A Different Sort of Christmas

It's no secret, really, that 2017 has been a particularly hard year for me. From start to finish, this year has brought with it many losses and a great deal of pain--not least of which has included walking with my community at House Blend through the decision to sell the house and then to close the ministry, as well as personally navigating the loss of my calling to pastor this particular community.

I find myself carrying the grief of these losses into this Advent season with me, and as the celebration of Christ's incarnation among us draws closer and closer, I find myself acutely aware of the grief that sits alongside the celebration this year--the grief that, even as we remember and proclaim the Good News that the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, this community that incarnated God's love for me so well for the past several years is conspicuously absent this year.

Journeying with this community over the past few years has also given me the gift of new perspective that has invited me to check my privilege and to remember that Christmas is not a season of joyful celebration for everyone. For those who have lost jobs, for those whose families are a source of pain more than delight, for those who are lonely or who walk with the struggle of seasonal depression or who are struggling to overcome addictions, along with so many others, the merriment of Christmas  can, and so often does, serve to increase the sense of isolation and pain that they walk with daily.


I find myself longing for a Christmas story that is big enough to be good news for this season of my life, and for the friends I know for whom Christmas is an annual and unwelcome struggle. I'm longing for a Christmas story that will be good news not only for the mostly-comfortable, but for the aches and pains of a world that knows that deep down things are not right and need radical change.  For a Christmas story that won't just affirm the status quo and support the present order, but that will shake the foundations and stir our desire for a new kind of Kingdom to emerge.


This year, I resonate with Mary's song: "He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away with empty hands."

Zechariah's prophecy, too, stirs a longing for change: "Because of God's tender mercy, the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide us to the path of peace."

This year, as we remember the birth of a baby long ago, may we hear the echoes of the voices of the prophets who foretold his coming to a nation longing for change. May we have eyes to see beyond the peaceful image of a baby cradled asleep in his mother's arms to the miracle of God with us, the Word made flesh, come to dwell among us.

This story is big enough to be good news for all of us. Big enough for the hungry, for those who sit in darkness, for those who long for peace. May we give it the space to be so, today and every day!

Merry Christmas, friends!

With Fear and Trembling

In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy,

God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a village in Galilee,

to a virgin named Mary.

She was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendent of King David.

Gabriel appeared to her and said, 'Greetings, favoured woman!

The Lord is with you!'

Confused and disturbed, Mary tried to think what the angel could mean.

'Don't be afraid, Mary,' the angel told her, 

'for you have found favour with God! You will conceive and give birth to a son,

and you will name him Jesus.

He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High.

The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David.

And he will reign over Israel forever; his kingdom will never end!'

Luke 1:26-33

My home phone rang, too late at night for it to be a casual social call or a telemarketer. It was one of those phone calls that seems to make your heart stop, even if only momentarily. An already difficult situation had become urgent. Would I come right away?

It's odd, looking back, the particular details that stand out in my memory all this time later. I remember how my hands shook as I hung up the phone. I remember getting into the car and trying to drive, teeth chattering not so much from the cold air but from the adrenaline suddenly surging through my body. I remember trying to take deep breaths, one after another, to calm myself while praying for the adrenaline to subside enough so that I could drive safely to where I needed to be.

I remember getting there, trying not to let anyone see how much I was shaking and shivering, hoping that what I couldn't hide would be quickly dismissed as due to the cold weather.

I remember the person who gave me a hug, and pressed a mug of hot tea into my hands. Even in the moment, the grace being offered touched something deep within me.

I remember having no idea what to do, but doing it anyway.

*     *     *     *     *

"Don't be afraid, Mary," the angel told her.

Those words catch my attention, won't let go.

Mary, did your hands shake, your knees tremble, your teeth chatter when that angel appeared to you and turned your everyday life upside-down?

Do we sanitize how very confusing and disturbing it must have been for you to have an angel appear suddenly in the middle of mundane village life, in the middle of growing up and dreaming of marriage and wondering what the future might hold, in the middle of helping with chores and preparing meals and laughing with your friends?

Do the angel's words, "Don't be afraid," point us to the fact that to have an angel appear, to find out that you are to give birth to the Messiah, to learn that this is all to occur while you're still an unwed virgin must have been earth-shaking news?

Was there a tremble in your voice when you spoke the words, "I am the Lord's servant. May everything you have said about me come true"?

Mary, were you scared? 

