Advent 2023 Studies Sampler by United Methodist Publishing House-Cokesbury

Advent 2023 Sampler

A Preview of New Advent Studies and Devotions from

NEW 4-WEEK STUDIES

An Unlikely Advent By Rachel Billups

Heaven and Earth By Will Willimon

Experiencing Christmas By Matt Rawle

DEVOTIONAL Advent 2023

A Calendar of Devotions By Sam McGlothlin

For more information, visit Cokesbury.com or call 800.672.1789

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A Preview of New Advent Studies and Devotions from

Experiencing Christmas by Matt Rawle Everything seems different at the end of the year. We put lights on our houses to dispel the growing darkness, Christmas music floods local radio stations, apple cider and cranberry sauce are again on the menu, and wrapping paper and tape are always ready. Things just look, smell, and taste differently during the Advent and Christmas season, and these differences are a sign to us that God is about to do something radical! What signs do you see during the Advent and Christmas season that point you to the divine? Components include the book, a full leader’s guide, video, and a sermon and worship series download to help plan worship. Click HERE to order now. Preview the first session in Amplify Media on ‘First Look’ page at HERE.

An Unlikely Advent by Rachel Billups During this Advent season, Rachel Billups guides readers through the themes of hope, love, joy, and peace by sharing the stories of Elizabeth and Zechariah, Herod, the magi, and the shepherds. Each set of unexpected characters has something to teach about living faithfully on the journey to Christmas. Components include the book, a full leader’s guide, and video. Click HERE to order now. Preview the ﬁrst session in Amplify Media on ‘First Look’ page at HERE.

Heaven and Earth by Will Willimon In the Advent season, heaven seems so close as we remember that a tiny baby in a manger is God in human form coming to show us the Way. God’s choice of Incarnation allows us to re ect on the mystery that Christ is the full revelation of God instead of being one who talks about God or one who speaks for or acts as God. But, no, Christ is God. In Heaven and Earth, beloved pastor and scholar Will Willimon explores the idea of Jesus as both fully human and fully divine this Christmas. Components include the book, a full leader’s guide, video, and a sermon and worship series download to help plan worship. Click HERE to order now. Preview the ﬁrst session in Amplify Media on ‘First Look’ page at HERE.

Advent: A Calendar of Devotions 2023 by Sam McGlothlin Advent: A Calendar of Daily Devotions 2023 provides daily devotions to celebrate the birth of Christ. This annual favorite is a wonderful resource for churches to give to each family to emphasize the importance of the Advent of our Lord. Each day’s reading, from Sunday, December 3 to Christmas Day, is based on the Revised Common Lectionary and includes the Scripture, a short devotion, and a brief prayer or practice, and it’s printed with a larger font for ease of reading. Sold in packs of 10, booklets are designed to ﬁt in a #10 envelope and are also available at Cokesbury.com in downloadable digital format for delivery through church emails. Click HERE to order now.

Experiencing Christmas: Christ in the Sights and Sounds of Advent Experiencing Christmas 978-1-7910-2927-2 978-1-7910-2928-9 eBook Experiencing Christmas: Leader Guide 978-1-7910-2929-6 978-1-7910-2930-2 eBook Experiencing Christmas: DVD 978-1-7910-2931-9 Download a FREE children’s leader guide and youth study at https://www.cokesbury.com/experiencing-christmas-2

Also by Matt Rawle The Faith of a Mockingbird The Redemption of Scrooge What Makes a Hero? The Gift of the Nutcracker The Grace of Les Miserables The Heart that Grew Three Sizes Jesus Revealed

For more information, visit MattRawle.com.

Abingdon Press | Nashville

Experiencing Christmas Christ in the Sights and Sounds of Advent Copyright © 2023 Abingdon Press All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission can be addressed to Rights and Permissions, The United Methodist Publishing House, 810 12th Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37203-4704 or e-mailed to permissions@abingdonpress.com. Library of Congress Control Number: 2023936272 978-1-7910-2927-2 Scripture quotations unless noted otherwise are from the Common English Bible. Copyright © 2011 by the Common English Bible. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.CommonEnglishBible.com. Scripture quotations noted (KJV) are from the King James Version of the Bible which is in the public domain.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents Introduction: Experiencing Christmas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Do You See What I See? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Do You Hear What I Hear? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Do You Taste What I Taste?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Do You Feel What I Feel? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Afterword: A Pleasing Aroma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

INTRODUCTION Experiencing Christmas Stop. For a moment pay attention to what you’re hearing. Are you the kind of person who reads when it’s quiet, with no outside distractions? Maybe you can only read when it’s busy and loud, the hustle and bustle of life creating a white noise allowing you to concentrate. Where are you reading? What do you see? Obviously, the words on this page are calling for your attention, but what else do you see? Are you reading outside in the sunlight? Maybe you’re in an office under the fluorescents? Are you reading off a screen, or

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is lamplight dancing off the page? Do you snack while you read? I certainly do. I’m not too ashamed to say that I almost always have a can of almonds or a pack of gum at the ready when I know I’ll be reading for a while. Maybe you read under the warmth of a blanket or outside in the nippy air. Do you lick your fingers and turn the page, or simply swipe from left to right to see what’s next? We don’t make sense without our senses. Everything we understand, everything we communicate, and everything we imagine is filtered through what we can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. Have you ever tried sitting and thinking about nothing, being aware enough to know that you aren’t paying attention to what you see or smell or feel? I’ve never been able to achieve that kind of mindfulness. I’ve heard that this kind of meditation can make you feel closer to God, and although I’m sure this is true, the Christmas story encourages the opposite. Christmas is the celebration that God now has senses. God put on flesh in the person of Jesus to experience and redeem humanity in a unique and radical way. Instead of us burning offerings so our prayers may rise to the heavens, God has come down to us. God has come near to smell the sweetness of our incense and the mustiness of poverty. As we hunger and thirst for righteousness, God now knows what it’s like to hunger and thirst after the daily search for a meal. Through the Incarnation, God-in-flesh, God has made the chasm between heaven and earth very small indeed. We seem to acknowledge this intuitively as we prepare for Christmas. Advent is a season set apart like no other. Everything seems different at the end of the year. We put lights on our houses to dispel the growing darkness, Christmas music floods local

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radio stations, apple cider and cranberry sauce are once again on the menu, and wrapping paper and tape are always at the ready. Things just look, smell, and taste different during the Advent and Christmas season. It’s as if creation itself is groaning and searching for God’s intervention. Everything seems different at the end of the year because everything was different when Jesus breathed his first breath in Bethlehem. That’s what we’ll explore together in this book. In each chapter, we’ll consider one of our senses and its unique encounters during Advent—things we see, hear, taste, and touch. We’ll discover how those senses become signs for us, pointing to the Incarnation when God took on human flesh and experienced the world as we do. What does it mean for God to have senses, and what does it have to do with us? Let’s begin with sight. After all, most of our brain power is dedicated to sight. My wife and I both wear glasses, but our vision is quite different. She’s effectively blind without her glasses, and she calls my prescription a windshield because there’s hardly any change at all. I wonder if Jesus would have worn glasses. Should we assume that Jesus’s vision was perfect? Is needing a prescription a sin? Certainly not, but do we feel uncomfortable thinking that Jesus’s eyesight might have needed correcting? It may seem a silly thing, but Jesus had two eyes just like us. If something was outside the periphery, Jesus didn’t see it. But in other ways, Jesus saw more than we see. When a woman bathed Jesus’s feet with her tears, he asked his host, “Do you see this woman?” (Luke 7:44). Simon the Pharisee could only see her sin. How often do our eyes fall short of this divine compassion? The Christmas story reminds us that God now sees both what we see and what we fail to see.

Introduction

Several years ago, a friend was gracious enough to give me a ride to a meeting. His car radio was playing a talk show, and, hoping to change the station, I asked him what his favorite kind of music was. He said that he didn’t have one. I was at a loss for words. To me, not having a favorite kind of music is like saying that you only drink clam juice. I’m sure it’s possible, but what a sad way to journey through life. Maybe you don’t listen to music, and this sounds perfectly normal. I was a music major in college, and I can’t imagine what life would be like without music. My life has a constant soundtrack playing in my headphones. But I wonder if Jesus might have been more like my friend than I care to admit. Did Jesus have a favorite kind of music? Maybe that question doesn’t even make sense in the ancient world. Did people have to speak up when talking to Jesus, or was there a holiness about him that prompted hushed whispers? I don’t mind hearing people chew, but some find the sound stomach-churning. Did Jesus ever find certain sounds annoying? Maybe cries for healing, the sound of desperation and lament, were as unpalatable to Jesus’s ears as nails scraped across a chalkboard. Maybe those sounds called attention to injustice or a need for Jesus to act, to teach, restore, heal. What kind of food do you think Jesus preferred? Did Jesus ever know the calming scent of lavender? Did Jesus find wool itchy? These are silly questions, but they point to a profound truth. God put on flesh and all that comes with it—growing pains, thirsting after a long day’s journey, the joy of an early morning stretch, tired feet, sunburned skin, and even the suffering of crucifixion. God entered into God’s own creation so that the line between heaven and earth might be thin.

Introduction

During Christmas, our senses are saturated with music, visuals, food, textures, and holiday scents—of course they are. Christmas celebrates that God now has senses—eyes to see suffering and ears to hear lament, knowing the saltiness of tears and the desire for compassionate touch. God doesn’t experience humanity and simply let it be. God enters into our story so that our story might be redeemed. “This will be a sign to you,” the angel announces to the shepherds. They didn’t see fire on the mountain or parted waters. They didn’t see wheels upon wheels and dry bones dancing. There were no burning altars or gale-force winds. They saw a baby wrapped snugly, lying in a manger. They saw that God had emptied the divine to reveal a vulnerable love to a mother and a man, relying on humanity to save humanity. As we adorn our houses with lights and fill our sanctuaries with Christmas songs, bring out the figgy pudding and wrap the gifts for Christmas morning, may all of our senses and all that we are, celebrate the night God put on flesh and dwelt among us!

CHAPTER ONE

Do You See What I See?

CHAPTER ONE Do You See What I See? In those days Caesar Augustus declared that everyone throughout the empire should be enrolled in the tax lists. (Luke 2:1)

What is your fondest Advent or Christmas memory? Does this memory have something to do with decorating a tree full of ornaments, each holding a memory of its own? Maybe it doesn’t quite feel like Christmas until the choir sings The Messiah or that

Experiencing Christmas

special song that only your congregation sings year after year. Sometimes there’s a special dish a loved one whips up for the family gathering that you only have around the holidays. Maybe it’s the smell of gingerbread or even wrapping paper and tape that immediately transports you to your childhood home on the night before Christmas. Or maybe it’s the warmth of a mug of cocoa in your hand, or the brush of your fingers against pine needles? These moments, taken separately or together as a season of senses, are what it means to experience Christmas. The sights, sounds, smells, and tastes are just different during the holidays. Talking about resurrection and singing “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” feels fine almost any time of year, but sing “Silent Night” in July, or don’t sing “Silent Night” on December 24th, and you just might start a riot. It’s not our liturgical senses that are offended. Our actual senses are. Having a Christmas tree in your living room in March feels about as sensical as eating soup in the summer or wearing shorts to a snowball fight. Christmas is so tied to our collective memory because it is so intimately connected to our senses. These holiday experiences are hard to forget, for good or ill. Luke’s Nativity story begins with the words, “In those days Caesar Augustus declared that everyone throughout the empire should be enrolled in the tax lists.” In those days there was a proclamation from the one who held the most power. That declaration went out to the corners of the Roman Empire. Luke’s story begins in the past, but how far back in the past? Just how far back is the period in question, “in those days”?

Do You See What I See?

In the beginning, when God began creating the heavens and the earth, God said, “Let there be light.” In those days the one who held all power spoke, and that declaration shaped the four corners of the world. As far as introductions go, John’s Gospel usually gets top billing as the narrative that calls the reader to remember creation. John’s “In the beginning was the Word,” certainly tunes our ears to remember “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1 KJV); but by bringing to mind that the one who holds the power proclaims a word that is to spread throughout the world, Luke’s Gospel, in its own way, is also calling us to remember the beginning. God said, “Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good” (Genesis 1:3-4 KJV). God spoke, and then saw. God saw the light and saw that it was good. God then separated the waters from the waters and saw that it was good. God made the dry land and saw that it was good. The sun, moon, and stars, the vegetation, the creeping things, and then humanity . . . and saw that it was good. The creation unfolds through the repetition of those two actions: “God said . . .” and “God saw . . .” I can almost imagine that God’s eyes were closed in that first utterance of “let there be,” and maybe there really wasn’t much to see anyway. With eyes closed God speaks, and then when God’s voice ceases to reverberate through the cosmos, God opens divine eyes and sees that the light is good. When we are born, we cry with eyes closed, then we open our eyes to look up at the one who gave us birth. For a moment, everything is good. At our beginning we remember the beginning. God spoke and then saw. We speak and then see. I wonder if God

Experiencing Christmas

offers this reminder of creation at our creation just to say that we are already loved from the beginning of our story. God spoke and then saw, though God saw creation from the perspective of creator. Try as we might, we cannot comprehend the chasm between creator and creation. We cannot perceive what it means for anything to exist outside of creation. God knows we can’t. This is what Christmas is about. God entered into creation with eyes of God’s own, so that we might see God’s love clearly. Christmas is the beginning of heaven and earth becoming one, where the dividing line between Creator and Creation, and the dividing line between you and me, is dissolved. When time was “full,” God began to experience humanity like never before. What does it mean for God now to have eyes? Did God in Jesus have perfect vision? We ponder, “Do you see what I see,” knowing now that God just might ask us the same question.

A Distant Glow When you see a box of Christmas lights, what do you see? Do you see the potential for an amazing display, artfully adorning your home signifying the changing of the season from Thanksgiving to Advent and Christmas? Maybe these small filaments wrapped in plastic represent a winter wonderland or the first attempt at “lawn of the year.” Maybe this role of wire and bulbs will soon be an illuminated scene depicting Christ’s birth. Or do you see what I see: a fifty-foot ladder, clips that don’t adhere to your roof, an afternoon of cursing the day you were born, and second-guessing your life choices? We may be looking at the same box of Christmas lights,

Do You See What I See?

We ponder, “Do you see what I see,” knowing now that God just might ask us the same question.

Experiencing Christmas

but what we see might be two very different things. What we can agree on is that Christmas just isn’t Christmas without light. Lights are one of the first signs that Christmas is near. Maybe more accurately, a lack of light begins to signal the changing season. At least for those of us north of the equator, the days begin to grow short. You start prepping for family dinner and by the time you set the table, the sun has set. For many, these short days offer an anxious anticipation for the next sunrise. There’s almost a gnawing sensation when you know the day isn’t over but the sun set hours ago. For others the darkness is no problem. The early evenings mean more time for campfires, more time to enjoy the lights around the neighborhood homes and businesses. Do you see what I see after the sun sets? Are you filled with anxiety? Do you experience excitement? (Maybe you see what I see . . . bedtime. I know it’s only 8:00, but it’s been dark for hours. Why spoil an opportunity for sleep?) Whether you experience anxiety or you are filled with excitement, we all tend to land in the same place. We all seem to agree that when it gets dark, we need more light. Either the light brings peace to the anxious heart or light offers beauty to those looking for some Christmas cheer. The light signals to us that something is different. There are other visual signs too. We notice the change often when my family comes home from Thanksgiving. We typically spend a week galivanting across South Louisiana, seeing friends and family over the course of several Thanksgiving meals. When we leave our North Louisiana neighborhood, the houses appear normal, but when we come back everything looks different. There are reindeer in lawns, wreaths on streetlights, pop-up Christmas

Do You See What I See?

tree stands, inflatable Santas, and Salvation Army kettles in front of grocery stores. You don’t have to be a Christian or a person of any faith tradition to recognize that change is in the air. You can see it with your own eyes. Advent is a season of anticipation. “This is a sign for you,” the angels tell the shepherds as they were “guarding their sheep at night.” This is something you need to see. This is something to look for. When you see infants pulling up on the edge of the coffee table, you know they are soon to walk. When the fuel light illuminates on your car’s dashboard, you know you need to get to a gas station. The inverted yield curve usually means a recession is ahead. We see these signs and anticipate what comes next. We almost seem hardwired for anticipation, to recognize that we live in a world of cause and effect. The relationship between what we see and how we respond is basic to our human condition. Sight is a powerful sense. More than 50 percent of our brain’s cortex, the outer layer of our brain, is dedicated to sight.1 Seeing something in the distance, recognizing what it is, and responding correctly can be a life-or-death situation. A ship on the horizon can be friend or foe. The subtle movement in the bushes might be a bunny or a bear. Can I tell how far the oncoming headlights are before making this left-hand turn? Life is having the “capacity for anticipation,” as John F. Haught puts it in his fantastic book God After Einstein. Anticipation is what separates us from God’s magnificent work in the beginning of creation.2 The light, seas, stars, and dry land cannot anticipate. They can offer signs of anticipation like a changing tide, a weathered rock, and a star that guides wise men from the east to find the new Messiah,

Experiencing Christmas

but they in and of themselves do not anticipate. The arrival of life, for which the universe had to wait, gives a surprising, dramatic intelligibility for the three great immensities of time, space, and complexity. Only living creatures can anticipate, that is, see a sign and expect what will come next. Sometimes I like to ponder just how long a “day” is meant to be during the Genesis 1 Creation account. The beautiful rhythm of light, water, and land, then creeping and swarming things, and animals, along with humanity, represents a story that is much grander than maybe we imagine. “Let there be light” may have been an utterance spoken an unfathomably long time ago. On our timeline, this light began to emerge over 13 billion years ago. Maybe the poet was on to something when he wrote: “In [God’s] perspective a thousand years are like yesterday past” (Psalm 90:4). The data of both narrative and nature reveals that our participation in God’s history constitutes just a sliver of time. How long did the universe have to wait until the universe could look back at itself? It took quite a long time—13.6 billion years— to anticipate a first look. Anticipation can heighten the senses, inspiring either fight or flight. It usually begins with our feet. Either we anticipate standing our ground with feet planted firm, or our legs engage to get us away as quickly as we can. Thinking about feet and anticipation, this past summer I was reminded of a third category. There is fight, there is flight, and there is utter paralysis. I have a love-hate relationship with water. I love looking at water. I love the sound of the waves crashing against the shoreline. Seeing the vastness of the ocean inspires thoughts of the immensity of God’s grace, but

Do You See What I See?

