Scripture Text: Zephaniah 3: 14-20

¹⁴Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! ¹⁵The Lord has taken away the judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more. ¹⁶On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak. ¹⁷The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing ¹⁸as on a day of festival. I will remove disaster from you, so that you will not bear reproach for it. ¹⁹I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth. ²⁰At that time I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you; for I will make you renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth, when I restore your fortunes before your eyes, says the Lord.

This passage is normally read in the third week of Advent during Year C.  We actually only read from the book of Zephaniah three times throughout the three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary, so we’re probably not experts on it.  The book is probably set during the time of King Josiah.  It was a time of indifference by the people.  Maybe they were tired; perhaps they were just a bit too comfortable; or possibly they just forgot who and whose they were.  They have been hearing an ongoing foretelling of a time of destruction, a time of divine judgment. (I guess that would make me tune out too!)  But then we come to this passage.  It is a voice of hope, foretelling salvation rather than destruction.  And it proclaims, “the Lord, your God, is in your midst.”

What does that mean?  In our midst?  Like, here, now?  What do we do with a God who is here, who is with us, now?  We’ve been waiting for a God who seemed “out there” or maybe “up ahead”.  But God is here?  The Light is here?  The Light is with us?  That notion changes everything.

When I was about six years old, I remember laying in my bed one night, staring at the closet where the light was still lit.  It always was at night.  (Honestly, I still can’t sleep in a completely dark room.) But I had been told in Sunday School that day that God was always with me, that God could see everything.  I remember thinking that God seemed to be someone similar to Santa Claus, all-seeing, knowing everything that happens.  But to a six-year-old that presented a theological dilemma.  I mean, it was a little scary.  (Perhaps if you tell a six year old that, you need to clarify it a bit)  I remember thinking how scary that was, as if God was keeping track of all the ways I had been bad.  I laid there and thought about what that meant, what it meant for God to always be with me.  Was God here, now?  Was God in that closet with the light on?  Was God in bed with me?  If I closed my eyes, was God still there?  What if I got under the covers?  Could God see me if I hid under the covers?  It was confusing.

Most of us as adults probably are not much more theologically advanced than that six-year-old.  It’s not because we haven’t advanced; it’s because we don’t allow ourselves to think differently, to question.  We tend to neglect even thinking about God unless we think we need God.  Somewhere we have indeed convinced ourselves that God is “out there”, an elusive deity that we are trying desperately to approach.  We have been somehow convinced that all of our hope rests in this “out there” God, that getting to God will once and for all save us.  And, yet, we also know that God is everywhere.  God is here, here with us.  So, which is it?  I think perhaps the reason we don’t see God and don’t feel God upon demand is not that God is elusive or hiding in plain sight.  The reason is that we are not fully prepared to know the fullness of God, the fullness of life that God has in store for us.  In the language of some of the New Testament scriptures, we live beneath a veil, a veil that we have sewn, a veil that we are not prepared to shed, a veil that somehow obstructs our view of the Light or shields us from what we do not know or do not understand.  And, yet, there are holes in the veil, places where the threads are worn and beginning to tear.  And through those holes we sometimes get glimmers of light.  This Light in our midst is always peeking in, beckoning us forward, guiding us into the Light that we might become full, that we might finally know this God who is in our midst, finally be prepared to see what we’re meant to see and be what God means us to be.

So, what do we do?  What do we do with a God who is even now in our midst?  We do what we’re called to do in this time, in this place beneath the veil.  We prepare ourselves to see the Light.  This season of Advent is the season of that preparation.  We’re not waiting for God; God is waiting for us.  Walk into it.  You will never be alone (yes, even under the covers!).  Open your eyes. Prepare your heart.  The Lord, your God, is in your midst.

Bidden or unbidden, God is present. (Desiderius Erasmus, 1466-1536; also attributed to Carl Jung, but this quote was supposedly posted above the door at his house in Switzerland)

Full Lyrics: “All Saints Day” by Carrie Newcomer

All around us and within us
And yet it’s only at times we notice
As real as rain and soft as stardust
We know deep down what nobody told us

Can’t you feel it ever closer
We breathe it in and then we exhale
We touch both sides and now eternal
Standing closer to the veil

Now is just a moving image
Not a ribbon a start and end
There is a bird a hidden singer
That calls and listens and calls again

Can’t you feel it ever closer
We breathe it in and then we exhale
We touch both sides and now eternal
Standing closer to the veil

