Stumbling Into Advent

“(In Narnia), it was always winter and never Christmas” (C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).

We who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.   (As we do), the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express (Romans 8: 23, 26). 

“The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight” (from “O Little town of Bethlehem”). 

When I am weary and overwhelmed with deadlines, I practice what I like to call “holy procrastination.”  That is, I postpone absolutely everything in my life that can be postponed, and focus on the immediate demands of each day.  Often this means focusing on “urgent” things while letting “important” matters (o

like, for example, investing in a friendship) wait. 

Why would I call this “holy procrastination?” Well, think Shrek for a minute.   Our God-created humanness is somewhat like an onion that has layers.  The outer layers are where we take care of the gazillion details and demands of life that each new day throws at us:  sleeping, eating, daily assignments and deadlines, the small (but still important!) talk that greases the wheels of our social life. 

As we peel back the outer layers and move on in, we uncover our joys and sorrows, our doubt and our faith, our gratitudes and our longings, “the hopes and fears of all the years,” as the old carol puts it.  Down beneath those outer layers we find the inward groanings that contain the tangled messes that weave all over and through our heart and soul.  When we get to the innermost layer of the onion, we find we’ve left behind the territory where words are operative; deep down in that muddled spot, the Holy Spirit kicks in “with groans that words cannot express.” 

I’m thankful that the beginning of Advent coincides with the end of our term.  At this time of year we easily live in “outer-onion-layer-survival-mode,” and our worship and devotional life becomes the Lord’s double-edged sword that pierces through our holy procrastinations, challenging us to surrender our verbal and non-verbal groanings to Him. 

That’s the blessing and call of Advent.  That’s Christmas preparing to break into the winter of our discontent.  That’s “slo-mo” ordering our “over-drive” to stop and listen to the whispers that we’ve drowned out and ignored for too long.  Listen to the Spirit groaning within you:

                                                                                                                                   

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.
 Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord…

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

                                                              Psalm 139:  1-4, 23-24

Preparing for Advent

O come, Thou Day-Spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death's dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

Consider the words of the ancient hymn, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.  Set to minor chords, it powerfully captures in word and melody the combination of pain and hope that is intrinsic to this season. 

As the end of November approaches, I find that while I am not yet prepared for Advent, I am certainly preparing to prepare. The cues are all in place. Bare trees, cold weather, the hints of snow, not to mention of course the commercial signs of the season. 

As a family with Canadian and Dutch roots, we have embraced the celebration of the entire season. We love to weave what we consider the best of our northern European culture and the biblical narrative into a time of family, food and a month of celebration. We would extend it for the full six weeks.

However, since my son, David, died three years ago in December, we have found that we have had to put these wonderful elements aside for the time being. They had become deeply connected to yet another narrative.  We do so in the expectation that we will be able to pick them up yet again and enjoy them in perhaps a much deeper way than before. In the meantime, we are forging out new and deeply meaningful traditions in their stead.

It has enabled us to consider in a more profound manner the love which would cause the Creator of all that is to send His own Son to live and die for a lost corner of His creation. We begin to grasp the depth of that cost.  It has pushed us to consider the reality of eternity in a way we never had before.

It makes Advent that much more poignant.  Advent involves longing, hope, expectation, anticipation in the face of lack, need, loss and pain. Advent recognizes the world for what it is, in its fallen state and sees it for what it could be. It refuses to accept the status quo.  Advent is what we might call “hopeful realism” or “realistic hope”.  It is more than an attitude. It is an orientation.

 The world, whether it recognizes it or not, yearns for that very thing. And, as God’s children, it is our birthright. In the midst of the turmoil of the next few weeks,  I encourage you to embrace it.

Come Lord Jesus.   Rev. 22:20

Coherent Randomness

 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well…All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:  14, 16).

Now I have had most of the life I am going to have, and I can see what it has been.  I can remember those early years when it seemed to me I was cut completely adrift, and times when, looking back at earlier times, it seemed I had been wandering in the dark woods of error.  But now it looks to me as though I was following a path that was laid out for me, unbroken, and maybe even as straight as possible, from one end to the other, and I have this feeling, which never leaves me anymore, that I have been led  (the elderly narrator in the novel Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, p. 66, emphasis his). 

                                   

Does your life ever feel random – like a series of disconnected dots that just won’t join together? 

I imagine that David’s life felt that way at times. 

I don’t know how old David was when he composed Psalm 139.  I like to imagine him singing this as one of his “golden oldies” during his final year of life.  At that point, his life included the following episodes:

·         Samuel anointed him king when he was a teenager, the youngest in his family.

·         He killed the Philistine giant Goliath while he was not yet old enough to serve in the army. 

·         He was summoned to King Saul’s court as a musician to soothe the king’s struggle with an evil spirit. 

·         The jealous King Saul spent several years trying to kill him.

·         David took over the kingdom from Saul. 

·         His son Absalom tried to kill him and take over the throne.

·         After one of his sons raped his half-sister, David neglected to deal with it properly.

·         He had sex with his neighbour’s wife Bathsheba, and then had her husband killed when he learned that she was pregnant.