*     *     *     *     *

I have wondered where God was that day, when I found myself thrust into a situation that felt so far outside of my comfort zone that it might as well have been happening to someone else, somewhere else. 

But then I remembered Mary, remembered the angel's words to her, "Don't be afraid."

I've always pictured Mary as serene, peace-filled, and trustingly obedient. 

But today, I find myself wondering if her hands were shaking too.

And I find myself wondering if, just maybe, showing up in spite of the shaking hands and trembling knees and chattering teeth is the point.

Maybe faith isn't always serene and peace-filled, confident and full of optimism. Maybe sometimes it trembles at the fearfulness of it all.

After all, if God can show up to a young woman in a small village like Nazareth, if God can be born in a stable and have his first cradle be a feeding trough, then maybe it's still true that God most often shows up in the least likely of places.

Like in young women who tremble with fear even as they reaffirm, "I am the Lord's servant."

May it be so.

Road Work Ahead: A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say the word “wilderness”?

Perhaps for some of you, the wilderness is a place of adventure and excitement, a place of escape, a place where you experience communion with God as Creator.

I suspect that for others of us, wilderness brings to mind images of isolation, of rugged terrain and wild animals, of being at the mercy of the elements, of discomfort.

Back in the day, I spent several summers working at Manitoba Pioneer Camp. MPC is located on an island on Shoal Lake, just past Falcon Lake across the Ontario border. To reach the camp, you have to turn off the Trans Canada Highway onto the gravel road that leads to Shoal Lake First Nation Bands 39 and 40. From the dock, located on the land of band 39, it’s a twenty-minute boat ride from the mainland to the island where the camp is located.

Because the land around the camp is largely undeveloped, being at camp is being surrounded by wilderness. The fact that the only way in or out is by boat only adds to the wilderness feel.

MPC has always had an emphasis on canoe tripping—inviting staff and campers to go in small cabin groups out into the wilderness together. The first time I was to lead such a canoe trip with a group of 10-12 year-olds, I vividly recall waking up to hear the wind blowing against the walls of the cabin and the sound of large waves crashing up against the rocky shoreline. I have what I’d describe as a healthy fear of the wilderness to begin with, and I had already been protesting that I wasn’t ready to be the leader of the trip—so the sounds that the lake makes when under a small craft warning were So. Not. Welcome. I believe my prayer that morning was something along the lines of, “Dear Jesus, Please don’t make me do this.”

Mercifully, the weather was deemed unsuitable for a canoe trip by a group of fairly inexperienced canoeists, and instead we were sent hiking to a site at the other end of the island, along something one might loosely describe as a trail through the woods—in reality, in many places we were bushwhacking, following the shoreline to be sure that we weren’t wandering around in circles.

The next morning, though, the winds had died down and we hiked back to the main site to be sent off on our previously scheduled canoe trip. The lake was calm, and we had an uneventful trip—until we arrived at the island where we were to spend the night and got our tents set up. Just as we finished getting the gear unloaded into the tents and a tarp set up over the fire, the heavens opened up and the winds picked up, and a torrential rainstorm started that wouldn’t stop until well into the night. It took forever to cook our supper, because the only wood we had to keep the fire going was wet, and when we had finally fed everyone, I went up to check on the campsite only to find that two out of our three tents had flooded, with everything in them floating on several inches of water. We spent that night with thirteen people huddled together in a six-person tent, packed so tightly that if one person rolled over, everyone had to roll over, and I couldn’t straighten my legs lest I kick one of my campers in the face.

The point is, the wilderness is unpredictable. It’s a place where we are very clearly not in control—for better or for worse. In the wilderness, we find ourselves at the mercy of the elements, far from home, stripped down to the bare essentials.

The wilderness is also very often the place where God meets us.

For the people of Judah, their particular wilderness was Babylon, where they had been living in exile. The holy city of Jerusalem had been destroyed, its walls pulled down, the Temple burned, and the Davidic lineage removed from the throne. Now they found themselves far from home, stripped of their culture and their religious freedom, at the mercy of foreign powers determined to strip them of their identity as a people. Powerless and homesick, and faced with the fear that their current situation was a reflection of God’s abandonment, of punishment for their sins as a nation—this was a wilderness experience indeed!

Then, out of nowhere, into this wilderness, amidst the fears and the tears of a people in exile, the prophet Isaiah spoke these words—our Scripture reading for this second Sunday of Advent.

