In Defense of Evangelism

When did "evangelism" become a bad word?

To be clear, I'm not questioning how "evangelism" might have become a bad word among many who do not claim Christian faith. I have vivid memories of my own of a particular preacher I heard in my teenage years who gave a pulpit-pounding message about hell that left a particularly bad taste in my mouth that I can still remember to this day. I'm sorry, if that's been your experience. Really, truly sorry.

Instead, I'm talking about how "evangelism" has become such a bad word among those who are committed to Christian faith.

I'm wondering how it was that one of the few times that I can remember biting my tongue and choosing not to speak up for my viewpoint in one of my undergraduate Christian spirituality classes was the day that I chose not to speak up and discuss how it came to be that I identified as an evangelical Christian. I remember the professor looking directly at me when not one person in that forty-some student class would admit to identifying with the evangelical stream of Christianity, and then saying to the class that he understood why it would be a difficult position to publicly identify with at our Mennonite institution.

And now, as I journey away from the evangelical tradition within which so much of my faith was formed, I notice how well the Canadian church does with engaging issues of social justice, and how little we talk about evangelism.

And as much as I have wrestled with my evangelical tradition over the way it sometimes tends to see people as 'inside' or 'outside' in a very black-and-white way, or how it can tend to instrumentalize relationships as a tool for evangelism, still a little voice inside of me whispers that there has to be a better way, that surely the gospel is still 'good news.'

You see, my faith is one of the things that is most precious to me, and it was thanks to friends who cared enough to answer my questions and to invite me to explore what it meant to me to be a Christian that I have this faith today in the first place. It was thanks to the friend who welcomed my questions and doubts, who stayed up with me well past midnight to explain the 'four spiritual laws,' who invited me to try actually reading the Bible to see if it might hold answers to some of my questions, who patiently taught me how to pray at (very) early Friday morning prayer meetings, who invited me to attend chapel services with them, that I am who I am today.

I am a product of evangelism.

And none of it was gross, or forced, or pressured in any way.

It was rooted in pointing me toward God, in gently and respectfully answering my questions, in inviting me to consider new perspectives, and in insistently suggesting that a Christian faith could be a living source of strength and direction.

Walter Brueggemann wrote a book called Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe, in which he calls evangelism the act of inviting people to experience the biblical narrative for themselves, and to choose this story as the definitional story of their lives. He suggests that evangelism isn't only about inviting outsiders to become insiders within the community of faith, but also about inviting insiders who have grown complacent to be reincorporated into the vitality of faith, and inviting the children of believers to become "belief-ful" adults. I love his well-rounded perspective on evangelism, and why it's important on so many levels. I love how he does so without talking about techniques, numbers, or growth models.

I think I'll always carry with me the deep belief that I was given by my evangelical tradition that there is good news in the Christian faith that's worth sharing, wherever the journey may lead from here, and I worry that there will be pressure as I move into new traditions to hide those beliefs. I worry that if I express that evangelism has value, people will label me with all kinds of images that just aren't
consistent with what I believe evangelism is all about.

But just because we haven't always gotten it right--have often gotten it wrong, in fact--doesn't mean that we should throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Does it?

A Heart of Flesh

"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; 

I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." 

Ezekiel 36:26

I was flipping through Facebook recently when I came across a video by The Work of the People featuring one of my favourite theologians, Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche. In it, Vanier's thoughts on this particular passage from Ezekiel 36 caught my attention:

"That sounds beautiful. But if instead of saying heart of flesh you say a vulnerable heart, it sounds less exciting. And if you want to define vulnerability as capacity of being hurt...So, 'I'll change your heart of stone, which is protective, and give you a heart where you'll be capable of being hurt,' that sounds less exciting. But that's the reality, is that if really we start being concerned about people and loving people, well, necessarily we'll be hurt. So growth then (is) about how to grow through being hurt."

To be candid, I never wanted to work in "the inner city." I vividly recall being a part of a small group at one point in time where most of the members were interested in collectively volunteering for an evening at a soup kitchen. It didn't work out in the end, to my great relief.