·         He is the Bible’s most prolific and best known worship-song composer.

These random episodes (and many more) are given coherence through “God’s book” that David refers to in the verses above.  And Jayber Crow, like David, sees the randomness of his life cohering through a profound sense of being led by the Lord’s faithfulness. 

How about you?  Take a minute and ponder a brief bullet list of your most significant life experiences:  strong relationships, broken relationships, successes, failures, blessings, tragedies, disappointments, struggles, dreams and hopes. 

Do they feel random?  Confusing?  Encouraging?

Somewhere inside the randomness all the bits are being held together by the Lord Jesus who promised to be with us to the very end of the age (Matt. 28: 20).  Some days we boldly declare with David and Jayber Crow that we see it clearly.  On other days we’re blinded and we need their testimony to trust that it is also true for us.  Either way, it’s one of the deepest truths we’re grounded in as we begin another week. 

Power and Violence (Remembrance Day 2012)

When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come (Mark 13: 17).

  

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness   (II Cor. 12: 9).

Violence wears many different faces. 

We see it in Syrian jets bombing rebel civilians, attempting to cow them into submission.  We see it in the global slave-trade, which is at its highest levels in centuries.  We see it in a young man leading a young woman on to drink too much so that he can have his way with her sexually.  We see it in a young woman seeking revenge by engaging in cyber-bullying.  I see it in my own heart when the anger that accumulates there like barnacles on a rusty ship hull doesn’t know what to do with itself anymore. 

Violence is all around us and within us. 

After the Western world realized just how horrific the violence of World War I was, they called it “the war to end all wars,” a phrase which we recognize now as nothing more than sentimental balderdash.  Even so, in Canada we commemorate the conclusion of that war every year on Nov. 11 at 11 AM to remind us that we long for the day when “’the wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,’ says the LORD” (Isaiah 65: 25). 

Because Remembrance Day falls on a Sunday this year, we will mark it today, on Monday, Nov. 12.  As we do, I invite you to ponder the relationship between the accumulated violence of human history and the impulse to violence that lives within your own heart.  I invite you to ponder along with the monk Thomas Merton, who, according to Henri Nouwen, “discovered that the roots of all problems were in his own soul, too, that evil is not something outside himself that could be identified, but part of the whole human condition of which he was a part.”

When I peer into my soul, I recognize that the impulse to violence that lives there is directly connected to an anxious need to be in control, to have things my way, to hold things together forcibly by my own will. 

And when I recall the times in my life history when I have begun to act on this impulse, I recognize that every single time the results have been disastrous:  damaged relationships, paralyzing guilt and shame, barriers between me and God. 

I cannot hold things together by a sheer exercise of my own will.  I cannot control the outcomes of my own life.

Jesus teaches strange phrases like “love your enemies” (Matt. 5: 44) and “blessed are those who are persecuted” (Matt. 5:10), which are further developed in Paul’s command:  “do not take revenge” (Rom. 12: 19). 

And when my anxious soul protests and says “that’s crazy!  I’ll be ripped to pieces,” it’s as if Jesus calmly smiles and says something like, “but I hold all things together, and you can’t.  Suck it up, get over it, trust me and live out my kind of peace.”

Counter-Cultural Rest

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together  (Colossians 1:17).

The above text, from which we draw our theme for this academic year, is cosmic in its scope. However, at whatever level, large or small, its implications are that in Him there is cohesion and integration….

So lets bring its implications closer:  in the midst of the multitude of ways we experience fragmentation and brokenness in our culture, I would like to isolate two elements. 

When we are in the midst of a culture filled with hurry and noise, where we are subject to hundreds of voices and many thousands of words along with a mind-numbing list of possible activities, all within a constantly shrinking availability of time, we are invited to heed to a Call.  Those of you who were part of our community last year will remember this call as our theme for that year: 

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”  (Matt 11:28)

On the surface, this call seems like yet one more voice and one more activity to fit into an already bursting calendar.  Have you ever responded to it that way?  But when we do heed it and respond to it, we find that rather than a source of further fragmentation and stress, it brings integration and peace. 

But our flesh resists it. The danger is when we use theological sophistication to aid it in doing so. The Call is to come and surrender. But there are many times we want to do almost anything but…. The noise and hurry drives us forward along the surface and we miss the depths that are ours to enjoy. I know for myself,  in such seasons, as I have finally yielded, bent my knee and come to Him in subservience that I have realized that all of my striving has not only been in vain but has been almost,  ‘insane’. 

At Redeemer, you and I are no less subject to the impact of hurry and noise than others in our culture.  The question is whether we will allow ourselves to be carried along in its current or whether we will break free of it by heeding Jesus’ invitation.  The logic of this carries over into the time we offer to Him directly, whether individually or as part of an academic community in Christ gathering in chapel. It is rarely convenient, but that is part of the point. We are being 'counter-cultural'.

The texts for the theme this year and last year are congruent. It is when we encounter Him, the One in whom all things are held together, that we know personal integration and can allow it to work outwards.

Indeed, he calls us to do so…