I hate being in the water. Being on top of the water in a boat or on a pier is absolutely fine, but being in the water causes a cascade of problems for me. First, as a young child I constantly had ear infections during the summer, so eventually if I wanted to swim I had to wear ear plugs and a swim cap. I also wasn’t the slimmest of children. Being the chubby child having to wear a swim cap at parties makes for very long grade-school summers. Needless to say, I just didn’t enjoy pool parties, and therefore I didn’t spend much time at the pool. Secondly, I must have seen Jaws at muchtoo-young an age. If I ever did find myself in the deep end where my feet couldn’t touch, all I could think about was how big the shark lurking just under the waves ready to eat me whole was. This past summer I decided to give it another go. I swam out past the breaking waves and decided to swim past where my feet couldn’t touch the sea floor. Then it happened. My body became still and unmoving, like I was playing a game of freeze tag. As soon as my feet couldn’t ground me, I almost couldn’t move. As soon as my head went under, thankfully flight kicked in and I swam as hard as I could to get back to shallow water. It’s embarrassing, and I’m sure I’ll tackle this fear at some point along my journey, but I didn’t conquer it that day. In this case, anticipation led to anxiety. Do you see what I see when you see the ocean waves? Do you see a playground for surfing, fishing, and fun, or do you see something that must be avoided at all costs? At the beginning of the Advent season, we dive into the prophetic poetry of the Hebrew Scriptures that our faith tradition has taught are signs for the coming Messiah. Jeremiah writes,

Experiencing Christmas

The time is coming, declares the LORD, when I will fulfill my gracious promise with the people of Israel and Judah. In those days and at that time, I will raise up a righteous branch from David’s line, who will do what is just and right in the land. In those days, Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is what he will be called: The LORD Is Our Righteousness. (Jeremiah 33:14-16)

I imagine Jeremiah writing his poetry in the evening illuminated by firelight, except Jeremiah isn’t sitting near the hearth. He sees Jerusalem burning in the distance. Jeremiah, who was called to be a prophet in 625 BC, lived during the time of Judah’s last kings. Sometimes called “The Weeping Prophet,” Jeremiah’s words were heavy, full of lament and warning. He was a “soul in pain,” who “screamed, wept, moaned, and was left with a terror in his soul.”3 On the one hand, the Lord proclaimed through Jeremiah, “The Lord’s fierce anger won’t turn back / until God’s purposes are entirely accomplished. / In the days to come, / you will understand what this means.” (Jeremiah 30:24). On the other hand, at times Jeremiah struggled with the harshness of his people’s rejection of God— I thought, I’ll forget him; I’ll no longer speak in his name. But there’s an intense fire in my heart, trapped in my bones.

Do You See What I See?

I’m drained trying to contain it; I’m unable to do it. (Jeremiah 20:9)

Jeremiah lived with a polarity of despair and hope, dancing between terror and grace, offering both warning and pardon to a people seemingly deaf to both. What better character to shift our gaze, to help us see something else within that distant glow? The fire is destructive, but it also symbolizes God’s new, righteous branch rising from the smoldering rubble. As Walter Brueggemann writes: What a commission it is to express a future that none think imaginable! Of course this cannot be done by inventing new symbols, for that is wishful thinking. Rather, it means to move back into the deepest memories of this community and activate those very symbols that have always been the basis for contradicting the regnant consciousness. Therefore the symbols of hope . . . must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history . . . to those deep symbols, they will discern that hope is not a late, tacked-on hypothesis to serve a crisis but rather the primal dimension of every memory of this community . . . [which] begins in God’s promissory address to the darkness of chaos.4

There’s more to Advent than waiting in anticipation. There is hope. If it were only anticipation Jeremiah might anticipate an everlasting Babylonian Empire as they sack the Jerusalem Temple. He would anticipate a people destroyed and a God forgotten. Yet

Experiencing Christmas

There’s more to Advent than waiting in anticipation. There is hope.

Do You See What I See?

the prophet articulates hope that even in the fire, God is doing something wonderful. When the days grow increasingly short in the autumn, we anticipate that nights will lengthen. Yet we hope that light will dispel the darkness. What kind of light do we envision? What kind of light are we expecting, and what might it mean? A devastating fire certainly illuminates the night sky, but at what cost? Jeremiah is asking, “Do you see what I see?”

The Holly and the Ivy What are those visual markers of the season that represent something new is about to happen? The symbols we see during Advent are important. The familiar symbols of the Christmas tree, the holly and the ivy, the wreath, and the candles need little explanation in our popular imagination, and yet they represent a hope that can be difficult to see without prophetic fervor. With little exception, every Advent in my congregation begins with a “Hanging of the Greens” worship experience independent of our Sunday morning worship. The first Sunday in Advent the table is relatively bare, the decorations sparse. The Scripture reading and message for the day are deeply rooted in prophets like Jeremiah, offering a tension between tragedy and hope. It is the only worship experience of the year that is intended to feel “intertestamental.” The Old Testament is remembered, but we aren’t quite in the New Testament just yet. The pomp and majesty of Christ the King Sunday seems longer ago than last week, and it also doesn’t feel quite right to jump into Advent. Not yet.

Experiencing Christmas

The service on this first Sunday morning of Advent is simple and stripped down as if there’s not enough time for something as frivolous as decorations as we hold our breath between Malachi and Matthew. The prophet says, Look, I am sending Elijah the prophet to you, before the great and terrifying day of the LORD arrives. Turn the hearts of the parents to the children and the hearts of the children to their parents. Otherwise, I will come and strike the land with a curse. (Malachi 4:5-6)

We wait, lingering on the prophet’s words, giving ourselves space to anticipate and hope for the Gospel: “A record of the ancestors of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1). The morning service is meant to feel ambiguous, leaving you with unanswered questions searching for more definitive answers. This is more than a clever strategy to get the congregation to return for the evening “Hanging of the Greens” (though it is a great strategy to do just that!). The experience captures the anticipation of Advent. The service ends with the feeling of “and then . . .” When the congregation returns in the evening, we finally hear the familiar tune of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” which heralds, in song, the familiar hope. Gathering in the evening outside of the normal worship order gives us permission to craft a different kind of experience. Using musical arrangements from bands like The Brilliance and Page CVXI signals that something different is around the corner. We decorate and light the Chrismon

Do You See What I See?

tree within the context of worshipful work and liturgical prayer. The children strand garlands around the sanctuary in a parade reminiscent of their palm-waving “Hosannas” the Sunday before Easter. We pray over the Advent wreath as we light the candle of hope. Lights, colorful fabric, poinsettias, and maybe a sweater or two signal that it’s finally the time to prepare for the coming of the Lord. These symbols of our faith—the tree, the wreath, the lights, and the holly and the ivy—all represent the “deep symbols” that not only root us in a shared, collective, and trusted (and maybe dangerously nostalgic) memory, but they are necessary symbols of hope. When we bless the chrismon tree we pray, “Holy Lord, we come with joy to celebrate the birth of your Son, / who rescued us from the darkness of sin / by making the cross a tree of life and light.”5 The tree isn’t just adorned with lights and ornaments. It represents a future hope of salvation through the justifying grace of God in Christ. The prayer for the Advent Wreath details an expectation that light can conquer the “darkness of ignorance and sin.”6 When we light the candle of hope, we invite the congregation into a different future trajectory. Do you see what I see when we bless, parade, and illuminate these symbols of our faith? The decorations represent more than the coming of a new season. In a very real sense these symbols mark the crucial transition between anticipation and expectation. They are the bridge between seeing a distant fire and assuming a destructive finality and recognizing that the blaze is burning away the old so that the new can come into fruition. It is the difference between Jerusalem being destroyed and a “new shoot” sprouting.

Experiencing Christmas

Advent is not a season of anticipation. Anticipation is incomplete. Anticipation does not require hope. Advent is not a time for studying trends or waiting on markets or replicating programmatic calendars for a new ministry year. That is anticipation—responding to what is known, looking for what is likely. When we make room for hope, our anticipation becomes expectation: the mystery of faith, trading certainty for blessed surprise, exchanging the safety of rhythm for the risk of improvisation, letting go of our assumptions of finitude for the glory of abundant life. Jeremiah wasn’t anticipating the destruction of Jerusalem. His prophecies were expecting a coming Messiah. Anticipation is assuming that exile is the end of the story. Expectation is the falling upward of grace. Do you see what I see in these symbols of our faith? They are the transition between anticipation and expectation, or as Psalm 30:5 puts it— His anger lasts for only a second, but his favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may stay all night, but by morning, joy!

We anticipate the weeping lingering of the night, but we, through these Advent and Christmas symbols, expect the joy of morning.

From Anticipation to Expectation Chris Hemsworth, best known for his role of Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is also the narrator of a Disney Plus

Do You See What I See?

program titled, Limitless with Chris Hemsworth. Limitless explores the limits of the human body, offering “fascinating insights into how we can all unlock our body’s superpowers to fight illness, perform better and even reverse the aging process.”7 Throughout the show, Hemsworth completes a series of extraordinary challenges to test these new scientific theories. Hemsworth’s hosting offers a tragic irony. During the course of the series, Hemsworth had his DNA tested and discovered his genetic makeup includes two copies of the gene APOE4, one from his mother, the other from his father, which studies have linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. One in four people carry a single copy of the gene, but only 2 to 3 percent of the population have both, according to a 2021 study by the National Institutes of Health.8 This makes him ten times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Knowing this information, you might anticipate suffering, sadness, and a feeling of defeat, which are all honest and appropriate emotions. Hemsworth said in a Vanity Fair article, “You don’t know what tomorrow holds, so live it to its fullest. Whether or not [knowing about the disease] helps you live longer, it’s about living better right now. Whatever you do right now to benefit your future self is having a huge benefit in your current self.”9 Finding out that he had a genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s wasn’t what he was anticipating, but now he is expecting to live a full life every day. The journey from anticipation to expectation hinges on hope. When your child comes home with less than perfect grades, you may anticipate difficulty in the future, but are you expecting to see a brilliant mind coming into fruition, struggling with the

Experiencing Christmas

The journey from anticipation to expectation hinges on hope.

Do You See What I See?

current rules because they will be writing new ones for the rest of us? Maybe you’ve been told that this is the last year you will be with your current employer. I’m sure you’re anticipating hardship and a difficult season, but are you expecting a new freedom and a new opportunity to jump into something truly life-giving? What are you anticipating about tomorrow? What are you expecting to happen? How do you know the difference? Anticipation is knowing how to catch a ball because of the way it is thrown. Expectation is looking for someone who wants to play catch. Anticipation is based on what is known. Expectation never is. How do you define the difference between anticipation and expectation in your story? When we were having our first child, my wife devoured the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting. In theory the book is a helpful guide for awareness during the confusing time of a first pregnancy. In practice the title should more appropriately be What to Be Paranoid About When You’re Expecting. My wife, Christie, wanted to do everything perfectly: caloric intake with the best foods for brain development, aerobic exercise to build stamina, the perfect blend of supplements for peak immunity, and a host of other things. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of this, though through subsequent pregnancies we’ve discovered just how resilient and amazing a mother’s body is. Even when eating too much salmon or skipping the daily walk, all of our kids (despite the DNA they’ve inherited from their father) are wonderful. I know not every story ends well, and I grieve with those for whom even this paragraph brings to the surface difficult memories. What to expect when you’re expecting? Expect that no two journeys are the same.

Experiencing Christmas

Without

preparation,

anticipation

makes

sense.

Anticipation is the fruit of previous knowledge, skill, and deduction, and its goal is an appropriate course of action for what is coming. Conversely, you can’t prepare for expectation, at least not actively. The only way to “prepare” for expectation is through imagination. The hope found within expectation is the acceptance of unfettered possibility. You can prepare for the birth of a child, but you should expect that the child will be and do many things that surprise you, that you will never see coming. The role of surprise and possibility applies to our spiritual journey. We can envision our spiritual walk as a story in three chapters. In the first chapter you build a “God box,” into which you place all of your ideas, thoughts, and assumptions about God. This begins at an early age regardless of whether you were raised within a faith community. We all have ideas that there is an “other.” That other must be bigger, better, faster, stronger than we. It’s easy to see how our first idea about God is that God simply is bigger, because early in our story, everything is bigger than we are. Chairs adults use to sit on are the very things on which we pull to stand up. You realize that there was something here before you were here, and so the “other” must be old, at least older than you. You have a hard time moving heavy things, but adults seem to struggle little, so the divine must be even stronger than grownups. God must be up in the sky somewhere because with your feet on the ground it seems an impossible place to be. It’s no surprise that our first thoughts about God are that there is someone or something bigger, older, stronger, and full of the impossible.

Do You See What I See?

These divine attributes are beautiful, and they serve us well. At some point these characteristics begin to change. The second chapter in this spiritual story begins when our thoughts about God change. Think about those first few math lessons from elementary school about subtraction. You’re told at an early age that you can’t subtract a bigger number from a smaller number. Then one day you’re taught that you can. The only difference is that previously you weren’t able to conceive of something like a negative number. At some point you may consider that God might not be bigger than everything. Maybe God doesn’t have a body at all? Maybe it’s not that God is stronger than anything, able to move mountains or barriers, but maybe God wants us to level the mountains and make the rough places plain (Isaiah 40:3-4) so that God can be seen clearly. Maybe God isn’t older than we are, but God isn’t bound by time in the same way. In this way, eternity is about being unbound rather than how long our experience of heaven may be. It’s not that God lives up there and out there as much as we understand that God lives in each one of us. The “God box” you’ve built will be taken apart as you grow in relationship with God and others. Eventually you’ll build another box into which your new assumptions about God neatly fit. And then, you’ll dismantle that one too. You will build up and tear down more than once, to the point when you think there are only two chapters in this story. The third chapter only begins when you realize that there is no need for a box because there is no box. No box can contain an inexhaustible, eternal, abundant, on-themove God. This final step in this story, realizing that there is no box, is the place where expectation lives. You cannot prepare for

Experiencing Christmas

expectation, except by opening your imagination to what you’ve never before seen. Expectation changes what we see. Jeremiah sees a city burning to rubble and envisions righteousness, justice, and a new branch springing from ashes for all the world. We anticipate destruction, but Jeremiah looks with eyes of hope and offers the expectation of rebirth. How might expectation change your vision early in this Advent season? What are you anticipating that needs a touch of hope to become expectation? Just before the Advent season we hosted a hymn sing at my local congregation. Much like John Wesley on his way to a society meeting on Aldersgate Street in 1738, I begrudgingly attended the hymn sing. As a vocal music major in undergrad, I love singing hymns; but it was late in November on a Wednesday evening, and with seemingly one hundred things still on my to-do list before Advent, I certainly didn’t have time to sit and sing all the stanzas of “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” We invited participants to write down their favorite hymns and place them in a basket. Our lay leader would pull them out, name how many stanzas we would sing, and then cue the piano player. The event was scheduled for forty-five minutes to an hour, but after seeing something like sixty suggested hymns in the basket (at two to three stanzas per hymn), I realized that I should have brought a snack and a water bottle. This was going to take a while, and that didn’t help my mood in the slightest. But there was hope. Surely with sixty cards in the basket there had to be some duplicate suggestions, which would make the evening considerably shorter. There were . . . only two. There were

Do You See What I See?

Expectation changes what we see. . . . We anticipate destruction, but Jeremiah looks with eyes of hope and offers the expectation of rebirth.