(Scripture Reading: Isaiah 40:1-11)

Can you imagine the impact these words must have had on a people who had known such pain and despair? Comfort my people, commands God. Speak tenderly to them, and tell them that their sin has been paid for, that the hard times are over. Make way for the Lord—pave a highway through the desert, fill in the valleys, level the mountains, smooth over the rugged terrain, because I am coming to save my people. They’re about to see my glory!

These words are words of Good News. These words are what salvation sounds like. Into years of seeming abandonment by God, into the void left by the destruction of the Temple and the struggle to maintain their identity as God’s chosen people, comes this promise that God has not forgotten God’s people, nor is God blind to their suffering. No, God has seen, and things are about to change—comfort in place of tears, hope in place of fears. God will not allow anything—not desert wasteland, nor deep valleys of despair, nor the long, mountainous uphill battles—God will not allow anything to stand between God and God’s people. All of these barriers are all to be leveled, in order to hasten God’s return to rescue the people and restore them to God’s presence once more.

So often, God meets us in the midst of the wilderness—in the place where we feel most powerless, where we feel farthest from home, in the place where we feel like we are at the mercy of elements beyond our control. It’s in that very place of exile, of wilderness wandering, that we spot the burning bush, or find ourselves following a star, or watch in awe as Jesus commands the wind and the waves to be still—and they respond! Just when we suspect that God has abandoned us, given up on us, turned God’s back on us, we hear a voice beckoning, speaking unexpected words of comfort. We find ourselves once again in the company of the Good Shepherd, who gathers his lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart, speaking tenderly to them and reassuring them that his word endures forever.

The good news of the Lord’s coming is not only for exiles in Babylon in 540 B.C. The beginning of the Good News about Jesus also first emerges in the wilderness, in the person of wild-haired, wild-eyed John the Baptist in his camel’s hair robe, munching on locusts and wild honey. And it continues to be good news for those who find themselves in the wilderness today: for the person who finds himself homeless and alone; for the scared young woman faced with an unexpected, unplanned pregnancy; for the family displaced by war; for the single mother who finds herself unemployed at Christmas, unsure of how to provide any sort of festivities for her children; and for the young man who finds himself cast out because his family cannot come to terms with his sexuality. For each of these, and so many others, the gospel comes as good news—words of comfort, hope, and tender embrace from the One who longs to gather all of his flock into his arms and cradle them next to his chest.

The good news is the same today as it was in Babylon in 540 B.C., and as it was almost 600 years later when John the Baptist showed up on the scene to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus the Messiah. The good news of Advent is the reminder that God is coming to speak comfort to people who feel lost in the wilderness, and to bring good news to people longing for God’s coming. God has not forgotten any of God’s children; and although we may have begun to wonder if God had forgotten us, rescue is on the way!

The good news that God has not forgotten us, that God is returning to set all things right, that the Kingdom of God has already been inaugurated in the person of Jesus Christ, is needed just as much this Advent as it ever has been. In the wilderness of the man facing his first Christmas without his wife. In the hospital room where a family keeps vigil, facing the uncertainty of a difficult diagnosis together. In the lineup at the local food bank, where a sense of community has formed among the clients who gather to collect some much-needed sustenance, both of food and fellowship. In the room in the personal care home where a woman sits, surrounded by the ache of loneliness, as one day blends into another. In the life of the dearly loved child of God who struggles daily to hold onto faith when the anxiety and depression and sense of God’s absence threaten to overwhelm.

The season of Advent invites us to open our hearts, to pay attention, to be attentive to the promise that God wants to make a road through the hills and valleys of our world to gather God’s people to Godself once again.

For those of us who find ourselves even this morning wearily trekking through the wilderness, we are promised that God has not forgotten us. Even now, God longs to gather us into God’s arms. We are not alone. Comfort and rescue are on the way. Jesus is coming!

But I think there’s more here, for those of us who are followers of Christ—for those of us who have heard and received this message of good news already. In this passage, there is also an invitation—a call to proclaim even now, in anticipation of what God is about to do, that God is on the way. To speak tenderly to wounded people longing to hear that they aren’t alone. To bring words of comfort to people who may have forgotten, in the midst of storms and struggles, that they are children of God. To prepare the way for the Lord—leveling rough ground, filling in the valleys, tearing down the mountains—in order to prepare for that day when God’s Kingdom will come in full.