Centered down and moving outward
Sometimes almost too sweet to bare
There are endless ways to reach home
Just keep walking and I’ll meet you there

Can’t you feel it ever closer
We breathe it in and then we exhale
We touch both sides and now eternal
Standing closer to the veil

Can’t you feel it ever closer
We breathe it in and then we exhale
We touch both sides and now eternal
Standing closer to the veil

There’s a blurring of the borders
And I swear that I heard voices
But every act of simple kindness
Calls the kingdom down and all around us

Can’t you feel it ever closer
We breathe it in and then we exhale
We touch both sides and now eternal
Standing closer to the veil
Standing closer to the veil
Standing closer to the veil

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Scripture Text: Mark 1: 1-8 (Advent 2B)

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

²As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,

“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
³the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,’”

⁴John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. ⁵And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. ⁶Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. ⁷He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. ⁸I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Well, it must be the season of Advent because John the Baptizer has appeared!  We all know John.  Many may have sort of a love-hate relationship with him of some sort.  I mean, he’s a little weird.  He may even scare us a bit.  He wears camel’s hair secured by a leather belt (quite the fashion statement!) and we are told that he dines on locusts and honey.  And he sort of has a reputation for being loud and overly-zealous. I, for one, probably would have opted for someone a bit more, well, traditional than this wild-eyed wilderness man.  But look at the passage: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  John is the messenger that is sent ahead.  John is the beginning of the Gospel story.

Think about what that means—the beginning of the story.  A people have walked in darkness.  We have walked in darkness.  And here, as John breaks into the story, is the beginning of the Light.  Now John himself would correct me a bit and say that he was definitely NOT the Light, that the One who was Light, the One who is more powerful than John, was coming.  But it’s almost as if John begins to move the drapes a bit so that the Light that will come in full vision soon can begin to be seen.  Think of it as filtered light.  Maybe it’s harder to see.  Maybe it doesn’t illumine everything.  Maybe it’s not even bright enough for us to give it much notice.  But it is a beginning.  The Light is beginning to break.

In this version of the Gospel by the writer we call Mark, we get no build up to the story.  There is no Mary and Joseph, no angel annunciating while treading air, no long journey to Bethlehem, no stable, no shepherds, no magi, and no angels.  We have to turn to the writers known as Matthew and Luke for those familiar settings.  Mark just starts, diving in and declaring the beginning.  This is it…this is the beginning!  And then we are left hanging, not yet bathed in Light but aware of its presence.  We are beginning to see the Light that is beginning to filter in.  It is as if we are a little suspended in time waiting for the dawn to come. But it has begun.  The light has shifted toward us a bit.

Most of us spend our lives surrounded by light.  There is sunlight, electric light, candle light, dashboard lights, and our sometimes too-bright phone screen.  My dashboard has this circle of light that changes colors depending on how efficiently I’m driving.  It is odd.  (Hmm…I guess I wouldn’t notice it if I drove more efficiently more of the time!)  The thing is, we don’t always notice light itself.  We see what it illumines.  We seldom see light unless it is dark enough for us to see it.  What an odd concept!  We pay more attention to the sunrise or the sunset than we do the noonday sun.  We don’t really appreciate the notion of filtered candlelight unless the surrounding light is dim.  When it is dark, we can see the light. 

This image of John the Baptizer as the forerunner, as the beginning of the Light coming into the world is not because the light has begun to illumine and clarify what is around us.  John stands in the waning darkness and points us toward the light, tells us it’s coming into the world.  Advent is like that.  We begin in darkness, traveling through the wilderness, and we come closer and closer to the light.  It is still off in the distance.  It is still not bathing our world or showing us what we need to be.  It is beginning to peek through the darkness.  We see the Light.  It is not that for which we have waited or that for which we have hoped.  But this is the beginning of the story. 

So, look toward the light and wipe the grogginess from your eyes.  This is the moment.  This is the first light that is beginning to peek into the world, the first notion of that light coming down to us.  Look at it now because soon it will be so bright that you won’t be able to look at it.  You will only see what it illumines.  But this, filtered as it is, dim as it may be, is the beginning of the Light coming into the world.  The purpose is so that we will now know where to look. 