Experiencing Christmas

only two duplicate suggestions being “How Great Thou Art” and “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” I could almost hear God chuckling from heaven at my aggravation of how this hymn sing was infringing on my precious pastoral time. I was anticipating a long night and a sore throat. And then we sang “Blessed Assurance,” and everything changed. As we started singing, I became tired and distracted so I stopped singing and started gazing about the room. I glanced over to see Ms. Jolene with her hymnal shut, hugging it against her heart. Her eyes were closed, and her head was tilted back as if she were singing to a divine audience of One. In that moment, nothing seemed more important to her. Seeing this holy moment unfold for her changed my narrow anticipation to an abundant expectation of what God was doing in her life and what God might be calling us to do in our faith community. Our hymn sing wasn’t quite Jeremiah seeing a new shoot among the glowing embers of devastation, but it certainly changed me in my little world. Anticipation becomes expectation in a moment of hopeful conviction. The Hebrew Scriptures fill us with a sense of anticipation for a child Messiah to be born. Therefore, the Lord will give you a sign. The young woman is pregnant and is about to give birth to a son, and she will name him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14) A child is born to us, a son is given to us, and authority will be on his shoulders. He will be named

Do You See What I See?

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6) This is a sign for you: you will find a newborn baby wrapped snugly and lying in a manger. (Luke 2:12)

We are primed on Christmas Eve to anticipate seeing a baby, but do we expect to see salvation? When Jesus is presented to Simeon at the Temple eight days after his birth, Simeon says: “Now, master, let your servant go in peace according to your word, because my eyes have seen your salvation. You prepared this salvation in the presence of all peoples. It’s a light for revelation to the Gentiles and a glory for your people Israel.” (Luke 2:29-32)

I mentioned that you can’t prepare for expectation. That’s true. You can’t prepare for expectation in the same way you might for anticipation. It’s not that the technique is different or that it takes special training. Yes, expectation lives in the place where “boxes” aren’t, and our holy imagination needs to be big enough to “expect the unexpected.” But you can’t prepare for expectation because it is God who prepares for expectation. “My eyes have seen your salvation [that] you prepared . . . in the presence of all peoples.” We can’t prepare for the hopeful conviction the Holy Spirit offers, moving us from anticipation to expectation, but we can open our eyes and keep watch. We might anticipate having

Experiencing Christmas

to keep an eye on feckless sheep by moonlight, but the evening might end with the unbound expectation of what God will do through the sign of “a newborn baby wrapped snugly and lying in a manger” the angels in heaven announce.

Christmas Looks Different The first Sunday of Advent is a special Sunday because everything looks dramatically different than when we gathered last. The Christmas trees fill us with the anticipation of gifts, adorned with the symbols of our faith. But are we filled with the expectation of the cross, the expectation that there is more to the story for this tree, that one day it will be cut down and used for a symbol of death by an oppressive state? Are we expectant with hope that God will redeem it with an empty tomb? We anticipate a baby, but do we expect to see salvation? The Advent wreath leads us to anticipate peace, hope, love, and joy, but do we expect to have peace in our lifetime? Experiencing Christmas is moving from anticipation into expectation. This time of year just looks different. Lights up on the rooftop, window displays of red and green and gold, trees in living rooms, SUVs with antlers and a red-nosed hood ornament (which I’ve seen surprisingly little of this year, and that’s . . . OK). And it’s not just the decorations that look different. There are more people serving with the poor, there are more people at local restaurants celebrating, there are more cars in the street and neighborhood because families are visiting. Things just look different this time of year because all of creation, with intent or accident, recognizes

Do You See What I See?

We anticipate a baby, but do we expect to see salvation?

Experiencing Christmas

that when God put on flesh, everything changed. We look at the world and ask God, “Do you see what I see?” Do you see the hungry? Do you see the poor? Do you see those who are put down, messed up, ignored, or forgotten? Now, for the first time because God now has eyes to see, God answers with our same question: Do you see what I see? Do you see that soon the hungry will be filled, the poor will be blessed, the persecuted will leap for joy? I will walk among you, I will call you to follow, and together we will change the world.

Questions 1. What unique sights do you encounter during the weeks leading up to Christmas? How do these signify the coming birth of Jesus? 2. What is the difference between anticipation and expectation? 3. Imagine what Jesus saw when he lived. How much of it is the same as what you see today, and how much is different? 4. What do you think God sees when God looks at our world today? 5. How might expectation change your vision in this Advent season? What are you anticipating that needs a touch of hope?

An Unlikely Advent: Extraordinary People of the Christmas Story An Unlikely Advent 978-1-7910-2897-8 978-1-7910-2896-1 eBook An Unlikely Advent: DVD 978-1-7910-2900-5 An Unlikely Advent: Leader Guide 978-1-7910-2899-2 978-1-7910-2898-5 eBook

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An Unlikely Advent: Extraordinary People of the Christmas Story Copyright © 2023 Abingdon Press All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission can be addressed to Rights and Permissions, The United Methodist Publishing House, 810 12th Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37203-4704 or emailed to permissions@abingdonpress.com. Library of Congress Control Number: 2023936946 978-1-7910-2897-8 All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www .zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™ Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from THE MESSAGE, copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To my mom, Linda Fast You fanned the f lame, and I am grateful.

CONTENTS Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Chapter 1: What If I Missed It? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 Chapter 2: Playing the Villain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Chapter 3: A Curious People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Chapter 4: When God Shows Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

INTRODUCTION I watched as Carolyn, a member of the worship design team, gently unwrapped the delicate pieces of our church’s beloved antique Nativity set one by one. They were cast in white porcelain, and I had just learned that one of our older church faithfuls had handcrafted each Nativity character and presented the set to the church. Worn by years of handling, certain characters were already chipped and stored out of sight until they could be properly repaired. Carolyn went on to explain that this Nativity set was special. At first it had been displayed within reach of little ones walking through the preschool hallway, but it did not take long to realize that curious hands find their way to the manger unintentionally further damaging the set. The set had to be moved. So, we moved it together. “It’s a beauty,” I said, and I meant it. The Nativity set was gorgeous and pristine. It was beautiful but honestly a little bit unrealistic. The Holy Family huddled together in the dark dampness of a straw-filled cave seemed a far cry from the white porcelain I saw before me now. Nativity scenes function as the centerpiece of nearly every Christmas gathering in our homes and in our churches. It’s a holy ix

Introduction spot that we attempt to re-create our interpretations of the Gospel stories. So, we gather wise men, Mary and Joseph, a shepherd, and a camel, just to name a few. And then it hit me, what about everyone else in the Christmas story? Why only include Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus? Some Nativities include the frequent extras: a side-angel and a few assorted barnyard animals; but what about Zechariah and Elizabeth there in that inner circle? Where is Herod in the grand scheme of things? How did the magi and the shepherds encounter the Christ child? These B-players usually emerge as “extras” in God’s story, but I could not help but wonder if they might have more to teach us about the intersection of God’s story with ours. I realized over those years that I somehow relate more closely to shepherds and magi than to Mary and Joseph. And, I am definitely no angel. Could it be that we more readily see ourselves in these unlikely characters surrounding the Advent story?

Perhaps you will discover that your unlikely story is more aligned with these men and women than you first realized, and ultimately that their story and yours are part of God’s unfolding of the Christmas story. Perhaps we find ourselves in their imperfections, rendering them more accessible, more real-life than the Holy Family. This Advent, we are going on an unlikely journey, reading the stories of these unlikely characters anew. Maybe you will discover that your unlikely story is more aligned with these men and women than x

Introduction you first realized, and ultimately that their story and yours are part of God’s unfolding of the Christmas story. Working through the weeks of Advent, we will start in the first chapter with dreams, or should I say, broken dreams. Our broken dreams are often born out of what we may affectionately call our glory days. How often do we keep our eyes fixed on the rearview mirror, believing that our best days are behind us? Have you ever watched a dream pass you by and thought to yourself, I missed it, I’ve missed my shot? Zechariah and Elizabeth did. Zechariah and Elizabeth believed that they were past their prime, until one day an angel of the Lord showed up and transformed their perspective. Could it be that Zechariah and Elizabeth give us a future hope that we didn’t even know we needed? For anyone who has ever felt too old, no longer useful, or past their prime, let God transform your perspective: What If I Missed It? In chapter 2, I unapologetically want to change your perspective about what Herod has to teach us. Characters of good and evil make for exciting stories, yet left unchecked the villains—even the ones inside our heads—can keep us paralyzed. These perceived limitations threaten to keep us bound, yet God wants to birth something new in each of us. God wants to give us perspective on the Herod within. What if you dared to challenge that inner limitation to step into something new? It’s time to overcome those negative narratives and embrace the scandalous love of God: Playing the Villain. The magi in chapter 3 have something to teach us about who we believe deserves a front row seat in the Advent story. So often we expect God to act in certain ways within the prescribed confines of our characters and categories. But what if God wants to move in a different direction and use those outside your prescribed faith xi

Introduction circle to empower your way forward? Let’s rediscover the joy of stargazing—reimagining God’s kingdom connections—and how to innovate beyond the perceived boundaries of our faith tradition. Let’s extend the edges of God’s table and ours: A Curious People. Our final week we will allow ordinary shepherds to lead the way to the manager. Have you ever had an experience that changed everything, an unlikely God-encounter that interrupted the trajectory of your life? Luke’s Christmas story describes shepherds as ordinary folks working the night shift when God shows up and messes with their mundane—inviting them to be part of a story bigger than what they’d ever experienced. Angels announced, “There’s a new kind of peace in town and discovering it will change everything!” What if God shows up in your unlikely story this holiday season? Advent might just be the best time for a God-encounter: When God Shows Up. The invitation is open to take this four-week Advent journey together. A journey to explore our longings—our hopes and our fears—alongside the characters that function more like sidekicks than the main attraction. With honesty and vulnerability, we will discover stories of pain and promise, jealousy and joy, as reallife people encountering an incarnational presence. My prayer is ultimately for you to explore your own unlikely story for an unlikely Advent.

Your Unlikely Story In October of 2021, I left a leadership board meeting in a hurry. I knew I had over two hours of driving ahead of me. I was headed to my childhood home in the heart of the Hocking Hills, Ohio. It would be a very short trip: spend the night, get xii

Introduction up, do some work, and attend my uncle’s funeral. My uncle had passed away after a battle with cancer, and my cousins are just too important to me to miss such a moment in their lives. Therefore, I did what I set out to do: arrive late at night, catch some sleep, get up early, do some church work, and have a little breakfast with my mom and dad. I was so efficient with my time that I was able to take a walk with my mom around the farm. It was a glorious morning! The air was crisp, the leaves were vibrant yellows and oranges with a few reds speckled in between. Stepping into the cool air, my heart swelled with joy. My mom and I walked the entire perimeter of their hundred-acre farm. The cattle were giving us skeptical looks as we talked about all the fall has to offer. The time flew by and before we knew it was time to get dressed and go to the funeral. I dressed: black outfit, pearls, and heels—you know, funeral ready. My parents drove separately to pick up my grandma, so rather than follow my parents, I decided to drive an alternative route: Thompson Ridge Road. The road is full of twists and turns. It’s an incredible road to drive as the leaves are transforming in the fall. I knew the road well, so I also knew I could pick up the pace. I was excited, I was ready to enjoy the drive as much as I had enjoyed the morning. And then the moment I made a left turn onto Thompson Ridge Road, I noticed a car in the ditch and someone in it. Everything inside of me said, “Rachel you have to stop!” I quickly pulled over and jumped out, my high heels clicking on the pavement. I tapped on the window, “You okay in there?” The middle-aged woman looked at me with distress in her eyes as she cracked the window open. “Yeah,” she remarked, “but I can’t get my car out. I was just trying to look at my GPS and I slid off the side of the road.” I xiii

Introduction could totally see why! Without enough shoulder space, the leaves and mud made the slide into the ditch a sure thing. “Let me see if I can help,” I heard myself say, “I’ll grab some shoes.” I had running shoes in the car so I quickly changed shoes and attempted to push her out, praying I would not get covered in mud in the process. The tires just kept spinning. The woman was desperate: “I can’t afford a tow, I’m out here cleaning cabins.” “Okay,” I said, “Let me make a few phone calls.” A plan was emerging in my head to ask my great uncle from the other side of my family to help me out. He was cutting wood on our farm. So, I asked if he could come and pull her car out with his truck. I asked for her name. “Sharon, I am going to give you my cell phone number,” I said to her. “I will tell you who is coming to help so you are not surprised, but I must go to this funeral. Oh, and Sharon, you should know I was not supposed to be on this road. I believe that God sent me to you. That is how mindful the God of the universe is of you. God really does love you!” We hugged and I drove to the funeral, still worrying about Sharon. In that moment I questioned, “God, why was I unable to push her out?” I wanted to be a blessing and instead I drove to the funeral with Sharon and her situation heavy on my mind. I was so worried. But then about twenty minutes later I received a text: “Your uncle came! I’m out! Thank you! You have no idea how much you helped me today. May God be with you all as you bury your loved one.” I was not the hero that day; God was the hero! This unlikely encounter reminded me that life is not all about me. Life is about all of us: you, me, and everybody else! We are so divinely xiv

Introduction interconnected that God works through our lives to bring help, hope, and healing to the people around us. And particularly in this Advent season, I cannot help but especially remind those of you who have experienced great loss that God is mindful of you. Immanuel, God is with us! I do not pretend to understand it all. But I know God is continuously weaving together God’s purpose and plan through your life into mine and vice versa. Even the simplest experiences and challenges matter to God as God weaves together this unlikely story. It will be incredible! But let’s not confuse life as a tranquil, quiet walk in the park because as you and I know, the journey can be more than a little rocky. Perhaps that is your story? Life has been a little bit rocky, and your faith has been a long process. Faith is a muscle that you have developed over the years. At first, it was hard to say yes to God, even downright scary. But after a few years of building trust, your faith muscle is stronger. When you feel the nudge of God you say yes more quickly. You have spiritual muscle memory. Your faith is stronger, and you are done trusting your own sense of direction! You have let go of control. You have given God permission to take the reins. You have surrendered your own agenda for God’s agenda. Why? Because you no longer worry about the destination or getting there in a hurry. You are trusting God all along the way with an extra pair of shoes in the back seat of your vehicle. You have realized that saying yes to God means God speaks, you listen, somebody else gets blessed. The Advent season finds us smack dab inside the most wonderful but busy time of the year. It’s tough to be fully present, from the Thanksgiving meals gathered around the table straight on through to everything Christmas. But when the Christmas xv

Introduction presents are all unwrapped and the parties are over, when that last song has been sung, do we really arrive at the place we were hoping? Or are we merely surviving? What if you were open to God’s direction, you were listening, and you said yes to God? Well friend, maybe, just maybe, somebody else gets blessed! I imagine there are some of you wrestling with your God purpose! You want answers and you want direction, like yesterday! You have said right out loud to God: just make it plain! God, please give me a clear five-year plan! God, I need to know that I’m going to be okay. I need to know I’m living my best life possible.

Your God-purpose is going to call you into an openness to what God has for you every single day, one day at a time. Here’s the challenge: God’s only telling you to get up and go day by day by day. There is no five-year plan, there is no total security, there is no “life is going to be easy” or “get ready for comfortable”! When it’s God’s plan, you’ve got to trust God to fulfill it. When it’s God’s purpose for your life, you’ve got to trust God for courage to pull through. When it’s God’s plan, it’s going to be bigger than you. Your God-purpose is going to call you into an openness to what God has for you every single day, one day at a time. What does God want you to do today? Who are you called to pull out of the mud? Let’s practice saying no to merely surviving. Let’s say no to the so-so agenda we plan for ourselves. And let’s say yes to this journey of interconnectedness and fulfillment. Let us say yes to actively waiting for what God wants to birth in you and in me and through all of us. Because, like it or not, we are so connected. xvi

Introduction

We Are Connected Our God-purpose is bound up in every other person on the planet. We have an individual destiny, woven into a communal design! We cannot get away from the fact that we are intrinsically connected in a tangible and meaningful way. We are connected to one another and to this God child who was born two thousand years ago. We are interconnected to God’s story! Our lives are not just random. We are not islands. The God at work in the lives of Joseph, Mary, and their Son, our Savior, is the same God at work in our lives to break the cycles of struggle that have us bound up.

This unlikely Advent story is not about you or me or any one of us being healed in isolation. We are healed in community. This unlikely Advent story is not about you or me or any one of us being healed in isolation. We are healed in community. We find hope together as we hear children sing songs of the season. We understand the kingdom of God just a bit more when words are set to music, and we soak in the messages of truth and light in new ways. We are connected once again when together we sing familiar words both ancient and future in the hymn “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”! If there is one thing I have learned in these last pandemic years, it is that healing, the fulfillment of our collective purpose, cannot take place separate from the people around us. It is not just Jesus ‘n me. It’s Jesus, me, you, and everyone else. And what if we xvii

Introduction dared to acknowledge this gift of one another and set out to live more connected than we ever imagined? We cannot do faith alone; we are bound up together, connected as the body of Jesus. I need you and you need me. Are you ready to pour your life into the people around you? Are you ready to throw an extra pair of shoes into your back seat and listen for God to speak? Are your eyes and calendar open for an unlikely encounter? We are not rugged individualists determined to survive. We are interconnected faith followers of Jesus created to thrive, no matter what life brings our way. We are in this together. And I cannot wait to hear how God shapes and reshapes your unlikely story throughout this Advent season.

xviii

What If I Missed It?

