God of love offered far more than he had ever desired.

He still does. He is here in the waiting if we only silence our words, let the space become pregnant with his presence. He has come and is coming.

* From "Annunciation" by Kathleen Noris, taken from Watch for the Light, Orbis, 2011

Seedlings in the dark: Advent day 1

Four hundred years of silence.

A people can grow weary after waiting that long. A people can lose heart, miss the way. A people can despair. A world shrouded in darkness can make a people forget what light ever looked like, can make them wonder if there ever was a light at all. And waiting can go on until it becomes a way of life, until it becomes tradition, until it is no longer waiting at all.

It is forgetting.

A people who have forgotten what God sounds like no longer wait for him. They live in fear of themselves, of each other, of the past and the future, and they cannot wait because waiting feels like doing nothing. "When we are afraid, we want to get away from where we are."*

But there is a small remnant of those who still wait. There is a promise they cling to. "They have received something that is at work in them, like a seed that has started to grow . . . We can only really wait if what we are waiting for has already begun for us. It is always a movement from something to something more."*

History may have recorded four hundred years of silence, but these hearts did not. They heard God. And in the darkness they were waiting, not passively, but in the moment, present in the belief that God was near.

He had already come. And so they were ready. Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon, Anna . . . they were watching for the light because it shone already in their hearts.

Advent: expectant waiting and preparation for the coming of Christ.

We mark his coming more like a forgetting than a remembering. We fill up our darkness with all kinds of noisy celebration, but I wonder if we are really waiting for him.

He's coming, you know. His coming has begun in us. There are tendrils uncurling in the darkness, seedlings reaching for the light. Will we be ready to receive him?

* Henri Nouwen, "Waiting for God." From Watch for the Light, Orbis, 2011