In every beginning, there is darkness.  The darkness of chaos seems eternal, Yet form emerges: light dawns, and life is born. (From The New Union Prayer Book)

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Scripture Text: Isaiah 11: 1-10

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. ²The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. ³His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; ⁴but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. ⁵Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. ⁶The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. ⁷The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. ⁸The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. ⁹They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

¹⁰On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

This is another familiar reading from Isaiah and comes from our lectionary from Year A, which we read last year.  It’s yet another depiction of the future vision that God holds for us, the one we’re walking toward, the one that we are supposed to be part of bringing to be, the one that God promised us.  We are given a vision of a shoot, a new shoot that will come out of the dead and decaying stump of the past, a branch that will come out of the original roots of our faith and our lives.  It doesn’t replace the old: it just continues growing.  (So, true confessions here.  I’m taking a lot of this post from one I wrote three years ago.  (Can you plagiarize yourself?)  So, if you’ve been with me awhile, it will sound familiar.)

I have a picture of an olive tree that I took in the Garden of Gethsemane.  It’s one of my favorite photos.  To explain, olive trees will actually live for centuries, sprouting new life over and over again.  If you look at this picture, the thing on the left side that looks like a dead and decaying stump (because, well, that’s essentially what it is) is what is left of a tree that was probably in that place 2,000 years ago.  Imagine…that is what is left of a tree, a remnant, if you will, that might have been there that night before the Crucifixion as Jesus prayed and submitted his own life to God.  And from that stump came another shoot, that grew into a tree that is probably about 1,000 years old.  And to the right of it is yet another stump that may be 200 years old or so.  And from that is a newer shoot, a live, growing tree that is just a few years old.  It is a picture of new shoots, new creations that God is always creating and always nurturing into being.  But they exist together, sprouting from each other’s strengths into new life.

So, how do we live as new shoots?  How do we embrace that vision we’ve been given and make it part of us?  The message that Advent brings is that God loves us enough to keep showing up—in a vision laid out for us to embrace, in Emmanuel, God-With-Us, and over and over again as God walks with us through our own becoming a new creation.  Maybe the question is whether or not we are holding on to what we know or are we new shoots, giving the old new life?  This is not just a rehash of the same old thing.  William Sloane Coffin once said that “believers know that while our values are embodied in tradition, our hopes are always located in change.”  But change is often uncomfortable.  Change is unpredictable.  Change is hard.  Maybe we can just get through this busy season and then change. 

A couple of years ago, the Today Show had a feature story about some young Panda bears who had been brought up in captivity.  But the plan was to eventually return them to their natural habitat.  So, in order to prepare them for what was to come, their caretakers thought that it would be better if they had no human contact.  So, to care for them, the people dressed up like panda bears.  In order to show them how to be pandas, they became them.

I think that’s been done before!  In its simplest form, the Incarnation is God’s mingling of God with humanity.  It is God becoming human and breathing a piece of the Divine into humanity.  It is the mystery of life that always was coming into all life yet to be.  God became human and lived here.  God became us that we might change the world.   God became like us to show us what it meant for us to be like God envisioned (not to be God, not even to be “Godly”, but to be just like God envisioned we could be) in the world.  God didn’t walk this earth to teach us to be divine; God came to show us what it means to be human–caring, loving humans that envision that the world could be different.  The miracle of the birth of the Christ child is that God now comes through us.  We ARE the new shoots of transformation.

So perhaps the reason that the earth is not yet filled with the knowledge of the Lord, that the Reign of God has not come into its fullness, that poverty and homelessness and injustice and war still exists is because we do not dare to imagine it any other way.  This is not some vision of an inaccessible utopian paradise; this is the vision of God.  The passage says that a shoot shall come out of the stump and a branch shall grow out of the roots.  In other words, life shall spring from that which is dead and discarded.  Because in God’s eyes, even death has the foundation, the roots of life.  Even death will not have the last word.  We just have to imagine it into being.  So, imagine beyond all your imaginings; envision a world beyond all you dare to see; and hope for a life greater than anything that is possible.  Imagine what it means to become a new shoot and prepare yourself to be just that. And then you’ll start to be. 

But here’s the thing…you can’t just be a shoot, wandering off on your own, growing where it’s comfortable to grow.  Shoots that do that are, well, compost.  You have to stay rooted.  You have to remain attached to the source from which you sprouted.  We are no different.  This Advent season does indeed call us to figure out what it means to be a shoot.  But it also means we have to know that to which we’re rooted.  God walks with us.  God roots us, letting us grow and sprout and wander a bit.  But always, always, staying attached to the One that feeds and nourishes us and connects us to Home.