Chapter 1 WHAT IF I MISSED IT?

Growing up, I was obsessed with pictures of Mary and baby Jesus. I collected prints of Renaissance paintings and ancient icons and taped them to the inside of my high school locker. While I was mystically drawn to the Madonna and child, it was a bonus to encounter a portrayal of the entire Holy Family. Typically, in a creche of the Nativity, huddled together in the glow of the strawfilled cave, Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus seemed pristine, otherworldly. This picturesque scene is and was a popular household display. Perhaps you felt the same way growing up. There was a bit of awe and wonder when looking at a classic Nativity set. But what about everybody else in the Christmas story? Ever wonder why your standard Nativity sets only include a handful of characters: Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, an angel, a sheep, maybe a cow or two? What about Uncle Zechariah and Aunt Elizabeth present at 3

An Unlikely Advent the manger? These B-players emerge as extras in God’s story, but could it be they have significantly more to teach us about the intersection of God’s story with ours? I wonder if perhaps we might find ourselves in these characters exactly because they are not so picture-perfect. They seem more accessible, more real, and grittier than the Holy Family. Real life! Real life is what I am after in this Advent journey. I want to plumb the depths of these other characters to understand their experience and how it might relate to ours. Even with centuries separating us, could these Advent sidekicks teach us about hope, love, joy, and peace? I believe they can. Today we start this journey with dreams.

God-Sized Dreams God puts dreams in all of us. It’s just that sometimes we find ourselves wavering, and we doubt the legitimacy of our dreams. You have a dream, a vision, a goal for your life, and in the waiting, you begin to wonder, is this even possible? Could this actually happen? Do I have what it takes? Perhaps over the last few years you have forgotten how to dream. There have been plenty of pandemic problems, distance delays, and a grab bag of straight-up cancellations. And it is no wonder with so much loss of potential, profit, and people we love, dreaming again seems, well, like an exercise in disappointment. I am an optimist by nature. I have spent most of my life deciding against the odds to take the risk and dream forward. Even in the middle of the pandemic, I was dreaming about my future. I was ready for a change—at least a change in scenery. That’s when I started talking with my mom about my plans for the future. 4

What If I Missed It? I asked my mom if she would consider taking a trip with me. It was January 2021, and I was dreaming of a place and space with a bit more sunshine, maybe a beach, or at least a beautiful body of water. January in Ohio is nearly always a shade of gray and I needed sunshine! And truth be told, I wanted to get away and escape pandemic life. My mom quickly said she was not interested in any of that, dashing my dreams for fun in the sun. She piped up and said, “Rachel, I am determined to go to the Holy Land before I die. It’s at the top of my bucket list.” “The Holy Land?” I questioned. “Yes, the Holy Land,” she said with dogged determination. “I’m not interested in going anywhere else!” Okay, Mom, tell me what you really think! “Who knows, Mom?” I piped back, “those kinds of opportunities come up from time to time for pastor types. Maybe we could go sooner than later.” “You know, Rachel,” my mom said wistfully. “I’ve always wanted to be a missionary, but I guess it was not in the cards.” “Yes, Mom, I know,” I answered. Now, somehow this trip of a lifetime to the Holy Land would be tied to my mother’s calling as a Christian who traveled throughout the globe on behalf of God. For my mom, being a missionary had seemed like a dream beyond her reach. As a teenager who gave her life to Jesus, she had aspirations of serving God throughout the globe. But those dreams just seemed impossible. For starters my mom had not flown on a plane since the summer of 1972 when she visited my dad while he was at Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas. My dad served in the United States Air Force, and they were soon to be engaged. 5

An Unlikely Advent It was young love, and Linda Lou overcame her fear of flying just to see my father. It was the one time in her life that she boarded a plane. My mom is not exactly the traveling type. She has not spent a lot of time beyond the boundaries of Hocking County, Ohio. Do not misunderstand what I am saying about my momma. She has the desire! These God dreams are in her heart. It is just that sometimes life happens, plans change, and those dreams— well, they are all but dashed. And sometimes people feel like they must give up on their dreams. My mom could not conceive of the combination of raising a family and working for God.

Giving Up on Your Dreams Perhaps you have a dream that has lived rent-free in your head and heart for a long time. You dreamed of a career practicing international law. Maybe you believed you would live in a space and place more luxurious, or at least warmer. You had plans for relationships, for marriage, for children, but it just did not seem like it was in the stars. You had a vision for yourself, your family, your community, or even the world, and well, it just didn’t take shape.

Waiting is active waiting with minds, ears, and hearts leaning in, tilted toward a hope-filled future. Advent is a season of waiting, but do not for a second think that this kind of waiting is a passive activity. Waiting is anything but passive. Even for you worrying types. Waiting is active waiting 6

What If I Missed It? with minds, ears, and hearts leaning in, tilted toward a hopefilled future. We actively wait, placing our trust and lives in God’s hands. And in this season of waiting, actively waiting for the coming Christ, we are a people of audacious hope. In Advent we expect the unexpected. The atmosphere is ripe for dreaming! And yet for many of us it is difficult to get ourselves through the pessimism of past problems, political pressures, family frustrations, and dreams deferred in order to hope for the future. And we are not alone. There are people in the Advent story who found themselves in a similar situation. Giving up on their dreams, they became steeped in a world of reality. What is actually possible in our ordinary lives? This was Zechariah and Elizabeth’s story. They had hopes and dreams for their future. Family seemed to be part of the formula, but the Bible tell us that they just never had children of their own. The Gospel of Luke tells the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth. They are not mentioned in Matthew, Mark, or John. Luke’s telling of the Advent story is just a shade different than that of Matthew. For starters, Luke wanted the reader to know who was in charge, who was seemingly in power. It was Herod the Great and a variety of others in the political atmosphere. Certainly, Luke himself seemed heavily influenced by the Roman way of life, until he wrote of his encounters with this Jew named Jesus that set the whole world on fire with the presence of God: In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly. But they were childless

An Unlikely Advent because Elizabeth was not able to conceive, and they were both very old. Once when Zechariah’s division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside. Luke 1:5-10

I imagine many of us have felt like Zechariah and Elizabeth. You had a vision and dream for your life and for whatever reason it just did not turn out the way you’d hoped. I imagine that through the decades this faith-filled couple was wondering, What if we missed it? They might have wondered if they missed their chance at having a family. Perhaps you have asked yourself a question. What if I missed my shot? What if I missed my opportunity of a good life? What if I missed out on a decent career? What if I missed a solid relationship? What if I missed it? The past has a funny way of playing tricks on our future. Too often we romanticize the past and ignore the possibilities of the present. Anytime my husband, Jon, begins to talk about his high school or college football days, I tease him by calling out “glory days.” He seems to fawn over the excitement of the past. But the truth is I too have fond memories of high school teammates and college races. In the summer of 2022, I found myself sorting through boxes of trophies and banners from high school and college. It had been eight years since I had placed those boxes in an upstairs attic, and I had all but forgotten they were there. Eight years spent at Ginghamsburg Church felt like a crucible of leadership. We navigated through beautifully horrific leadership transitions, devastating storms, a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, and the crushing pressures of COVID-19. And near the tail end of that 8

What If I Missed It? journey, we came to the other side to a diagnosis for our youngest child, the single most precious addition to our family in those eight years. Sarah was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that affects all the connective tissue in her body. Marfan syndrome had somehow randomly invaded her DNA. My husband took her to see a pediatric ophthalmologist. Her regular eye doctor was concerned about the cloudiness in our then fiveyear-old’s eyes. “She may have cataracts,” the doctor remarked. “Cataracts?” I questioned. It seemed impossible for a tiny child to have cataracts. She reassured my husband and me that it was possible. It was spring break, and my teacher husband took her to the appointment. They waited for what seemed like forever to see the doctor. So, when my husband texted, “doc believes Sarah has Marfan syndrome.” I was relieved. We have a possible answer! “Rachel, did you Google that?” Jon texted back. No, I had not Googled it. But when I did, I was a puddle on the ground. Not only could the disease affect her eyesight, but also every single piece of connective tissue in her body, including her heart. While it was not the exact reason for my packing my belongings and family and moving halfway across the state of Ohio, her diagnosis was the tipping point. All the future dreams I had for Ginghamsburg Church and my family were deferred. Sarah would not be deterred. That bundle of joy, all five years of her, was eager to step into Momma’s past and sort through my attic boxes. For Sarah, this seemed like a treasure chest of discovery, a version of her mother she did not quite understand and a version 9

An Unlikely Advent of myself I had nearly forgotten. There were running plaques and medals, an assortment of slides for my art portfolio as I had contemplated colleges of design. There were seven academic achievement awards I had zero recollection of receiving. No wonder I had so much trouble attempting to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life! Those were the glory days: high school academic achievements, medals won, and pictures drawn. “Mommy, I didn’t know you were an artist!” Sarah declared. “I was,” I remarked as she sorted through the paintings in my high school portfolio. These were and are my dreams deferred. Some days I still dream of being an artist, and yet it just does not seem to be in the cards. We totally can honor the past and celebrate our achievements. But when the past becomes the pinnacle of the present, we find ourselves paralyzed, staring into a future without possibilities. Moving is not easy, because it means change. And change is challenging. One Sunday afternoon, I was listening to National Public Radio where a neuroscientist was talking about our resistance to change. Even though our brains are constantly changing as we grow and develop, we human types tend to resist changing our minds. Our brains develop these neural pathways and they become content with what they know. It’s like the well-worn path in the woods or ruts that have been created driving the tractor between farm fields and buildings. The ruts get deep and it’s difficult to walk any other way. Like the ruts, these neural pathways get static. It’s hard for our brains to want to change. Hard, but not impossible! Sometimes we want to hold on to stories or narratives that make sense of our lives: the good, the bad, and the in-between. They are comfortable. These stories that we tell ourselves are 10

What If I Missed It? what we know. And our brains sort of hold on to them. We resist changing our minds. Our stories shape our identities. But when our stories distort our reality, they can keep us from moving forward. Friend, does it have to be that way? What happens when our life narrative becomes a barrier to our future? What happens if we refuse to change? We get stuck! And often fear is fueling that paralysis.

Sometimes we want to hold on to stories or narratives that make sense of our lives: the good, the bad, and the in-between. They are comfortable. These stories that we tell ourselves are what we know. Zechariah was stuck as well. And it took God showing up in Zechariah’s life to get him unstuck. Zechariah was one of a number of priests who served in Jerusalem at the Temple. The Temple took center stage in the lives of God’s people in Jerusalem. Each priest served one week in the Temple twice a year. Zechariah was performing his priestly duties when it happened that he was chosen by lot to burn incense in the Holy of Holies. This meant a once-in-a-lifetime trip into this sacred space. Not every priest was afforded the opportunity for this special service, and a priest could only be selected once in his entire life. Zechariah was not going to miss that shot. The process for burning incense was not complicated. Sure, there were very specific instructions: prayers to pray, incense to light, and a benediction to give the listeners in the Temple that day. 11

An Unlikely Advent The benediction was the sign that the ceremony was complete. It was an honor, and yet the ritual was simple and quick. Zechariah should have been in and out. But it was not simple and quick, not this time. Luke wrote that while Zechariah was performing the priestly rituals an angel of the Lord stood at the right side of the altar of incense. Can you imagine? A divine being just shows up unannounced in the middle of your unlikely story? Now I know we have these cute pictures of chubby cherubs in our mind, particularly when thinking of a story as sacred as the Christmas story. But angels seem to be anything but cute. Nearly every time a messenger of the Lord shows up unannounced people are afraid. Luke tells us: When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. But the angel said to him: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born. He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Luke 1:12-17

Certainly, that was not the announcement that Zechariah expected to receive that day in the Temple. He was gripped with fear. Whatever he witnessed terrified him to his core! I imagine many of us do not expect the God of the universe to show up at our workplace, and if God did, we too would be paralyzed with 12

What If I Missed It? fear. Zechariah questioned, How can I be sure of this? He did the math. He was old and his wife more seasoned as well (notice in the Scripture Zechariah did not claim that Elizabeth was old. Good man, Zechariah! Good man! Choose your words carefully!). Zechariah was overwhelmed, unsure, really skeptical about what the angel of the Lord was telling him. How was this even possible?

Scared Speechless The moment that God’s messenger appears to Zechariah, Zechariah was scared out of his mind. Perhaps he never expected God to show up, not in that way. I mean, Zechariah was in the most religious spot on the face of the planet, the Holy of Holies. But even religious types do not necessarily expect God to show up so profoundly and so personally. Let’s be honest, sometimes we too get so caught up in the religious routine that we forget to expect the unexpected. While we are worshipping week after week, we can become numb to certain God possibilities. Of course, we believe with God all things are possible. It is just that sometimes we do not imagine those possibilities are for us, our community, our church, our families, and ourselves. God shows up for other people all the time, but for us we are not so sure. We cling to the reality that is consistent, if not comforting. We begin to buy into the lie that we are the makers of our own destiny and that if God’s power and presence are part of the equation, it’s only demonstrated through our own constant faithfulness. We have to be faithful for God to show up. Zechariah and Elizabeth were certainly faithful. They followed the law and held on to a faith that kept them bound 13

An Unlikely Advent beautifully to community. Consistency is rarely a bad way to live. And yet something in the narrative, something in the regular routine blinded Zechariah to a future that could be different from his comforting norm. And fear has a funny way of squelching expectations. Fear has a way of paralyzing our present. What was Zechariah scared speechless about? Suddenly he couldn’t talk at all. Even though he was disciplined, and by all accounts he and his wife lived by the spirit of love, could it be that Zechariah did not see beyond what was right in front of him. He and his wife were childless, but this was about more than his immediate family. Zechariah’s people, his tribe, the community that held his identity was occupied and oppressed by the likes of the Roman Empire. They were living into the reality that occupation was right out their front door. Perhaps his fear was masking the hopelessness he felt. Hopeless because there was not a clear path forward for himself or God’s people. Maybe lament was the only vocabulary that seemed reasonable as Zechariah stepped into the Holy of Holies that day. I encounter people all the time who believe in God, but sometimes they do not believe in themselves. At the very least they are not expecting God to show up in their ordinary lives anytime soon. They have experienced too much pain to believe that God is present in their lives.

Sometimes when hope is unclear, God illumines a path, a dream forward. And in that moment of Zechariah’s life, it seemed that too much time had passed between prophetic messages and the 14

What If I Missed It? present. God’s revelation seemed like a spiritual currency that had all but dried up. And the best work that Zechariah could muster was to show up. Zechariah kept praying, continued to believe, and moved forward even when the future seemed a bit too hard, too limited to expect the unexpected. Perhaps the fear was the result of a dream dimmed by this suffering. How could he even begin to dream forward? Perhaps if he had just remembered God’s movement in the past—the way that God moved through God’s people. Sometimes when hope is unclear, God illumines a path, a dream forward.