The interesting thing about Isaiah 40 is that the word “comfort” in the first verse is not a noun, as I had always assumed it was, but a verb in the plural imperative voice—It is a command: “Comfort my people.” Listen to all of the verbs in this passage: Comfort. Speak tenderly. Proclaim forgiveness. Prepare the way for the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Cry out. Bring good news. Lift up your voice, and say to the people, “Here is your God!”

What does this kind of startling comfort look like in our world today? I suspect that it begins with a willingness to commit to patient and attentive waiting—the discipline traditionally associated with the Advent season. What if we were to pray for eyes to see the people around us who are longing even now for a little good news? What if we were to ask God to open our eyes to the places and situations where we might engage in a little road work of our own—perhaps that means visiting a lonely senior, or taking a meal to a young single mother and her children, or taking the time to listen deeply to a hurting person and offering the gift of prayer and presence.

Road work can be hard work—it’s not easy to build highways in the desert, to level mountains and fill in valleys—but instead of letting the magnitude of the task overwhelm us, maybe we can begin with moving just one stone. And then another. And see where it leads us.

For the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together. And oh, what a day that will be!

Amen.

The Waiting and the Longing: A Sermon for First Advent

Texts:

Isaiah 64: 1-9

Psalm 80: 1-7, 17-19

1 Corinthians 1: 3-9

Mark 13: 24-37

Advent begins in the darkness.

Before the first candles are lit, before the angel of the Lord appears, before the star emerges in the sky over Bethlehem, before the life that was the light of all mankind enters into the world, there is darkness.

As much as we prefer the light, we need this time in the darkness to prepare ourselves to appreciate the light’s coming. Our Christmas light displays wouldn’t be quite the same without our long, dark Manitoba winter evenings to enhance their beauty. A candlelit dinner loses its impact in a room of brightly lit fluorescents. If fireflies appear before dusk, their display of dancing, twinkling lights goes virtually unnoticed.

In the same way, as we begin this season of Advent and anticipate the coming of the Light of the World, we read these texts from Isaiah and Mark that invite us to pause a moment, to acknowledge the darkness, to recognize this season as a time of waiting and longing, of acknowledging how deeply we need the light and how much we long for its presence among us.

“Oh, that you would…” the prophet Isaiah writes.

“Oh, that you would…” Can’t we all relate, in some way, to those moments when we have found ourselves praying this prayer? Aren’t there moments when we resonate with this prayer that has been shared by God’s people throughout history? It’s a prayer that gives voice to our deepest longings, to our most heartfelt aches, to those things that leave us so keenly aware of the void within us that sits there empty, reminding us of what’s just deeply not right with the world, with our world.

“Oh God, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you!”

It’s felt like a long year—health challenges, job losses, the loss of relationships, the loss of a community that you’ve loved—until, looking back, all you can see is one loss after another. You’re not sure how much more of this you can take. You need something hopeful to happen, the sooner the better.

Your child may be an adult, but that doesn’t make him or her any less your child, and you ache as you watch him deal with the pain of a marriage that is coming apart, or a long season of unemployment, or a painful struggle with addictions. You wish you could make it better with a hug and a kiss, like you could when she was little, but it’s not so easy anymore.

Or maybe you remember vividly the pictures of asylum seekers and wonder at the risks they are willing to take to find safety and a new home, and as the mercury drops again and winter descends, you wonder about a world where this can happen so close to home. A longing within you reflects the aches and pains of the world in which we live.

Where are the places where you most recognize the brokenness of the world? What are those things that leave you aching, that settle within you as a deep sense of longing? What is it that makes you whisper the prayer, together with the prophet, “Oh God, that you would…”?

Isaiah writes to a people who also know deep longing, who have experienced hard waiting. The portion of Isaiah known as Third Isaiah, from which today’s Scripture reading is taken, speaks to a post-exilic Israel. Around 538 BC, King Cyrus the Persian issued a decree to end the Babylonian Exile, permitting some Israelites to return to their home in Jerusalem under Persian sponsorship to begin the rebuilding process.

Homecomings, it turns out, aren’t always as beautiful and picture-perfect as Hollywood might make them seem. Mixed with the people’s relief to be returning to their homeland, to the holy city of Jerusalem, was the fact that they were still under the foreign rule of Persia as the overriding colonial power. What’s more, the experiences of the returning exiles, with the trauma they had experienced, often put them at odds with their fellow Israelites who had not been displaced. All of this left them with many more questions than answers—what would the rebuilt Israel look like? If the Temple was rebuilt, who should assume leadership? Who would serve as priests? Where was God in all of this? This is not what living as God’s people in the world is supposed to look like, to feel like!