My hands definitely trembled a little the first evening I ever showed up at a House Blend potluck, uncertain of what to expect and who I would meet inside, but my heart of stone had already begun cracking open through a Scripture story that had come to new life for me several months before. It was the story in which Jesus is speaking to a full house--literally! The house in which he is teaching is packed full right out the door, so that there was absolutely no space for anyone else to enter. A group of friends arrived, so the story goes, carrying a paralyzed friend on a mat, intent upon bringing him to Jesus so that he might be healed. They aren't deterred by the crowds; instead, they creatively climb up to the roof of the house, cut out an opening, and lower their friend right in front of Jesus, crowds or not. It's hard to ignore a man suddenly hovering right in front of your face, and he receives the hoped-for healing that his friends worked so hard for. One day, as I read that story (which can be found in the Bible in Mark 2), what became clear to me was that there were probably so many other people who would have liked to meet Jesus that day, but for whom the barriers were simply to great and who lacked resources like the four determined friends who dug their buddy a new way to get to Jesus, who walked right by disappointed. And I wondered who today might be wanting to encounter God's love and healing, but finding the inadvertent barriers created by Christian churches and institutions simply too great to allow them access. My stone heart began to shatter.

So, when I arrived at House Blend, in spite of the trembling, God had already primed me. And from that very first potluck meal together, I fell in love with this community of people who embraced me unquestioningly as one of their own right from the start--and who have embraced so many others in like manner. But you cannot love people without also accepting the vulnerability that requires--a reality that I saw unfold over and over as new people came into our community over the three years that I was part of it. Stone hearts became flesh.

And vulnerable hearts are indeed capable of being hurt, and mine certainly was when the community that I loved so deeply dispersed this past fall, and at so many other points along the way.

And yet, I would do it all over again--will do it all over again someday--because in spite of the hurt, there is a beauty that is only accessible to us as we become vulnerable and capable of being hurt.

My prayer these days, as I look around at the Church, is that we would become open to allowing God to replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh, even though that means accepting vulnerability, opening ourselves up to hurt and failure and weakness and a whole host of things that we would rather reject. This probably means that we have to abandon some of our ideas about what success looks like, and to wonder whether in God's Kingdom there is a different sort of economy at work.

Because the deep beauty of the good news of Jesus Christ has never been more clear to me than it was in those most vulnerable moments. I suspect that recognizing beauty always requires us to open ourselves to a degree of vulnerability. Can it really be any other way?

One More.

Words have been hard to come by lately.

Four months after the closing of House Blend, which was not only the ministry that I worked for but the community that embodied the Kingdom of God for me so often throughout the past three or so years, I guess it's fair to say that I'm still grieving what was lost, and trying to make sense out of not only the loss but also what it looks like to continue to move forward from here.

We always said that House Blend was a community, but it wasn't a church. That was true, I think. And yet, in many ways, it was the Church for me through so much of the three years that I was part of the House Blend community, and it showed me a way of being the Church that was different from anything I'd experienced before, or have experienced since.

And while I belong to a wonderful church now, and appreciate the people there so very much, I miss the unique beauty that was House Blend. The unique perspective it gave me on what it looks like for God's Kingdom to come to dwell among us.

I miss sitting down at a table to share a meal constructed from the offerings of each one present, to laugh and cry together, to learn the hard way what it means to practice forgiveness and to embody mercy, to witness the truth of the fact that each part of the body is valuable beyond measure and that we all need one another.

I miss lighting the candle, gathering the community in a circle in the parlour to pray together, sharing our highs and lows from the week, and speaking words of peace and blessing over one another. I miss how our prayer times could create a safe space for us to rest even in the midst of really, really hard weeks.

What I wouldn't give for just one more potluck, one more time to sit around that table together, one more chance to speak words of blessing and love over this community that has been, and still is even in its absence, so very dear to me.

I ache for the members of my community who have experienced the closing of House Blend as yet another abandonment, and I long for them to know that they are loved and held in God's embrace even now. I pray that they will know that the love they experienced was real, even in the pain of endings. I pray that I might know that, too.

I also ache for all of the people who didn't get to experience the unique beauty of being a part of this community, who didn't get to taste and see God's goodness embodied by this body in all its beautiful diversity and honest vulnerability.

And I long to see the kind of diversity, vulnerability, and hospitality that I experienced at House Blend reflected in the larger Church. I think that the Church at its best is all of those things, and I hope that we'll have the courage to step outside of our comfort zones to make the Church a place of radical welcome for all of our neighbours. Because in doing so, I am confident that we'll experience God's radical welcome to us more clearly than we ever have before.

I wanted to write this because, like many people who encounter seasons of grief, one of things that scares me most is that I will forget the beauty, the welcome, the care, the love that I experienced at House Blend. I don't want to forget that it was real, and true, and good. I don't want to lose the goodness of what was, in the wondering and praying about what will be.