Cracks Are Where the Light Floods In It is our human tendency to want to smooth over the rough edges of our story. Let us just eliminate all the confusions and pain. But what if the pain and confusion are only new ways we can see the beauty and experience the good? What if we understood that good wins when the light breaks through the cracks of our human experience? When we scroll through our news feeds it is difficult to reconcile the day-to-day struggles of life and a hopeful future. We need a bigger picture, a broader plan to make sense of our human experience. This is why we are united by a single human family. Our story begins in the Book of Genesis. In fact, that is what the word genesis means, the beginning. Zechariah was a priest, and it is presumable to believe that he knew God’s bigger story. This was the story of God of the universe choosing a single family to draw back to God. Three major religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, point to this family as their origin story. This promise of a 15

An Unlikely Advent new way to be family, a new way to be human, and a new way to move forward gave Zechariah and Elizabeth the hope that their dreams were possible! So, God chose a couple, first known as Abram and Sarai and later renamed Abraham and Sarah to birth his people. This couple had traveled from the land that they knew, Ur, to a foreign land called Canaan. When Abraham and Sarah stepped into the dream, God was determined to make their family and their descendants what is described in Genesis 12:2: “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.” There was just one small problem: Abraham and Sarah had zero children at the time. Does that sound familiar? Abraham and Sarah have parallel lives and stories to that of Zechariah and Elizabeth. And it had been twenty-five years since Abraham and Sarah made that move from Ur to Canaan. You can imagine that they are deeply sad, skeptical, and frustrated. Abraham and Sarah may even feel a bit forgotten. If you had traveled to a place you had never been, without family or community, perhaps you too would have wondered, Where are you God? I imagine many of you, particularly those in ministry, have made a similar move. I know I have had moments when I thought to myself, Are you sure, God? I am not sure I signed up for this! When life becomes overwhelming it can be difficult not to question the decisions we have made. Abraham and Sarah did what most human beings attempt to do when future dreams and plans are not going our way. We attempt to make life happen ourselves. Sometimes in our grief, we aggressively try to take control. Abraham and Sarah rush the promise, and in the process they abused a slave girl, Hagar. Hagar birthed a potential heir. Sarah perceived Hagar and her precious 16

What If I Missed It? baby, Ishmael, as a threat. It is the kind of Bible story that fills your heart and head with sorrow, wondering, why would Abraham and Sarah do such a thing? It is in this season of pain and disappointment that we find God paying Abraham and Sarah a visit. Three messengers of God appear to Abraham and Sarah near the great trees of Mamre. Abraham was minding his own business in the middle of the day when suddenly three figures appeared. Abraham hurried to offer the three messengers hospitality. “If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord, do not pass your servant by. Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way—now that you have come to your servant.” “Very well,” they answered, “do as you say.” Genesis 18:3-5

It’s the cracks in your life that allow the light to shine in. Abraham and Sarah have some major work to do in their relationship, in reconciliation, and in justice. And yet in the middle of their mess, three messengers come to visit. It was interesting that right off the bat, Abraham calls these visitors “my lord.” It was unclear as to whether the visitors are angels or human manifestations of God, but these three strangers have a holy mission, and somehow Abraham saw their potentially divine destiny. God has gathered at Abraham’s table. Let us be clear, hospitality is a big deal among the Hebrew people. It is not a bonus. Hospitality is not nice exchange between friends or even charging a fee for a stranger. Hospitality was understood as a way of life for God’s people. As we read through the Old Testament, we experience God’s presence through bread, 17

An Unlikely Advent sacrifice, meals, community, and family. There was always room around the table for family, but also for the stranger, the orphan, the immigrant, and the widow. The Old Testament language is strong concerning hospitality to those on the margins: “Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow” (Deuteronomy 27:19). And even in the New Testament there is this pull to welcoming in the stranger. Jesus himself said, “I was a stranger and you invited me in” (Matthew 25:35b). And in Hebrews 13 the writer declares, “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2). God has a habit of making room even for the messiest of human beings. But this is no mere dinner party. It’s a party with a purpose. Abraham asked his wife Sarah to help him with these preparations. Abraham was ready to roll out the red carpet for these messengers. He gave very specific instructions to knead and bake bread and to select the finest calf for butcher and preparation. And oh, do not forget the milk and curds! These strangers were going to have to wait a minute for the meal to be ready for their consumption. But the waiting gave Abraham the opportunity to be in conversation with these divine visitors. “‘Where is your wife Sarah?’ they asked him. ‘There, in the tent,’ he said. Then one of them said, ‘I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son’” (Genesis 18:9-10). This is no simple DoorDash! Abraham was pulling out all the stops for these strangers and they have a clear message for him. Do you remember the promise? The one that inspired you to leave everything you have ever known and travel to a foreign country to become God’s people? Abraham, do you remember that promise? 18

What If I Missed It? I know it has been a long time coming. I know you have wondered if God had forgotten you. But God has not forgotten you. Can you imagine how Abraham and Sarah must have been treated? Of course, they have doubt! Couple those doubts with gossip as the neighbors started to question why they moved so far in the first place. These neighbors are dream crushers: Why would these strangers inhabit our land? Is their so-called god going to help them now? Abraham and Sarah have boasted that they are going to be the mother and father of nations, and so far, they have zero children. They are either simply foolish or downright mad. Perhaps you have been there. You have believed that the move in location, career, in relationship was good, and maybe you thought you heard God. But time passed with no clear confirmation and the silence has you questioning, Was that you, God, or something strange that I ate? What do I do with this dream now?

Perhaps your story is not an exact match with their story, but certainly themes of our human condition begin to emerge. Themes of hope, dreams deferred, trust, abandonment, and dependence. We are only human after all. Abraham and Sarah are hanging on by their fingernails to a promise they barely remember receiving. Do you hear why this story is so important? Are you beginning to hear your own unlikely story in the story of Abraham and Sarah? Are you seeing 19

An Unlikely Advent yourselves in Zechariah and Elizabeth? Perhaps your story is not an exact match with their story, but certainly themes of our human condition begin to emerge. Themes of hope, dreams deferred, trust, abandonment, and dependence. We are only human after all. But God’s story does not stop there and neither does the story of Abraham and Sarah. Sarah seems to be listening from the tent the entire time. She was curious about these visitors. And she recognized the limitations of her age and Abraham’s as well. So she laughed at the thought of her giving birth to a child at her age. “After I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure?” Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son.” Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, “I did not laugh.” But he said, “Yes, you did laugh.” Genesis 18:12b-15

I can so relate to this. Why is it that when we get caught doing something we should not have done our first response is usually to hide? We come by that honestly, don’t we? When Adam and Eve did the very thing that God told them not to do, they hid from God. And in their hiding, shame reared its ugly head. They were naked and afraid. They did not want to face God. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” Genesis 3:9-11

What If I Missed It? When humans feel shame, we tend to hide and deny. Now I am not convinced that the angel was chastising Sarah for laughing. I believe this messenger just wanted to be clear, “You laughed Sarah, but the promise is still valid. Your laughing is not going to deter God from doing what God has already promised. God’s dream for you is still alive!” And before we blame Sarah too much for her laughter, remember that Abraham also laughed (Genesis 17:17). And who can blame them? Their dream was given almost twenty-five years prior, and they were old when they received the promise. The fear, the pain, the longing, the hopelessness, is all a part of their story. I love this story because it is Abraham and Sarah’s story, it is Zechariah and Elizabeth’s story, it is God’s story, and it is also our story. Could it be that connecting the dots between the dreams of Abraham and Sarah, and Zechariah and Elizabeth, reminds us of the arc of history and God’s amazing hopeful trajectory? Our story, our very messy and misunderstood human story, collides with our experience of the divine. You might be saying, well, that is great for Abraham and Sarah, and Zechariah and Elizabeth. But that is not great news for me. I am struggling to dream forward. I imagine you too are doing your best to put one foot in front of the other. Perhaps you too have experienced a moment where fear has rendered you speechless. Maybe it was taking the certification exam and failing it for the third time. Or it was being overlooked for the job promotion when the bills were piling up. Maybe it was after you had taken too many pregnancy tests to count. During all of these times and more we have all but lost our ability to lean in to hope. But God specializes in the realm of the unlikely. 21

An Unlikely Advent

Set Your Hopes High The angel Gabriel knows full well the prayers of God’s people and commanded Zechariah not to be afraid. Why? Because God is getting ready to birth a new promise in and through Elizabeth and him. And that new promise had a name and a destiny. Zechariah and Elizabeth’s son John (aka John the Baptist) would prepare God’s people for the coming of the Messiah. John had a clear job description. He’s going to be a big deal. But John’s purpose required sacrifice: no alcohol. John would be so full of the Holy Spirit that God did not want anyone to confuse his spiritual fervor with being drunk. His work would bring the people of Israel back to God. John would prepare the way of Jesus! The promise brought Zechariah fear, but not Elizabeth. Elizabeth set her hopes high. She does not seem to fear, but also has experienced the pain of disappointment. Then one day, when it seemed like all hope was lost, her husband has an encounter with a messenger of God. Zechariah was confused. The messenger’s announcement was unbelievable. Zechariah seemed doubtful, perhaps even skeptical, but not Elizabeth. Elizabeth did not seem to question. She certainly did not laugh like Abraham or Sarah, but rather rejoiced and spent time in joyful reflection. “‘The Lord has done this for me,’ she said. ‘In these days he has shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people’” (Luke 1:25). God has taken away Elizabeth’s disgrace. When Elizabeth was about to give birth to her son, the community gathered. I imagine many people in the community milling around in anticipation of what will transpire. Who will this child be? How will Zechariah respond? Elizabeth gives birth to the child that she names John, 22

What If I Missed It? Hebrew for “God is gracious.” Her disgrace was removed with God’s grace. And yet the community that surrounded Elizabeth in her birthing experience seemed to disapprove. John was not a family name. Those surrounding Elizabeth asked Zechariah to weigh in. Zechariah was still unable to speak when the child was born. And yet when asked for the child’s name, Zechariah wrote out the name John. And instantly, Zechariah was able to speak again! Names are powerful. In this Advent season as you gather around tables, some with friends and others with family, will you set your hopes high or will you live into old names? Family sometimes asks us to carry names or labels that limit or even harm us. What name do you carry to the table? Perhaps you have picked up a name for yourself. Or maybe you have had a friend label you, or even the community you find yourself in. I hate to put it in writing, but even church folk are known to give people less than helpful names.

So, let us set our hopes high. Living into Advent means living into the hope that good news is coming. But let me remind you, you are not a disgrace, you are not the black sheep, you are not the loser, and you are not the deadbeat. Friend, you are clothed in grace. You are a beloved child of the living God. God still plants dreams in our heads and hearts. God invites us to move forward toward a hopeful future. God gives new names. So, let us set our hopes high. Living into Advent means living into the hope that good news is coming. 23

An Unlikely Advent I cannot guarantee that you will have the opportunity to live out every dream you have ever had for your future. I certainly cannot predict whether every goal you have had for your life will be accomplished. But I can say this with conviction: living with a heavy dose of negativity is a crummy way to live. It is nearly a guarantee that fear will hold you hostage. We have a choice to make: cling to the negativity that sometimes is pervasive in our lives or set our hopes high. Could we be disappointed? Absolutely! But people who live with a relentless, faith-filled optimism pave their own way into an unlikely story and offer others that same hope in the process. They inspire us to believe and live differently.

Dream Forward We are able to dream forward! Throughout these pandemic years, I have encountered numerous people who have shifted jobs, changed careers, and questioned their entire vocations. They have been searching, longing for a bit of vocational guidance and hope. People are consulting everyone from spiritual directors to life coaches, counselors to even mystics to somehow figure out how to dream forward. I have a leadership coach, a message coach, and a therapist, because I want to be the healthiest version of myself. And I need help to dream forward. I need other voices in my life calling out the dreams of the past and helping me paint a picture of a new future. You have dreams living inside of you. Some of those dreams are seemingly broken dreams from your past. Human beings can hold on to those past dreams with dogged determination. But could it be that there’s life in the cracks of those broken dreams. Those broken bits when 24

What If I Missed It? examined and rearranged are reformed to make something new. It reminds me of the Japanese art kintsugi where broken pottery is remade by binding the shattered pieces together with precious metals like gold. You can take those broken bits and, with help, dream again into the future. Could it be that we’ve either held on so tightly to the broken bits of our dreams or even ignored them completely that we can’t see new art emerging from the rubble? At the core of who people are is not a desire for more power, but rather a deep need for more meaning. I wonder, are we church leaders teaching our people how to dream? Are we giving people the tools to dabble in a world of God possibilities? Do our people have permission to dream forward? For example, art does not have to be something that I leave on the shelf of my past dreams. What if I take my passion for art and apply it to the opportunities that God has already given me? Honestly I have this deep desire to begin sketching again, especially when I find myself hiking in the woods. I want to capture the beauty of God’s good creation and replicate the experience on paper.

But dreaming is not a season. People of all ages and stages are designed to dream forward. Am I scared? Of course. My perfectionism sometimes chokes out my ability to dream forward because I am afraid I will not be good enough. Maybe that’s your story. So many people are wondering if they are enough. They believe they are too old, too young, too tired, that life has passed them by, and they should step out of the dreaming season of their life. You can hear Zechariah’s 25

An Unlikely Advent voice protesting that he is not enough as he questions the angel of the Lord. I am too old for this, God. But dreaming is not a season. People of all ages and stages are designed to dream forward. We have our own version of life coaching in the church. We call it discipleship. This looks like Jesus followers helping other Jesus followers paint a God-centered picture for their future. We need one another to call out the dreams we see in each other. We need a messenger to say, Do not be afraid, God is with you. You can do this. You can dream forward, we can dream into the future together. Could it be that we struggle to help people dream forward because we too have lost hope. Church as we knew it has changed: online, in-person, and hybrid experiences challenged our pictures of the church. There is a seeming acceleration of the loss of people and influence in the communities we find ourselves in. Even if your local expression of church is growing, what “worked” before has lost its effectiveness. Each of these challenges is a barrier to dreaming into the future. The church of the future is going to be different. What great news! Different can be oh-so-good. I want to be a leader who gives people permission to dream. When we give people permission to dream, we experience church as a world of possibilities. It’s like a sandbox. When you are making a castle in a sandbox, you know it’s not going to last forever, but you give yourself permission to play, create, and dream of new worlds of possibility. Could we become spaces and places where people are given permission to play? Could churches gift our people with permission to try and fail and try and fail? Could we be dream builders rather than dream crushers? Do not cling to what was but rather let us dream forward together. 26

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Contagious Hope Dreaming forward requires contagious hope. When my mom and I rescheduled our trip to the Holy Land for late summer 2022, I was less than optimistic. Our trip had been canceled four times. In fact, I said to myself, until we land in Tel Aviv, I’m not going to believe we are actually going to the Holy Land. But in August, Mom and I packed our bags and headed for the airport. Our hope was reignited! We made our way from Dallas to Frankfurt and finally landed in Israel. A baggage delay gave my mom and me plenty of time to regroup and hang with our tour guide. Ordinary delays and disappointments are fertile ground for God to do an unlikely work. Sitting in the lobby with a lox sandwich and Turkish coffee in hand, I felt like a kid in a candy store. Who receives hours of oneon-one attention from your guide before the trip even truly begins? At first we made small talk, but then I decided to interview our guide. We went deep quickly. We talked at length about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. David was a Palestinian Christian, a brother in Christ. I had questions about American exceptionalism, that is, the belief that the United States is particular and special in the world, and how many people who travel to the Holy Land come with a false sense of a grandiose self. I also asked him about his life, faith, and his perceptions of Christianity particularly in the United States. David talked about a lack of humility. That some American Christians have gone as far as to decide who is in and who is out because we have made ourselves out to be God. That stung a little. I was curious and so I asked, “David, what frustrates you the most about Christians in the United States?” 27

An Unlikely Advent “Blind faith,” he responded. “Hatred is fueled by blind faith.” Certainly, there are a host of opinions and political conversations swirling around the Middle East conflict. So, when I asked David if he was afraid of living in Israel, he said no. He was not afraid. Sure, David had family hurt and even killed in the conflict, yet he was not afraid. His response surprised me. If I lived in this kind of daily tension, I would live in fear. His determination was inspiring. His disposition was so hopeful. I asked, “So then, David, what gives you such hope?” “I find hope in change,” he said. “When people come and experience this land for what it is, the people for who they are, when others come and see our land with their own eyes and their minds are changed. It gives me hope! Change gives me hope.” We are going to have to work to change our minds. Change is challenging. And yet followers of Jesus are going to have to change to give people hope!

In order to help one another dream forward, to dream new God possibilities, hope is the first step. Hope is contagious. The angel infused Zechariah and Elizabeth, and by extension God’s people, with hope. We need hope. In order to help one another dream forward, to dream new God possibilities, hope is the first step. When we listen to one another’s stories, when we feel each other’s suffering, we see a new generation of Jesus followers weed through all the political jargon and have the courage to see people as people. It gifts us hope and, in the process, we are changed. We begin to believe that if 28

What If I Missed It? God can rewrite the stories of other people, God can rewrite our unlikely stories as well. We become a birthplace of hope. Hope is what we all long for. Hope that dreaming again is possible. Hope that the future can and will look different. Hope that we can learn to trust again. Hope for a new story. Trust that God can rewrite our unlikely stories.

Your Unlikely Story God specializes in unlikely stories. God met an old man in the middle of a sacred space to open his heart and his eyes to new dreams for him, Elizabeth, and God’s people. God gave Zechariah the entire time of Elizabeth’s pregnancy to remember God’s promises for the future, to reclaim broken dreams, and to be ready to dream forward. If God can rewrite their unlikely story, God can rewrite ours as well. But if we are not careful, we can miss it. We miss future dreams by holding on to the broken bits, by losing our imaginations, and by refusing to have our minds changed. It’s scary to dream forward like Zechariah and Elizabeth. What if something bad happens? What if life doesn’t work out? Fear paralyzes us, robbing us of our potential, destroying new possibilities, and leaving us with old anxieties. But God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, love, and selfdiscipline. We have not missed it! God is still at work, writing an unlikely story in you. Ageism is real, but God’s plan has no end date. Infertility is a dream crusher, but God weaves new and creative possibilities. Perhaps you are a person whose finances seem futile, but God can make a way where there seems to be no way. You put a name on 29

An Unlikely Advent yourself, “I am not enough,” but the God of all wisdom is your salvation. Your dreams may feel unimportant, but God’s path moves way beyond what you can hope or imagine. Dreaming forward feels too risky, but Jesus says, “It is I; don’t be afraid” ( John 6:20). You are afraid that you messed everything up, but the people walking in darkness have seen a great light. You do not know where to start, and yet Jesus invites all who are weary and weighed down to simply come to him. Let God rewrite your unlikely story. Dream again! God is no cosmic Santa Claus. Humans do not receive everything we have ever wanted, yet there are dreams in our head and in our hearts that God wants to creatively partner with us to make happen. What are you dreaming about these days? What could happen with an innovative partnership? What dreams could come to fruition? Could you become a person of possibility? Could your church and its leadership give people permission to play? Whether you are twelve, twenty-two, or the age of Zechariah and Elizabeth, there is a God possibility in each one of us. It is time for us in this Advent season to let God rewrite our unlikely stories.