Only those who live beyond themselves ever become fully themselves. (Joan Chittister)

“There Is a Tree”, by Carrie Newcomer

Last night I dreamed you very near
Though the night was dark beyond the glass
I knew you’d left before I woke
But you’d fogged the window when you passed

The air was still and smelled like rain,
Though I’d never known so dry a spell
And what I heard there in the dark,
Are the secrets I will never tell?

There is a tree beyond the world
In it’s ancient roots a song is curled
I’m the fool whose life’s been spent
Between what’s said and what is meant

I didn’t mean what went so wrong
Some things I wish I didn’t know
I’ve always lived inside my head
And often utterly alone

I will be a pillow for your head
You can make me promises you can’t keep
And I’ll believe each word you’ve said
And hum to you while you sleep

There is a tree beyond the world
In it’s ancient roots a song is curled
I’m the fool whose life’s been spent
Between what’s said and what is meant

You took me by my shaking hand,
Laughed at me and closed the door,
Put your hands to my waist,
And waltzed rue round the kitchen floor

There is a tree beyond the world
In it’s ancient roots a song is curled
I’m the fool whose life’s been spent
Between what’s said and what is meant

So I will wander without fail
In circles that grow ever wide
The sky expands and then exhales
With an ache that never subsides

There is a tree beyond the world
In it’s ancient roots a song is curled
I’m the fool whose life’s been spent
Between what’s said and what is meant

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Scripture Text: 2 Peter 3: 8-15a (Advent 2B)

⁸But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.

⁹The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. ¹⁰But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.

¹¹Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, ¹²waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? ¹³But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home. ¹⁴Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; ¹⁵and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation. 

All in God’s time…don’t you hate it when people say that?  I mean, this whole waiting thing would be a whole lot easier if we just knew how long we actually were going to have to do it.  Well, it has become apparent (and this passage has confirmed it) that God’s someday is not the same as ours.  It makes sense when you think about it because, after all, as we get older, as we have more years in our quiver, so to speak, time seems to move faster for us.  So, God’s notion of time, as One who is, of course, eternal, would do the same and that is exactly the timing that God has envisioned.

So, we wait.  We wait for that day of the Lord.  Now, I don’t know if it’s going to dissolve in fire or not.  That seems a bit overly-dramatic to me.  I tend to err on the side of the Peaceable Kingdom thing, the ushering in of peace and unity and eternal shalom.  Just as an aside, fire is often a symbol for God’s divinity and work (think refiner’s fire from the Old Testament) so maybe the author is just expressing an image of the time when God’s divinity, when “God’s time” will be instilled in the earth.  But whatever it is, whatever it looks like, we don’t control it.  We don’t know what will happen or when it will happen or how long it might last.  So, we wait.

But lest we get bored with this waiting, the writer reminds us that there is stuff we’re supposed to be doing.  Now the first hearers of these words were probably more impatient than even we are.  After all, Jesus had promised to return.  So, these people would have started getting their affairs in order, completely convinced that the return was imminent in months or weeks or maybe even days.  But as time marched on and nothing happened, they had slowly begun to fall into a way of being that was, well, NOT filled with peace and righteousness, if you know what I mean.  Essentially, they had lost interest.  They had simply gone back to their lives, back to what they knew, back to what they could control.

I remember a science project that my class did together.  It must have been in 3^rd grade or so.  In what was probably our first introduction to botany, we were each given a little pot, some gravel, some soil, and some seeds.  And together we each planted our seeds in our little pot and placed them where the sun from the window would reach them.  It was a fun project, much better than sitting at the desk and listening.  But when it was done, it didn’t really LOOK like a plant.  The next day it looked the same.  And the next, and the next, and the next…it soon seemed to me to be a rather pointless endeavor.  Well, my little plant was in the last group (of course it was!) a few weeks later to begin to peek out from beneath the small bit of earth.  But you know what?  While we were waiting for that to happen, we watered it, we fertilized it, and we turned it around so that all sides would get sunlight.  Just because nothing was noticeably happening didn’t mean that we didn’t care for it and nurture it.  Things do not always happen in our time but that doesn’t mean we don’t continue to do our work.  That was the lesson.

That’s actually the point.  Our waiting, our holy waiting, is not passive.  Holy waiting is active waiting.  Holy waiting is waiting for that time that we do not control, that time that is not ours but God’s while we care for and nurture the world that is ever so slowly growing into being.  And as we wait, we are the ones that God is filling and gathering and sending.  We are the ones that are peacemaking and justice-building.  We are the ones that are feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless, wiping out racism and welcoming everyone into our midst.  We are called to be the manifestation of Christ on earth.  We are called to be the ones that help bring that Peaceable Kingdom in.  We are called to care for that little shoot while it roots and grows and begins to peek out from beneath the earth.