I know this is a less composed blog post than most. These are the words that I have to offer today, and so I share what I have as a prayer--of thanks for what was, of expression of what is, and of hope for what is yet to be.

When You Can't Pray...

I was sitting across from important church person recently, when he asked me to tell him about my
spiritual life in the past year.

I knew the answer that I wanted to give--thanks to my evangelical heritage, the children's song rings in my head readily, although I was well into adulthood when I would have heard it for the first time: "Read your Bible, pray every day, and you'll grow, grow, grow."

The problem is, I could not in good conscience claim to have even come close to that standard in the past year, and I'm through with pretending to be someone I'm not in order to be acceptable to the church.

But the answer that I wanted to give--to be honest about this season of life in which prayer has been hard--was also clearly not the answer I wanted to give to this person I barely know, not without first at least sketching for this man who doesn't know my story the traumas that I've walked through in the past twelve months with my community, and the struggle to find the right words to bring that pain to God.

And, to be honest, while my spiritual life has looked dramatically different this past year, I also don't feel like God has in any way been absent, or like I have at any point turned my back on God.

Prayerlessness doesn't mean faithlessness.

Weeks later, and I'm still dissatisfied with my attempt to answer his question that day. But I'm also convinced that it will help if we claim the courage to talk openly not only about our spiritual successes, but also about journeying with God through the dark nights of the soul, to normalize these experiences.

So, today I want to share a few of the things that I've learned in this past year of struggling to know how to pray, in the hopes that there is some common human element to the struggle and that, in sharing my experiences, someone out there may someday feel less alone when they find themselves in a similar spiritual landscape.

1) Just show up. 
There were days, when the trauma was at its freshest, and my own sheer exhaustion and, yes, burnout, were at their peak, when I had little capacity for words. The experiences were so fresh and raw that it was hard to process them even the little bit required to put them into words. On one of those days, I found myself in the chair in the corner of my office that serves as my dedicated prayer space. I just sat there--no words, no thoughts, no intentional practice to shape my being there. I just showed up, wanting to sit in God's presence but with no idea about how to make that happen.
As it turns out, sometimes just showing up is prayer.

2) The body has many members.
Faith, I think, is more of a communal venture than I have sometimes been led to believe. This past year has, if nothing else, taught me a great deal about the value of Christian community. When I couldn't pray, most weeks (although not always) I could still show up at worship, where more often than not I was met with at least one person who promised to be praying for me in the coming week. After many nudges from others, my introverted self learned the value of sending a quick text to a trusted friend to say that I was having a hard day and could use prayer. For most of the year, in sickness and in health, my community met weekly for Tuesday evening potluck and prayer, and the familiar shape of the liturgy of evening prayer gave me an entry into prayer, even when I was a ball of emotions. Meeting with my spiritual director every month gave me the reassurance that I wasn't walking alone, and that I couldn't stray too far off the path without someone gently and compassionately nudging me back in the right direction.
Prayer isn't just an individual spiritual practice. We were made for community, and letting others share the journey with you is a spiritual discipline--one that has been especially meaningful for me in this past year.

3) Prayer doesn't require words.
Many times over the course of the past year I have found great comfort and a sense of stability and connection with God by spending some time in the wilderness. Being in the midst of God's creation has long been one of the places where I most readily sense God's presence. Sometimes when the words just wouldn't come, I could manage to put one foot in front of the other and spend an hour alone, in silence, hiking through the woods. And, inevitably, I came out of it feeling like I had met God there.
At other times, I found lighting a candle to be a tangible reminder that I don't walk alone, that Christ's light will ultimately overcome the darkness.
Or I would spend some time walking the labyrinth at a park nearby, letting my body do the praying when my head could not.
As it turns out, while words are normally my go-to prayer language, they're not always necessary.

Lest this start to sound prescriptive, let me be clear--these are some of the places that I have met God this year, and some of the lessons that I have learned about prayer in the process. They are not a list of fool-proof ways to conquer prayerlessness. What I really want to say, I think, is that it's normal for there to be seasons in life when prayer is hard, and if you find yourself in one of those seasons, I hope you will know that there's no shame in being there. You are not alone.

And if the practices that normally make you feel closer to God feel hard during that season, remember that there are a whole lot of ways to pray, and that if "read your Bible, pray every day" isn't working, and if the words won't come, it's okay. Words aren't the only way to practice faith. I wish I'd done a better job at articulating that on the day I met with important church leader. I wish I'd risked being misunderstood to speak the truth--prayer as I've normally understood it has been hard this year, but God has met me in these less familiar places, and I'm most grateful.

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.