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Heaven and Earth Advent and the Incarnation Copyright © 2023 Abingdon Press All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission can be addressed to Rights and Permissions, The United Methodist Publishing House, 810 12th Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37203-4704 or e-mailed to permissions@abingdonpress.com. Library of Congress Control Number: 2023935972 978-1-7910-2903-6 Scripture quotations unless noted otherwise are from the Common English Bible. Copyright © 2011 by the Common English Bible. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.CommonEnglishBible.com.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS Introduction: God Taking Time for Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Chapter 1. Meanwhile (Mark 13:24-37). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 2. Surprised (Mark 1:1–8). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Chapter 3. Light ( John 1:6-8, 19-28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Chapter 4. Rejoice (Luke 1:26-55) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

INTRODUCTION

God Taking Time for Us Happy New Year! That’s right. It’s Advent, the Christian New Year. As the world’s year ends, the Christian year begins. In December, the world wearily plods toward the termination of another year. Days grow shorter, nights get longer. Welcome 2024! Sounds as exciting as Welcome 2014, or 2004. One year comes, another goes. What’s changed? Who cares? We’re still stuck with things as they are, which too closely resemble things as they always have been. There is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Not much new to toast in the new year. Congratulations. You are one year older! Rejoice! vii

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No wonder that New Year’s Eve parties are known for overconsumption of alcohol. Unhappy New Year. Take a sledgehammer to your brain so you won’t think about the beginning of yet another year. Why make New Year’s resolutions? Our resolve won’t last past Super Bowl Sunday. We’d like to put aside old behaviors and take up new, healthy habits, to make the new year a time for fresh beginnings. Still, we suspect there’s a good chance that the new year will resemble the old. Same old you. Tiresome old me. Stuck. Then the church gives us Advent, the beginning of the Church Year, four weeks to take time, mark time, and make time differently from the way the world keeps time. The appointed Advent scriptures are an answer to a number of New Year’s questions: Are we ending or beginning? Are our human efforts the only agency in history? Have we come to the end of the road, or is something new afoot? Is it the same old thing, or a fresh start? Are we stuck, abandoned to our own devices? Or is it possible that God might show up and disrupt, intervene, shake up, and take time for us? It’s not within our own power to make a fresh start. If we’re to have a future different from the past, it must come as a gift, something not of our devising. What we need is a God who refuses to be trapped in eternity, a Creator who is not aloof from our time. We need a God who not only cares about us but who is willing to show up among us and do something with us, here, now. viii

God Taking Time for Us

Good news! Advent, marking the church’s New Year, says, in a number of different ways, that’s just the sort of God we’ve got. Reflecting on some of the Gospel readings appointed for Advent, let’s take time to meditate upon the God who has, in the advent of the Babe of Bethlehem, Mighty Savior, Light of the World, taken time for us. Jesus’s name means “God saves,” which is a Bible way of saying that Almighty God has turned toward us. God is not confined in heaven. God stoops toward us, intervening, showing up when least expected and in ways that surprise. All in God’s good time. Advent is God taking time from us by making time for us. It’s Advent. You’ve got four weeks to adjust to the jolt of God taking time for us. So brace yourself to welcome the God you didn’t expect, the God who climbs down to us because we couldn’t climb up to God. Ready or not, God is on the way. Will Willimon

Chapter

Meanwhile

CHAPTER 1

Meanwhile “In those days, after the suffering of that time, the sun will become dark, and the moon won’t give its light. The stars will fall from the sky, and the planets and other heavenly bodies will be shaken.Then they will see the Human One coming in the clouds with great power and splendor. Then he will send the angels and gather together his chosen people from the four corners of the earth, from the end of the earth to the end of heaven.... “But nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the angels in heaven and not the Son. Only the Father knows. Watch out! Stay alert! You don’t know when the time is coming. It is as if someone took a trip, left the household behind, and put the servants in charge, giving each one a job to do, and told the doorkeeper to stay alert.Therefore, stay alert! You don’t know when the head of the household will come, whether in the evening or at midnight, or when the rooster crows in the early

Heaven and Earth morning or at daybreak. Don’t let him show up when you weren’t expecting and find you sleeping.What I say to you, I say to all: Stay alert!” (Mark 13:24-27, 32-37)

Jesus—on the way out of the temple on that last visit—takes time to predict that in a short while the beloved, magnificent temple will be utterly destroyed (Mark 13:2). In Jesus’s longest sermon in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus rants that not one stone will be left on another. Imagine the shock among the faithful when they heard Jesus speak of the destruction of the building that was built to look eternal. The grand temple, meant to appear as if it had always been here and always would be, according to Jesus would very soon cease to exist. More bad news. Jesus expands the apocalyptic (apocalypse = revelation), earth-shattering predictions beyond the temple: In those days, after the suffering of that time, the sun will become dark, and the moon won’t give its light.The stars will fall from the sky, and the planets and other heavenly bodies will be shaken. (Mark 13:24-25)

Advent begins with apocalyptic talk of the world’s end. Our cherished religious institutions, beautiful creations, and time-honored traditions will “in those days,” in “that time” be dismantled, the whole cosmos shaken. Stars and planets, so reassuring in their constant courses, will be dislodged, turned upside down, deconstructed, all shook up. My Lord, what a morning, when the stars begin to fall. (African American spiritual)

Meanwhile

We claimed that we wanted Advent, said that we yearned for God to come to us. We prayed that God would descend from heaven to us. But when God took us seriously and actually came down among us, God’s Advent was so earthshaking that many ran for cover. Trouble is, we wanted God on our terms, not God’s. We wanted God quietly and gently to slip in beside us, not kick in the door, blow the house down, tear up our temples, and shake us up. The prophet Isaiah pled, during one of the many difficult days in Israel’s history, “If only you would tear open the heavens and come down!” (Isaiah 64:1). But Jesus speaks of God’s coming as an event that tears up not just heaven, but the whole world. Be careful what you pray for.

SHAKEN Most of us have been conditioned to think that church is personal. Just Jesus and me. So much of our praise music is packed with first-person pronouns. I. Me. My. Mine. Religion is a private matter, something just between the two of us. Church is where we go, if we go, to have some personal time with a God who sometimes gives us assistance with our individual problems. “What does that have to do with me?” is the question that’s put to every sermon. “What’s in it for me?” Therefore it’s a jolt to be told, on the First Sunday of Advent, that when God at last turns toward us, God is about more than mere healing, moral renovation, or a helpful spiritual nudge for 5

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individuals. God’s intentions are no less than cosmic: heaven and earth shaken, darkened sun and moon and stars falling from the sky.

God is about more than mere healing, moral renovation, or a helpful spiritual nudge for individuals. God’s intentions are no less than cosmic: heaven and earth shaken, darkened sun and moon and stars falling from the sky. Powerful, privileged people (like most of us North American mainline Christians) get nervous when the talk turns edgy apocalyptic. Such highly charged, poetic language sounds unsophisticated, primitive, even fundamentalist. What would my sophisticated friends, who already think this church stuff is whacko, think of me if they heard Jesus on the world’s end? And after all, down through the ages, those Christians who took Jesus’s predictions literally, thinking that they had come up with a date for the end of the world, have always been wrong. Right? Don’t flatter yourself that you are put off by Jesus’s apocalyptic predictions because you are so sophisticated, modern, and urbane. People on top, well-fed and happily ensconced, tend always to 6

Meanwhile

believe that this world is as good as it gets. Don’t pray for change; work the world as it is to your advantage and privilege. Church is where we come to nail things down. The Christian faith is a primitive technique for holding on to what you’ve got. Stop whining about your troubles in the present; cease dreaming about the future. Adjust. This is as good as it gets. The best of times. Learn to be happy with things as they are. Steady, upward progress is easier on the psyche than abrupt death of the old and birth of the new. So the church plods along as always, for two thousand years brushing off Jesus’s talk of the sky falling and the sun being extinguished, reassuring ourselves. Relax. Jesus doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Didn’t happen then and won’t happen now. Jesus, keep your disruptive, earthshaking apocalyptic visions to yourself. Then came COVID-19, the nightmarish body counts on the nightly news, impotent old men refusing to vacate high places, trouble in the streets, broken glass, conspiracy theories, revolutionary rumblings among the young, dire predictions by Fox News, fear on the right and the left. Get yourself a gun. Cower behind locked doors. The penny dropped. Jesus’s apocalyptic prophecies about the end began to make sense. When things are going well for me personally—my children are well fed and my days are reasonably sunny; I’m secure in my gated community, clutching my 401(k) to my heart, eating organic, and working out at the gym now and then—I’m not too concerned about others whose needs are greater than mine. 7

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I take out an insurance policy, purchase an alarm system, and hold on to what I’ve got even more tightly. It’s disconcerting to have Jesus say to us, as Advent begins, that this world (that we’ve worked reasonably well to our advantage) is terminal. It’s scary to hear Jesus announce that we are profoundly unsafe. Texts like Mark 13 explain why most of our churches bolt the pews to the floor, the furnishings are heavier than they need to be, and the building is made to look five hundred years older than it really is. This is church twisted into a means of keeping our world safe from the cosmic shakings of Jesus. Plodding through the order of worship, seated row upon row in our fixedin-place pews, singing familiar hymns in unison without missing a beat, huddled with folks like us, beginning and ending right on time, secures us from the possibility of a God who just can’t leave us be. “Lord, we didn’t mean what we said when we asked you to come down and save us. Just give us some helpful guidance whereby we might be improved rather than saved. Better still, why don’t you just leave well enough alone?” Advent scripture says that our stratagems for being left alone won’t work because of who God is and what God is up to. First, God is relentless—fecund Creator who didn’t just begin the world and then retire. God keeps working with the world, bringing something out of nothing, light out of darkness, and form out of chaos, birthing a new you out of the old. There are many millennia of our well-documented human screwups, and still God’s not done with us yet. 8

Meanwhile

God keeps working with the world, bringing something out of nothing, light out of darkness, and form out of chaos, birthing a new you out of the old. Second, God is love. Love’s not love that abandons the beloved. There’s much that we don’t know about God, but this we know for sure from reading nearly any verse of scripture: God is determined to find a way to love us, to converse with us, to fulfill God’s promises to us, even if God’s got to rock our world in order to get the love that God wants. Should the true and living God be turning toward us, there are bound to be jolts and bumps, some shaking along the way. Something must die in order for anything to be born. The first name for Christians was the Way (Acts 9; 19; 22)—people on the way toward God, or God making a way toward us, take it either way. We’re not where God wants us to be, not by a long shot. “We don’t have a permanent city here, but rather we are looking for the city that is still to come” (Hebrews 13:14). If we’re going to follow Jesus, we must learn to sit lightly on present arrangements. Standing on the sidewalk before a storefront ministry for and with the homeless that she had managed for two decades, I asked the manager, “How have you been able to keep at such demanding ministry for so long?” 9

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She waved her hand over the gray ruin that was that part of the city and said, “Scripture keeps reminding me that all of this is temporary. God refuses to let what we’ve made of this town be eternal. Bad news for the guys who own those buildings and run the city; good news for folks who sleep on the streets.” What can we expect of God? A homeowner sleeps, secure in his stuff (Matthew 24:43, read the First Sunday of Advent, Year A). During the night, the proprietor awakes. A thief has kicked in his door, invaded his cozy alliance with the status quo, broken in and ripped off everything. Jesus warns us to live as if all we think is ours, safe and sound, is about to be ripped off. Losers, watch out, wake up! God the Thief, the Great Rip Off, not the most flattering divine image, to be sure. Good news or bad? Much depends on how tightly you’re holding on to your stuff when you receive the news. Jesus apocalyptically strides out of the temple and into the world, letting the disciples in on an open secret: God is launching a great invasion to take back what belongs to God. A new world breaking into the old. A whole lot of shakin’ going on. Spoiler alert: A few days after this announcement of the end of the temple in Mark 13, Jesus shook even the tight grip of death. In Jesus’s cross and resurrection, Jesus didn’t just come back from the dead, he also turned time on its head. Which is probably why Matthew (27:51-52) says that when Jesus on the cross breathed his last breath, rocks split, the earth heaved, and tombs were broken open. Three days later, when Jesus walked forth from the tomb, the earth violently shook and the 10

Meanwhile

stone rolled away. Jesus, in his death and in his resurrection, an earthquake. Or, as Paul said, trying his best to explain the Resurrection to thickheaded King Agrippa (Acts 26:26), “This didn’t happen secretly or in some out-of-the-way place.” This thing—the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus—is cosmic, worldshaking, time-disrupting. God won’t be tucked away in your heart, or confined to an hour at church on Sunday morning, or limited to matters personal and private. God thinks God owns it all and God is going to get back what belongs to God. Apocalyptic Jesus refuses to allow God to be used as the cement of social conformity or to have the gospel trimmed down to common sense. Buttoned-down, mainline Christianity has always been nervous about Jesus’s apocalyptic talk. Those of us who have successfully scrambled our way to the top find the gospel easier to manage when it’s toned down to soothe the anxious consciences of those of us who benefit from things as they are. But to people on the bottom or at the margins, all who are paralyzed and hopeless from fear, oppressed by the system, trapped in inescapable prisons, Jesus’s apocalyptic is good news. Help is on the way. God is taking time for us. Apocalyptic is good news because it’s not simply about ending; it’s also beginning. Jesus speaks of dismantling and deconstruction to alert us to the birth of something new. God’s creativity doesn’t end at Genesis; dismantling and disruption presage New Creation. The psalmist sings, 11

Heaven and Earth God is our refuge and strength, a help always near in times of great trouble. That’s why we won’t be afraid when the world falls apart, when the mountains crumble into the center of the sea, when its waters roar and rage, when the mountains shake because of its surging waves.... Come, see the LORD’s deeds, what devastation he has imposed on the earth— bringing wars to an end in every corner of the world, breaking the bow and shattering the spear, burning chariots with fire. (Psalm 46:1-3, 8-9)

“Times of great trouble” can be, in God’s hand, seasons of deliverance, though there may be some “devastation” and “shattering” in the meanwhile. Bad news for those who’ve trusted in the bow, spear, and chariot; good news for those who’ve got no refuge and strength except God. 12

Meanwhile

The Lord is busy. “Times of great trouble” can be, in God’s hand, seasons of deliverance, though there may be some “devastation” and “shattering” in the meanwhile. Bad news for those who’ve trusted in the bow, spear, and chariot; good news for those who’ve got no refuge and strength except God. We preachers tend to value stability, continuity, order, and placidity in our congregations. We worry about those who are discontent with things as they are, troublemakers who speak out and act up, grumblers who are unhappy with the church’s status quo. We ought to be more worried about all those who are just bored to death, those who don’t walk out of church in a huff but quietly quit attending because they’ve given up on anything new happening, anything disconcerting being said. For these malcontents, a church rumble now and then would be a welcomed sign of life. So here comes Jesus in Mark 13 speaking of heavens broken open, quotidian cycles ended, the earth convulsing, and the whole creation heaving. “Jesus, give us a word of hope before you go.” Mark 13 is the word Jesus spoke, wanted or not. We liked it when Jesus urged us to love one another, to welcome the little children, consider the lilies, offer a cup of water. But when Jesus goes apocalyptic, well. . . . A billboard outside of town proclaims “The Bible Has the Answer to All Your Questions, It’s the Key to All Your Problems.” Really? I know people who could say that they didn’t have tough problems or perplexing questions until they started reading the 13

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Bible. Much depends on what you define as your problems and what you would accept as solutions. Yet, be honest now, is there not something within you that yearns to be all shook up? “I like Joe,” a man said of his preacher, “but he’s no great preacher. Hard to follow. And our choir? It never was much; but, after the pandemic, our choir is nothing but a few aging sopranos and one rickety, former tenor.” I asked the obvious question. “Why do you still hang in there?” He responded, “I’m still attending that church because a few years ago, one Sunday, as the sermon was ending, just before the last hymn, it was like God grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, shook me up and down, took hold of me, and changed my world forever. God hasn’t repeated that in years. But God could. That’s why I show up on Sunday, hoping that God might light that fire again.”