In this Season of Advent as we practice holy waiting, when we both remember those who looked for the coming of the Messiah so long ago and look ahead for Christ’s coming into our own lives, we are also reminded to live as if it’s already come to be.  The truth is, this IS God’s time.  It’s ALL God’s time.  And we are smack dab in the middle of it.  We wait for the darkness to be pushed away by the light but in the meantime, we need to do a little of our own darkness-pushing.  God is waiting for us to respond, for us to proclaim God’s love and mercy, for us to live “as if”—as if the coming of the Lord is now, as if God’s Spirit has already spilled into the earth, as if justice and righteousness was the only way, and as if we knew no other way to live.  Be patient.  It will all come to be in God’s time.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun,

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun.

                                                      -John Newton, “Amazing Grace”

Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God;  But only [they] who see, take off [their] shoes—the rest sit around it and pluck blueberries.   (Elizabeth Barret Browning, from “Aurora Leigh”)

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Scripture Text: Psalm 85: 1-2, 8-13 (Advent 2B)

¹Lord, you were favorable to your land; you restored the fortunes of Jacob. ²You forgave the iniquity of your people; you pardoned all their sin.  Selah.…

⁸Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts. ⁹Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. ¹⁰Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. ¹¹Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. ¹²The Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase. ¹³Righteousness will go before him, and will make a path for his steps.

Selah.  It’s an odd word that seems to us to be sort of randomly inserted in some Psalms (and even a couple of times in Habakkuk).  The meaning for us is a little unclear.  Technically, the word means “forever”.  It is perhaps a derivative of the Hebrew word for “raise voices in praise” or even “make the instruments louder”.  Whatever the meaning, the insertion of the word in the midst of a passage indicates an intentional pause in the text. It possibly means to actually raise voices or add louder instruments.  Some also speculate that it could mean to bow or to raise one’s head.  However it is interpreted, it means to pause, to stop, to spend some time absorbing or meditating or just thinking about what has been said.

The Psalm begins as a “looking back”, if you will.  The people have been delivered from exile.  But they’re still struggling.  There is still wilderness in their midst.  The words are a reminder that God has delivered.  They have been returned from exile.  God has redeemed and forgiven the people.  But their memories of whatever they experienced God doing in the past seems to be slipping away.  They are in need of a reminder of restoration yet again so they plead that the God who has come before will be the God who comes yet again if they will only listen and pay attention.  And then we get yet another vision of the Peaceable Kingdom, where faithfulness rises up and righteousness is showered upon us, where peace and love reign.  But between the looking back and the peering ahead is a pause.  Selah. 

It’s a good lesson for us.  We have experienced the goodness of God.  We have cast our eyes upon God’s Creation and we have been reminded who God is and what God can do.  But then we get comfortable or we get busy or we get off track a bit and our memories begin to fade.  We sometimes find ourselves forgetting that this faith journey is ongoing.  We are not inserted into a Mach 1 spaceship upon our birth that is aimed for where we need to go.  There is not a map. There is not a GPS. I’m not even really sure there is one definitive plan. Life doesn’t work like that.  Faith doesn’t work like that.  It’s not a plan; it’s a Way. But we find ourselves in the wilderness yet again and we feel alone.  Selah.  It’s like we’re being told, “Just stop a minute.  Think about all the goodness that you have experienced.  Think about all the times you have felt loved and blessed.  Think about all those times that your faith carried you and all those times that God’s presence almost felt tangible.  Now remember. And pay attention. And walk.”

The truth is that we are not capable of maintaining that, for want of a better word, “faith high” on a permanent basis.  It’s too much.  And even that would eventually fall into some sort of comfortable familiarity.  Instead, God brings us through wilderness and blessing, through despair and faith, through loss and clarity.  And in between, we pause.  We remember so that we will know.

Have you ever thought that the season of Advent is sort of a pause?  Perhaps it is our selah season. It’s a look back, a remembrance of what God has done.  We read of deliverance from exile and forgiveness from wrongdoing.  And we look ahead.  We strive to imagine that Peaceable Kingdom that God envisions.  We try to see our world differently.  And in between, we pause and we prepare and we restructure our lives based on what God has done and what our faith tells us God will do.  Advent is our in-between time in which we are reminded that the God who has come near in the past, the God who has brought us to this place, is walking with us now and forward into that vision that God has for us.  As the Psalmist reminds us, God has gone before on this path we travel.  And now God walks with us as we follow the path.  Selah…forever.

Sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can’t read the address. (Ted Kooser)

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Scripture Text: Isaiah 40: 1-11 (Advent 2B)

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. ²Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.  ³A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. ⁴Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. ⁵Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” ⁶A voice says, “Cry out!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. ⁷The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. ⁸The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.  ⁹Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” ¹⁰See, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. ¹¹He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

Yes, I know this Advent seems to have started in the dark and drear but hang with me.  There’s a reason.  Think about it.  Most of what God does starts in the dark—Creation, Mt. Sinai, Deliverance, even Resurrection.  It makes us pay attention; it makes us alert; it makes us awake to what God is doing.  So, again, we find ourselves in the wilderness.  We’ve been here before.  We don’t necessarily like it but we’ve seen it before.

And here the people find themselves in the wilderness, desperately looking for a highway, a way out, something that will show them the way.  They yearn for comfort, for deliverance.  They yearn for God to save them.  We’re no different.  When we find ourself in the wilderness, the main thing we want is OUT.  Wouldn’t life be grand if it came with some sort of map or internal GPS to help us with that?  But it doesn’t.  So we wander and we wait and we yearn for answers.

OK, another dog story…I’ve had several Labrador Retrievers.  They are smart.  Some of them are sort of scary smart.  They actually use logic and reason things out, which some people say only humans can do.  I will tell you that is not true.  I’m thinking, first, of Magellan.  He was really smart.  Magellan could open anything—gates, doors, kitchen cabinets.  It just seemed normal to him.  Magellan competed in hunt tests.  He achieved his Junior Hunter title and I still have the ribbon and the official change on his title (Maggie’s Prince Magellan JH).  But in the midst of competing in the series of tests for Senior Hunter, Magellan had other ideas.  He began to “figure things out”.  One day during a water test, he took off when he was told and swam toward the mark.  Then I saw it.  I saw that look in his eyes and a change in his demeanor.  I saw him turn around and look at where he was supposed to go and then turn back around.  He was almost to the bank on the other side.  He started to turn around and come back (which means he would have passed) but NO…Magellan saw the closer bank, the more efficient way to get back, and so got out and ran full speed around the lake with the duck in his mouth, returning with a look that asked, “didn’t I do well?  And I found a better way!”  I was told that Magellan was too smart, too logical, for his own good so we went home and lived our lives.  Then came Maynard.  I was prepared for a dog that couldn’t possibly be as smart as Magellan but Maynard was just as smart and just as logical.  But Maynard had something else.  He was street smart.  Where Magellan just ran through life as if the world belonged to him, Maynard paid attention.  Maynard would stop at streets and look both ways even before I would pull the leash, already having figured out that an altercation with a car would not end well for him.  The difference between them?  Maynard was a Rescue.  He had been found on the streets of downtown Houston, emaciated, flea-ridden, and heartworm-positive and trying to eat out of a garbage can.  Maynard had been in the wilderness. 

Wildernesses are always a part of our life.  Some are physical—deserts, forests, rainforests, caves, or, well, just getting lost.  Some are mental or emotional.  Some have to do with changes in our lives that just don’t feel like our lives.  And some are spiritual.  To reiterate, wildernesses are part of life.  There is no map.  There is seldom a road.  The winds may shift the sands in the path and rain may blind our way.  But sometimes the only way to get to the place we need to be is through the wilderness.  (Sorry, Magellan!) 

So, maybe God wants us to be a little street smart.  I looked up the meaning of that and found words like “awake”, “alert”, and “adaptable”.  Well, that sounds pretty much like our Advent journey to me.  Wildernesses are hard.  But there has to be a reason why there are so many in the Scriptures.  The wildernesses are not merely impediments that God has constructed for us.  I personally don’t think that’s what God does.  This is not a test.  A wilderness is a Way.  It is the way to a place to which we could not go alone.  It is a way to our awakening, to our paying attention, to our honing our faith muscles that we might trust in God and not just ourselves.  Perhaps the wilderness is the Way itself, the way we must walk toward where God is calling us to go.  Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I think God does provide comfort along the way and, sometimes, even a highway.  But maybe even the comfort that God provides is showing us that the wilderness is home. 

The promised land lies on the other side of a wilderness. (Havelock Ellis)

Grace and Peace,

Shelli