Knowing this, we can understand the longing behind the prophet’s words: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you!”

You can almost picture yourself, an exile returned to your homeland that just doesn’t quite feel like home anymore, trying to make sense of your new reality. You can imagine hearing the age-old stories of the plagues in Egypt, of the Passover and of being led through the Red Sea on dry land. You can hear echoes of the earth rumbling as the walls around the city of Jericho collapse. You can picture Elijah calling down fire from heaven to ignite a water-drenched sacrifice in front of four hundred and fifty prophets of the god Baal. So many times, God has come in power to rescue his people—and you find yourself longing for one more dramatic rescue, one more sign of power that will make God’s name known throughout the earth, that will shatter the darkness, causing the nations to quake and the mountains to tremble before the awesome power of the Lord God Almighty.

And yet, alongside the memories passed down from generation to generation of the Lord’s mighty saving acts is this realization—“You, God, come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways. But when we continued to sin against them, you were angry. How then can we be saved?”

It isn’t only our relationship with the nations that needs healing—our politics and our relationships are only part of what ails us. Even as we voice our prayers for God to come in power, we recognize, as Isaiah does, that it may not be so simple. Because the truth is that the God whom we hope will come through once more with mighty deeds of power is the same God against whom we recognize that we have sinned. All of us have become like one who is unclean. All of us have shriveled up like a leaf. We have all failed, at one time or another, to call upon God, and we can all remember the times when it felt like God had hidden God’s face from us. There is no clear line to divide ‘good guys’ from ‘bad guys.’ Even as we long for God’s power, we recognize our own utter powerlessness, and long for our very relationship with God to be made right.

Even as we bring our deep longings before God in prayer, holding out to him that which aches and pains us, we recognize a deeper longing to find ourselves held once again within God’s loving embrace, to be restored, forgiven, reconciled and made new.

And so the aches within us, the awareness of our own need for forgiveness and healing and connection, meet the longings for those we love and the world around us—and we bring all of these things with us as we enter into this season of Advent, this new year in the Christian Church’s calendar.

Advent begins in the darkness, as we recognize once again our deep longing for the light to enter our world, to dwell among us, to make all things new once again. Advent meets us in that very place, in the darkness, where we recognize our deep longings and, in faith, enter into the waiting as we pray for the light and anticipate its dawning among us.

As it turns out, in the end God does not show up to rend the heavens and cause mountains to tremble, as the people had hoped. The rebuilding process is slow, filled with hard work and harder questions. There will be no miraculous acts of power, not this time.

But, friends, don’t mistake that for God not showing up.

If anything, the season of Advent reminds us that God sometimes shows up in the least expected places, in the places that may not have been the first place we’ve looked.

Instead of the kind of power that makes the mountains tremble, God shows up as a potter, shaping us into the work of God’s hands. Hands gently, carefully take a lump of wet mud, working it with slow, gentle pressure as ever-so gradually it takes the shape of a delicate, thin-walled vessel. The same hands that created the earth are persistently at work, molding us into the divine image.

Instead of a fire that turns into a blaze whose power can set water boiling, God comes to us with the intimacy of One who knows us even better than we know ourselves, as One who has been there from the beginning, as One who loves and cares for us with the gentle fierceness of a Father’s love for His children.

“You, O Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”

God’s coming often looks less like a force that shakes the mountains, and more like a Father tenderly approaching his child, or a potter carefully and intentionally working her clay into a vessel. Sometimes, Advent reminds us, our longings are met as God appears in the small and the quiet. In ways that require us to be watching, to be waiting attentively, because otherwise we might not notice.

Like a baby, born to a young virgin mother in an out of the way hamlet like Bethlehem.

Like a man hanging on a cross, between two criminals, about to breathe his last breath.

God may show up where we least expect it. God may appear quietly, without fanfare or mighty shows of power.

But don’t mistake it. What may appear small still has the power to turn nations upside-down.

So, as we wait in the darkness, watching for the first signs of light to appear on the horizon, let us not lose hope. Because we know this: God is about to show up, to act on behalf of the people he dearly loves, to come to our help once again.

Barbara Brown Taylor has said it better than I can: “New life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”

Even in the darkness, we anticipate the light. This is the good news of the Advent season.

Amen.