HERE COMES GOD Then they will see the Human One coming in the clouds with great power and splendor.Then he will send the angels and gather together his chosen people from the four corners of the earth, from the end of the earth to the end of heaven. (Mark 13:26–27)

On most days, the majority of people in my church can solve most of our problems and meet most of our challenges on 14

Meanwhile

our own. Sure, we’ve got our issues, but just get the right people in government, or find the wise counsel from some guru, come up with a workable solution to what ails us, and we can save ourselves by ourselves. Pity those who have fewer resources, or less freedom, or too little money. But maybe, with hard work, grit, and ambition, they can be just as self-sufficiently godless as the rest of us. While channel surfing one Sunday, I dropped in briefly on sermons in four churches. Here’s a one-sentence summary of each: (1) What you don’t know about personal trauma can kill you. Here’s what you need to think about when the world has been bad to you. (2) There’s enough for everybody if we just had better logistics. Shame on you if you’re not working for better food distribution. (3) If you aren’t voting for control of guns, particularly automatic weapons, you are part of the problem. Don’t you want to be the solution? (4) We have got to step up and stand up to the radical gay agenda. There’s nothing more important than getting godly (i.e., Republican) men (and I mean men) on the Supreme Court. Notice anything missing in those sermons? God. Church is where we come to be reminded of our responsibilities, to listen to our better angels, to step up and do something about our problems. It’s all about us. Thus we show up on Sunday to receive our to-do list for the week: “Here are all the things wrong with the world today. Come back next week and I’ll give you another list. It’s up to us to set the world right or right won’t be done. Stop wasting time asking God to come to your aid. Get busy!” 15

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Or else the sermon is where we are given tips for selfimprovement: “Here are four biblical principles that, if you follow them, will give you a happy marriage.” Or “Want to feel better about yourself? Diets, cosmetics, and workouts can only take you so far. While the Bible could not care less about most of your contemporary fixations, as a preacher, I’m an expert on human relations so let me tell you what you can do to have a more positive self-image. Write this down!” Who needs God to help you be the you that you want you to be? Maybe we limit Christian concerns to the personal, individual, and private because, not knowing how to fix the world, we try to modify ourselves, which, you know if you’ve ever tried to do something to change yourself by yourself, is absurd. Still, we try. God’s up there in heaven; we’re down here on earth. Maybe there was a day when we could expect divine intervention, but that was a long time ago. We couldn’t get the modern world going without first securing ourselves safe from God’s agency. Beginning in the seventeenth century, we attempted to make a world in which God wasn’t needed and didn’t matter, a clockwork cosmos protected from divine incursions. God, stay up there so we can be free to handle things as we darn well please down here. If we can just research, develop, and organize, we can control the world. Though we can’t (yet) control the weather, we can at least predict it. Given enough time and government funding, maybe we can control that too. Look at us, we’ve got the whole world in our hands. 16

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We can’t have God showing up and disrupting our wonderfully well-functioning, modern machine of a world. Back in Bible times (Mark 13) people needed God to do for them some of the many things they were powerless to control. Not us. We don’t pray to end a pandemic; we develop the drugs to stop the virus. We don’t ask God to stop Putin’s aggression, we send in the drones.We can do anything we put our minds to. I don’t beg God to give me a more positive attitude toward life; I take a pill. Look at us. Sure, there are still problems. Our vaunted human development also destroyed the environment. Some of our wars on disease created new diseases. Occasionally we had to destroy a town in order to save it. Now and then, things didn’t turn out as we had planned. If Putin would only behave. If people would just wash their hands and eat organic. Still, there’s only us to save the world or the world won’t be saved. God is up there and we are down here. Roll up your sleeves, get organized, get busy.

If things are set right between us and God, God’s got to do it. Then comes the First Sunday of Advent and Jesus insists on talking about God rather than us. Behind this strange, interventionist, apocalyptic talk is a countercultural claim: If things are set right between us and God, God’s got to do it. The same Creator who lovingly created the world must keep creating, keep overcoming the darkness with light, continue 17

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to push back the threatening chaos bringing something out of nothing or we are utterly without hope. “How did you get into church planting?” I asked the young pastor. There we stood, in a once-abandoned, now renovated, former crack house that was now aptly named Church of the Second Chance. “In my last church, I grew so tired of the triviality of it all, the pettiness,” he explained. “We weren’t much more than a friendly, congenial club of like-minded, middle-class folks. I wanted to try something so big, so out-of-the-box that if God wasn’t in it, if God refused to bless it, we’d fall flat on our faces. Turns out, we have a more resourceful God than I dared to imagine.” The deistic God of the philosophers, a minimalist, inactive, unobtrusive, noninvasive, unrevealing God is about as much of God as we moderns can take. Jesus the teacher of morality, a really nice person who loved lilies and was kind to children and people with disabilities; Jesus the all-affirming, never-judging friend who always tells you what you want to hear. No, says apocalyptic Jesus. This Jesus, named God Saves, is a peripatetic, wild Jew from Nazareth who won’t stay confined within our boundaries for God. He comes to cast fire on the earth, tear apart families (Matthew 10:35), topple kingdoms, and thereby offer us a refashioned world we could never create by ourselves. Apocalyptic Advent accuses us not of having asked too much of God, but rather of having settled for too little. Many of our congregations have limited themselves to that which human 18

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effort alone can accomplish and trimmed down our prayers to the purely personal. “God, here are a few things, mostly related to my health, that I need help with in the coming week,” rather than daring to pray as Jesus taught us, “Bring in your kingdom so that your will is done on earth as it’s done in heaven.” Bring it on, Lord! I came across a sermon by a preacher from Houston who preaches to more people than have ever listened to my sermons. I won’t use his name. That would be unprofessional. His sermon was titled “How to Get Close to Heaven” or “What You Need to Do to Get Noticed” or “Hey, We’re Down Here Pedaling as Fast as We Can.” Something like that. The preacher said that you can’t just show up at church.You’ve got to prepare yourself. Put yourself into the right frame of mind. Cultivate a teachable spirit. Stop taking potshots at the preacher. Forgive the off-key choir. On Saturday, ask yourself, “What do I need most in my life?” “Which problems do I need fixed?” (I muttered to myself, “Lots of luck, Joel. It’s all I can do just to get my folks to show up on Sundays. They’re not going to do homework!”) Notice anything missing from the preacher’s sermon (and my response)? God. On the First Sunday of Advent, Mark 13 and Jesus insist that we talk about God rather than ourselves. Our Deistic, detached, alleged-to-be-loving-but-mostly-inactive deities are exposed for what they are: a vain, modern attempt to protect ourselves from the intrusions and judgments of a living, active, real God. 19

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“You better try hard to believe that God is still active in creation,” said the noted Christian environmentalist at the Saving the Earth conference. “Set out to end global warming or make a significant impact on carbon emissions, it won’t be long until you see the futility of your efforts. Recycling your bottles and cans won’t get you to your goal. Despair sets in. You’ll give up. You must believe that God loves the world and is still caring for the world in order for you to keep working for the world.You’ve got to know that you work with the grain of the universe, that your efforts to clean up the mess we’ve made are not the only thing that’s going on, or you’ll quit.” Fred Craddock told of a young preacher who made a reluctant pastoral visit to an older member of his congregation who was in the hospital in the last days of her life. He entered the sick room and there she lay, her head back on the pillow. He could hear her gasping for breath. He resolved not to sap her strength with a long visit. After initial pleasantries, he asked, “Why don’t we pray? What would you like me to pray for?” Between her wheezes she said, “That ...I’ll ...be healed, of course.” He sighed. Then he prayed something like, “Lord, if it be thy will, please deliver this sister from her illness and pain. But if it is not thy will, we pray that you would be with her, that you would help her to better accept her situation, however this turns out, etc. Amen.” The moment he ended his prayer, the woman’s eyes opened. She lifted her head, then she sat up. She threw her feet over the 20

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side of the bed. “I think I’m healed,” she exclaimed before a dumbfounded pastor. “Yes. I feel strong. I’m healed!” The young man stood stupefied as he watched her get up and trot down to the nurses’ station, proclaiming, “I’m healed!” The pastor left the room and staggered down the hospital steps without a word. When he got back to his preachermobile, he put his hand upon the door, looked up to heaven and shouted, “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” How many Christians are languishing in the pews, quietly hoping, praying that even in their aggressively bright, cheerful, upbeat churches a few stars may fall, their souls shaken, and they be given some new beginning with God?

How many Christians are languishing in the pews, quietly hoping, praying that even in their aggressively bright, cheerful, upbeat churches a few stars may fall, their souls shaken, and they be given some new beginning with God? Funny how the Christmases past that I most vividly remember were those when there was some unexpected disruption of our plans—the Christmas Eve blizzard when we took in a stranded traveler; the year that my uncle, on his way to 21

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see us, had to be hospitalized; the Christmas when I had to bang on my neighbor’s door in the middle of the night and ask for help putting together the gym set for the kids. A while back an Anglican priest came to see me. He had read some of my work and said he wanted to tell me about his momentous move. (We lowly Methodists love it when Anglicans ask us for advice.) He told me a story I’ve heard from others: beginning ministry with enthusiasm and spirit, then gradually suffocating in the muck and mire of the trivialities of congregational life; becoming bored, stalled; and now having decided to leave parish ministry. “I’m telling them Wednesday night at the vestry. And no amount of begging is going to get me to stay,” he said. We had prayer and then I sent him on his way, asking him to keep me posted. A few weeks later I realized I hadn’t heard from the poor man. I called him. “Oh that,” he replied. “I’m still here, happily,” he said. “Really? You’re staying? Why?” “Well, we went through the agenda for the vestry meeting. Then I said, ‘I have an announcement. I’m leaving the ministry.’ Tears and gasps. ‘I used to love being a priest but we just spent an hour debating the repaving of the church parking lot! I loved ministry, but this is not what I was called to do. I’m out.’” Then he said the oldest member of the vestry, a septuagenarian in a pink pantsuit, said, “You mean there is something that you felt God was calling you to say or to do that you haven’t said or done because of us? We’re holding you back from creative, courageous ministry? I think I’ve heard all your sermons this 22

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past year and I don’t recall anything that suggested you were unhappy with the things as they are around here. Let me get this straight, we are keeping you from doing what God is calling you to do?” He said he gulped and replied, “Well, we’d have to take a hard look at who we are and what we’re doing. Admit the time we waste in pointlessness. We’d need to recruit some new leadership. Take a look at our congregation and who’s not here and how God might help us to reach them.” “‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Anybody here opposed to that?’” “We had the first honest conversation in my four years at that church. There were tears, truth, a spirit not of our devising, and sometime just before eleven that night, even though we’re Anglicans, we got born again.” How many congregations are stuck in the mire of the mundane, boring themselves to tears, awaiting God to give them the life-giving, heavenly jolt that could give them a future?

WHEN? From the first, it’s never been enough for some to hear Jesus say that God is coming to shake things up; they’ve demanded to know, when? Jesus is not clear about exactly what will happen in that earthshaking, star-falling Advent of the Lord. But he is definite that the timing is not up to us (Mark 13:32-37). Even though Jesus warned us against speculation on a time line for God’s promised apocalypse, down through the years, many have been disappointed that God doesn’t work on our schedule. 23

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From what I’ve seen as a pastor, waiting for God to show up is one of the most challenging aspects of staying in love with God. Lots of Christians may believe in an interventionist, intrusive, active God, yet their problem is that God takes God’s own sweet time to do so. They know that God loves and cares, but what they need, in the worst sort of way, is for God to love and care for them now. The cancer that won’t go away. The divided family that refuses reunion.The church that can’t scrape up the funds to live another year. The war that won’t end. The wound that doesn’t heal. Where is God, now? I know somebody who sincerely believes that Jesus wants her to forgive someone who has committed a terrible wrong against her. Her assailant has repented and sincerely begged for her forgiveness. “I’ve prayed every day for the past ten years for Jesus to come and help me do what he wants me to do, but Jesus hasn’t,” she told me. Mark’s constant stress on the cross-bearing and suffering of disciples suggests that this gospel hoped to strengthen early Christians as they bore the slings and arrows of a disbelieving world. A subtext of Mark 13 is thus, “hold on, be resilient, stay strong because Christ’s Second Advent is on the way! He will rescue, save, and preserve you. Keep the faith!” Their chief question: when? “God is good, all the time. All the time, God is good,” you sometimes hear said in worship. If that’s true, what’s keeping God from being more active in my time, our time, now? 24

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Therefore a cardinal Advent virtue is patience, the faithful willingness to wait, to not have God on demand, to allow God to come and to go as God pleases, to let Christ enter our time in Christ’s own good time. Besides, grace (meaning, “gift”) is not grace if it’s at our command. Why is God taking so long to fulfill the cosmic, heaven-andearth–shaking promises of Mark 13? Maybe God takes God’s time in order to give us more time. By not shaking the heavens a few decades after the death and resurrection of Jesus (when we think Mark was written), we are given more time to come to terms with Jesus and to allow Jesus to come to terms with us. Jesus commanded his followers, us, to go into all the world, teaching and baptizing all nations (Matthew 28), to be shining lights in the world, demonstrating to the world what God can do when ordinary people obey Jesus (Matthew 5), showing everybody, everywhere the truth about God (Acts 1:8). We’ve needed more than two thousand years to be obedient and are still not there yet. Thanks be to God, there’s still time. What if God had pulled the plug two thousand years ago? No Mother Teresa, no Martin Luther King Jr., no Saint Francis of Assisi, no Bono, no you or me. You may not be the finest disciple there ever was, but because the predictions of Mark 13 didn’t come to immediate fulfillment, there’s still time. God isn’t done with you yet. Jesus predicts, Then he will send the angels and gather together his chosen people from the four corners of the earth, from the end of the earth to the end of heaven (Mark13:27). There’s still time for fractured, divided people of God—scattered to the four corners 25

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of the earth, bickering with one another, divided by their differences—to be brought together, convened, congregated by the Human One. I’ve worked for the healing of divisions in my denomination, saying and doing what I can to get us on the same page, to keep folks from walking out. I’m glad to hear Mark say that Christ is taking the time to reunite us, regathering his chosen people from the four corners of the earth. Looks like that promised reunion may happen after I’m gone. Still, I’m glad that Christ is taking all the time we need to do what he expects us to do, even if my time may be up before it’s done. In delaying the end, perhaps God is not only teaching us patience but also showing us what true patience looks like. In the meanwhile, God not only takes time out of our hands but God also makes time for us. Patiently working with fractured, disobedient humanity down through the ages, God showed amazing forbearance, tolerance, and unflappable perseverance. As soon as we were given the Ten Commandments, we broke them. Prophets came and went and we failed to heed their words. We were offered God’s own Son; we crucified Jesus. Mark took the time to write his Gospel for us; we explained it away, dismissing its sermons as woefully out of date. Yet even when we nailed the Son of God to a cross, this long-suffering, patient God looks down upon us wasting our time and says, “I love you still. In the meanwhile, there’s yet time for you to learn to love the God who so eternally loves you.” 26

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WHAT NOW? So what do we do in the meanwhile? That’s a good Advent question. When it was my turn to have COVID-19, thank God I had a mild case. Still, bedridden with a fever, those few days seemed like an eternity. The worst part was the waiting. At times I felt very sick, but not so sick that I didn’t want to be up and out in the world. Life passed me by. There are too many hours in a day when one spends them in bed. I wanted to be well, to be up and at ’em, and I wanted that now. After recovering, as I was grousing to a friend about how miserable I had felt, my friend surprised me by asking, “What did your illness teach you? What did you learn about yourself and God while you were bedridden?” What? My illness is supposed to be a learning experience? What? Killing time sick in bed can be redemptive if it’s true all my time is still God’s time? “But nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the angels in heaven and not the Son. Only the Father knows. Watch out! Stay alert! You don’t know when the time is coming. It is as if someone took a trip, left the household behind, and put the servants in charge, giving each one a job to do, and told the doorkeeper to stay alert.Therefore, stay alert! You don’t know when the head of the household will come, whether in the evening or at midnight, or when the rooster crows in the early morning or at daybreak. Don’t let him show up when you weren’t expecting and find you sleeping.What I say to you, I say to all: Stay alert!”

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When? Nobody knows (Mark 13:32). But just because nobody knows, that’s no reason to put the end out of our minds. Just the reverse. Three times Jesus repeats his admonition, “Stay alert!” (vv. 33, 35, 37). Mark’s Gospel recorded these words less than a hundred years after Jesus spoke them. That’s a long time to stay awake. Early Christians believed that the time would be short between Christ’s first Advent and his next. Eager expectancy is a hard emotion to maintain over the long run.Yet Jesus commands his followers to stay awake. We pray the Advent prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus!” at the end of the Bible and the beginning of the church (Revelation 22:20). That’s the church’s earnest desire, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. God, show yourself to us. Come on down, Holy Spirit. Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!” Still, we wait. The cancer will not heal. Sure faith doesn’t come. There is no peace. Creation continues to be imperiled. We wait. The prophet’s prayer that God would “tear open the heavens and come down” (Isaiah 64:1) is unfulfilled. We wait. Yet in the meanwhile we don’t have to wait with nothing to do. I know a medical researcher who has been patiently, but not passively, waiting to discover a drug that will knock out a particular kind of rare but deadly disease. Her wait consists of five days a week, nine hours a day in the lab or poring over research data, trying this, venturing that, daily conversing and sharing results with dozens of fellow scientists. She’s waiting for the discovery that solves the problem, but she’s not doing nothing while she waits. 28

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Mark 13 urges that sort of waiting. Watch out! Stay alert! You don’t know when the time is coming. “We can solve the hunger problem in Trenton,” a congregation said to itself. A plan was devised whereby each Sunday, a basket was placed in front of the Lord’s Table. During the Communion, people would bring canned goods, packages of food, disposable diapers, toiletry items, bread, and place them in the basket. The first week, ten people received the free food. Next week, twenty showed up. The Food Committee urged congregants to be even more generous, since the need was greater than they first thought. By the third Monday, thirty people were standing in line at the church. The food gave out after the first twenty. Gradually it dawned on the congregation that they were not going to solve the hunger problem in Trenton. Enthusiasm for the project waned. Their basket, filled to the brim every week, would never be an adequate response to the need. They lobbied the city council for help with food deprivation in the city. Some aid was given. But not enough. “It’s a waste of time,” some in the congregation scoffed. “Not a practical, effective long-term solution,” others said. One of the youngest members spoke up. “No, it’s what Jesus wants. I don’t know how to solve the problem of hunger in Trenton. But I do know that Jesus expects me to notice, to pray, then to respond to the best of my ability. At times I feel overwhelmed, depressed by the needs I see in this town, right around our church. Maybe only God can finally solve this. But in the meanwhile, I do what I can. 29

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“Besides,” she added,“the Sunday food basket is the first time in a long time that our church has done much of anything for our neighborhood. That food basket may be doing this church more good than it’s helping folks in need. Maybe we’re the ones in need—in need of doing something for Jesus.” Mark 13 urges that sort of waiting. Advent is about that sort of waiting. We can’t bring the history of the world to successful conclusion. We, by our meager efforts, cannot fulfill all of God’s intentions for God’s Creation. We wait and work and pray (“Come, Lord!” 1 Corinthians 16:22) for the consummation that is only God’s to give. In the meantime, we do what we can, letting our little light shine, enabling people to see our good works, meager though they may be in the larger scheme of things, as signs, signals, and portents of the great good work Jesus promises to do in the end. Our job, in the meantime, is to tell and to show that Christ has come and will come again, to let the world in on the open secret that God isn’t done with us yet. Christ, the light of the world, has commissioned us to be his lights in the world. As Mark 13:10 says, this time between Advents is time for mission, witness, testimony, and evangelism. Before the grand Second Advent consummation, First, the good news must be proclaimed to all the nations. At the end of my visit with a young man incarcerated in our local jail, he said, speaking from behind iron bars, “Thanks for taking the time to come see me. Sitting here in this godforsaken cage, I had almost forgot. God will make a way. It ain’t over for 30

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me till God says it’s over. God’s got the time even while I’m doin’ time.” By the grace of God, there’s still time for the good news to be proclaimed and enacted in your neighborhood and mine. You don’t know when the time is coming. It is as if someone took a trip, left the household behind, and put the servants in charge, giving each one a job to do, and told the doorkeeper to stay alert.Therefore, stay alert!

In the meantime, between Christ’s first Advent and the Second, Christ has done the usual vocational thing: put the servants in charge, giving each one a job to do. We, somnambulant, inadequate servants though we are, having been given a portion of Christ’s realm to share with the world, have the time to be faithful. I once served a dwindling, inner-city congregation. Once, we were a lively young church in a burgeoning new neighborhood on the edge of town. By the time I got there we had aged into a small, struggling congregation where most of our members commuted from other parts of the city. What could we do to have a future? During a Bible study session one night, one of the members said something to the effect of “it’s sad that we live in a time when so many young parents are having babies, starting families, without family nearby. They’re stuck in these young-adult apartments with people their age who know as little about raising babies as they. Nobody to help, no adoring grandparents around.” 31

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Somehow the Holy Spirit must have shown up and insinuated itself into the conversation because, before the evening ended, we were on our way to devising the “Northside Baby Welcome.” We selected a set of stereotypical grandparents and commissioned them to visit every baby born on our turf. By checking the newborn list at the local hospital, it was easy to find where new babies lived. About a week after the baby was brought to a home in our neighborhood, our official “Baby Visitors” showed up on the parents’ doorstep asking, “Can we see our new neighbor?” The generic grandparents bore a children’s Bible storybook (“Never too soon to start reading to the baby,” the parents were told), a pamphlet on baby care, and a set of disposable diapers. The visitors said, “Our church is right down the street. Children are our top priority. When you visit, you’ll find a group of talented, vetted caregivers to greet you. We also have a new Parents Morning Out program. First two visits free. Children’s bulletins for worship too. Just want you to know that you don’t have to be parents alone. We’re here to help.” For the first time in a decade, there was growth. God took that Baby Welcome program and made it a successful evangelistic opportunity. Yet what I remember most was the comment, made sometime during Advent as I recall, “You know, this church has never really had a mission, never really connected with our own neighborhood. We built these buildings and Sunday school rooms thirty years ago, mostly for our own kids. Now, God has at last given us a purpose. We have a mission to our time and place. It took us three decades to discover it. Glad that the Lord gave us the time to figure it out and get in gear with God.” 32

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Maybe, since Jesus’s advent, any time God turns to us and we see ending and beginning, it’s apocalypse. In Jesus’s first Advent, Jesus had a habit of showing up when people weren’t expecting him, inviting himself into their lives, going where he wasn’t even wanted. It is as if someone took a trip, left the household behind, and put the servants in charge, giving each one a job to do, and told the doorkeeper to stay alert. Therefore, stay alert! You don’t know when the head of the household will come, whether in the evening or at midnight, or when the rooster crows in the early morning or at daybreak. Don’t let him show up when you weren’t expecting and find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: Stay alert!

What do we do between Advents? We live as if God were to show up among us right now, at any time, day or night at any place, here or there. We are to keep alert, stay awake, pay attention, expecting God’s presence here, now. Expectant. “Our biggest enemy is contentment,” said a frustrated pastor. “My folks think our church is already fulfilling all of the purposes of the church, just as we are. We’re too easily pleased, too content with what we’re doing now, not expecting more.” Alert. “I’ve been going to church all my life, so I’ve heard most of the scripture at one time or another. I’ve therefore found it helpful, just before the pastor reads the text on Sunday morning, to say a little prayer, ‘Lord, surprise me. Show me something that I never saw before. Go ahead, shock me. I can take it.’” 33

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Pay Attention. “Watching the evening news on TV is so depressing! Just one terrible event after another. Because I’m a Christian, I try to watch the news and keep asking, ‘Is God behind any of this?’ Is there some story that’s so amazing, so unexpected, amid all the bad news, that there’s no way to explain it except that God is involved in it, using people for good in a world of so much bad?” Stay Awake. “We just passed each other in the hall at work and I mumbled ‘Morning. How’re you doin’?’ and I heard him say, ‘Alright, I guess. Stuff going on at home.’ And we both moved on down the hall to our offices. But something, maybe it was God, I don’t know, something made his words stick in my brain. I wondered if he was trying to say more to me than he said. So just before lunch I dropped in his office and tried to be direct and asked, ‘Are you okay? Want to talk about the stuff at home?’ Well, he opened up to me, got emotional. We talked for an hour. He’s just a kid and feels he’s in over his head. I had a short prayer with him and went on my way. Next morning I see him and he says, ‘Thanks. You may have saved my life.’ Thank God I noticed.” Signs of God’s Presence Here and Now. “I came to church that Sunday discouraged, angry. It was the weekend when George Floyd was killed. Again? Really? Will this country ever learn? The service began. And after the opening hymn our pastor stood before us, planted her feet apart, and looked directly at us and said, with words strong and clear. ‘I want you to hear me and mark what I say: God did not do this. This is not what God 34

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wants. We shall be judged. There’s a new world coming and we’re here this morning to get ready for it.’ I haven’t felt that close to God in a long time.” Hold on to your hats, Christ has come and is coming, maybe when you least expect.Your world all shook up, ready or not.

Advent

2023

A Calendar of Devotions Sam McGlothlin First Sunday of Advent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Second Sunday of Advent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Third Sunday of Advent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Fourth Sunday of Advent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Copyright © 2023 by Abingdon Press All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission can be addressed to Rights and Permissions, The United Methodist Publishing House, 810 12th Avenue South, Nashville, TN 372034704 or emailed to permissions@abingdonpress.com. 978-1-7910-2981-4 (Single) 978-1-7910-2974-6 (Pack of 10) 978-1-7910-2975-3 (epub) Scripture quotations are taken from the Common English Bible. Copyright © 2011 by the Common English Bible. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www. CommonEnglishBible.com. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

First Sunday of Advent December 3 Isaiah 64:1-4 If only you would tear open the heavens and come down! Mountains would quake before you like fire igniting brushwood or making water boil. If you would make your name known to your enemies, the nations would tremble in your presence. When you accomplished wonders beyond all our expectations; when you came down, mountains quaked before you. From ancient times, no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any god but you who acts on behalf of those who wait for him!

Advent is a season to linger in longing. This poses a challenge in our tired, time-tabled culture. We are used to having what gratifies and satisfies at the tips of our fingers. We are used to finding quick solutions to our problems. We prefer to keep pushing through rather than pinpoint our pain. These luxuries were not afforded to the people of Judah, Isaiah’s audience, scattered and exiled from their homeland for years upon years. When the prophet spoke these words, they were either still in exile or newly returned from it. Yet, even if the exile had ended, God’s people were still under foreign rule. They were still trying to establish their identity among different cultures. They were still wrestling with the resistance from those who did not think they belonged in the land. Still rebuilding. Still seeking ways to have total freedom. Still lingering in longing. It is under these conditions that they cry out to God, “If only you would tear open the heavens and come down!” (v. 1). If only you would come 2

Advent: A Calendar of Devotions 2023

and ignite brushwood and make water boil. If only you would make your name known. This wasn’t an out-of-bounds request of their God. The storytelling around their desert fires was full of wonders beyond their expectations: a water-to-blood plague instead of a water-towine miracle. Big-bellied frogs. Greedy, gross gnats. Fierce flies. Dead donkeys. Blistering boils. Dousing downpours. Leech-like locusts. Days drenched in darkness. God had shown up in big ways before, delivering them from Egypt with plagues and the parting of the Red Sea. Now they wanted God to show up again, to perform a sign and deliver a wonder so that they would know they were not forgotten—so that everyone could see the power of their God. Our longing is not so different. In our grief, we cry out, wanting to know when the heart that feels exiled from our body will return to its home. In our suffering, we resent the racing rumination that disturbs our dreaming. In our pain, we want to pinpoint the endpoint. When will there be relief? When will the Red Sea part? When will the sea billows of sorrow turn to puddles of peace? We want to know that God is with us. That God has our back. That God will move mountains to restore our joy and delight. The prophet’s words show us that we cannot press fast-forward. We cannot travel through desolation and despair with haste. God will act on behalf of those who linger in longing—those who know how to wait and work through. If that sounds uncomfortable and excruciating, it is. But this is our starting place. Prayer: God, as I enter the season of Advent, help me to believe you act on behalf of those who wait. Tear open the heavens and come down. Deliver me from my longing, from any place in my life where I am still rebuilding, still seeking freedom, still working to belong. Amen. Advent: A Calendar of Devotions 2023

Monday, December 4 Isaiah 64:5-9 You look after those who gladly do right; they will praise you for your ways. But you were angry when we sinned; you hid yourself when we did wrong. We have all become like the unclean; all our righteous deeds are like a menstrual rag. All of us wither like a leaf; our sins, like the wind, carry us away. No one calls on your name; no one bothers to hold on to you, for you have hidden yourself from us, and have handed us over to our sin. But now, Lord, you are our father. We are the clay, and you are our potter. All of us are the work of your hand. Don’t rage so fiercely, Lord; don’t hold our sins against us forever, but gaze now on your people, all of us.

The people in exile feared they were there because of their own moral omissions. This is why they say to God, you “have handed us over to our sin” (v.7). Their inequities and failings may have contributed to their circumstances. But over time we learn that God does not work by a simple system of reward or punishment. I know that is how many of us operate because I hear myself when I talk to my children. “If you make it through your entire bath without complaining, you can have a lollipop.” “If you ask me one more question before I turn the lights out, no YouTube tomorrow.” I believe God is somewhere in the middle of this line of thinking. Love cannot be hard and harsh at all times, only speaking of what we have done wrong. Neither can it be too ego-inflating, only telling us what we want to hear. Love strikes a balance. We need to be aware of our sins and accountable to God, ourselves, and others. We 4

Advent: A Calendar of Devotions 2023

also need the abiding grace of Jesus that reminds us we are not inherently shameful. As the people of Israel are crying out to God, asking for a wonder, they are reckoning with their righteousness. Their verbal processing sounds something like: "God, we think you look after those who do right and are angry with those who sin. We admit we are among the unclean. Perhaps you have turned away from us because of that. But please remember that we are clay, the work of your hands. Come now and gaze on us. We need your looks of love." Advent beckons us to reckon with our righteousness as we wait. As we linger in longing, we may find ourselves wrestling with what we perceive as God’s inactivity in the same way Israel did. Perhaps we are in a period of waiting because of our sin. Or perhaps we are in need of the assurance that our sin has nothing to do with our waiting. In my ministry, I witness this wrestling within women struggling with infertility. Is God waiting until I am ready? Is God trying to teach me a lesson in the waiting? Did I do something wrong? Perhaps when our waiting is over, we can look back at the long journey and see that our experience led us to be more ready than we first were. Perhaps when our waiting is over, we can see how the Potter took hard lessons and molded and shaped us as clay so that something good was produced. But I do not believe God’s intentions are to withhold from us or test us. Instead, in the waiting, we have the gaze of God upon us—a comforting, affirming look of love. Prayer: God, when the waiting is hard, gaze upon me. Where I have done wrong, help me make amends. In my longing, help me feel the balance of your love. I admit my sins to you and I accept your abiding grace. Amen. Advent: A Calendar of Devotions 2023

Tuesday, December 5 Psalm 80: 1-7, 17-19 Shepherd of Israel, listen! You, the one who leads Joseph as if he were a sheep. You, who are enthroned upon the winged heavenly creatures. Show yourself before Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasseh! Wake up your power! Come to save us! Restore us, God! Make your face shine so that we can be saved! Lord God of heavenly forces, how long will you fume against your people’s prayer? You’ve fed them bread made of tears; you’ve given them tears to drink three times over! You’ve put us at odds with our neighbors; our enemies make fun of us. Restore us, God of heavenly forces! Make your face shine so that we can be saved! . . . Let your hand be with the one on your right side— with the one whom you secured as your own— then we will not turn away from you! Revive us so that we can call on your name. Restore us, Lord God of heavenly forces! Make your face shine so that we can be saved!

I grew up in a small community outside of Birmingham, Alabama, called Bluff Park. Those of us who are from Bluff Park claim it over the more well-known suburb, Hoover. We are a proud people, believing we had something in our childhood others didn’t: the best neighborhood pool, an ice cream man who knew our names, a place to hide in the woods and light fires, streets we could walk on at any time of day without fear of harm. Tucked in our community still sits Bluff Park United Methodist Church. It was my place of refuge growing up. I loved listening to my preacher, Reid Crotty. I watched how he held the pulpit, swaying and leaning with the words as if throwing them at us. I loved my youth group, a hodgepodge 6

Advent: A Calendar of Devotions 2023

of kids who held one another up. I was at church almost every Wednesday and twice on Sundays. My youth group first met in an old room across from the gym. It held cozy couches and an old fireplace that I can’t remember ever seeing lit. But when I think about that room, I feel warmth and see light. I see the closing circles we used to create as we held hands to sing our benediction. Every week the same refrain: “May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. May the rain fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand.” This moment was a parting, communal blessing. In a way it counters the communal lament we hear in Psalm 80. “Restore us, God! / Make your face shine so that we can be saved!” (v. 3). There is nothing wrong with lament; it is a companion in our longing. Ask your questions. Make your demands. But perhaps you could hum this communal blessing as a ritual reminder: to look for where the road rises, to feel the steady strength of the wind that has your back, to notice the joy and warmth of the sun, to believe God’s got you even when rainfall isn’t soft. Practice: Read today’s communal lament out loud. Name the areas in your life causing you to lament. Then sing today’s communal blessing. Try to make each line your prayer and see if you notice these elements coming to life throughout your day.

Advent: A Calendar of Devotions 2023