Sharing with God

Hannah, a window designed by Watkins Stained Glass  

1 Samuel 1-2:10

Hannah

Ask anyone who has ever wanted a child and struggled to conceive, whose gone through the agony of multiple miscarriages, the terrible roller coaster of invitro, or the long and scary process of adoption, ask them what it is like to finally, after everything, hold their child in their arms.  There is nothing like it. It is miraculous.

My friend adopted her daughter from Haiti, from an orphanage where she volunteered.  In this place, where there were too few sets of arms, and too many babies needing holding, once or twice a year, my friend would go  down and hold babies.  After fostering locally, and praying and longing for a long time, and after many arduous legal steps, she flew to Haiti, back to that orphanage, to meet the baby girl that was to be hers.

She texted me a photo that day, the tiny soft face of a two month old, pressed against her own tear-streaked and joy-filled one.  She held her in her arms and whispered that she loved her and that she couldn’t wait to be her mom. And then she had to return home. She had to leave her baby alone in the crib where she would not likely be held much, for the next few weeks, to await the final legal hurdles.  

But in the meantime, a bureaucratic move in Haiti closed adoptions, and for the next fourteen months her daughter remained in the orphanage while her case stalled on hold.  She visited twice in that time, for a few desperate days and nights she sat in a rocker in a concrete room surrounded by metal cribs, holding her baby in her arms, talking to her and singing to her, and then laying her down and leaving, getting on a plane and flying home without her. 

Finally, the paperwork cleared, and she flew back and was able to take her home, when she was a year and a half old.  Finally my friend became Stefanie’s mother.  And Stefanie is hers to raise, forever.  For months afterwards, she wore Stefanie in a pack, to give her human contact and help her bond.  She watched her sleep and prayed for her in the dark, an astonished thank you to God as she listened to her peacefully breathing. 

Imagine if, after all that, one day my friend packed a suitcase, and buckled Stefanie into a car seat, drove across the state to a church, took her out of the car and held her hand up to the door, pulled it open and walked inside, placed the suitcase beside her and knelt down, brushed Stefanie’s braids from her face, kissed her forehead, handed over paperwork terminating her parental rights to whomever was standing there, and turned and walked away?  

How could she do it? 

How can Hannah give back her child? And how can God allow it? 

How can we accept this story? How can this be in our bible? 

I remember this story from Sunday school. It didn’t go like that. It was about how badly Hannah wanted a child, and how she was made fun of for not having one, and how she prayed really hard and didn’t care how she looked doing it, and how God heard her prayer and gave her a child, and how she was so thankful she gave him back, and how cool it was that Samuel got to live in the temple, lucky him!, and how awesome God is for answering prayer, and how selfless and obedient Hannah is for saying Thank you so big.  

We never questioned the darkness in this story.  Surely we glossed over the terribleness of letting go of your child, the child you’ve wanted so badly.  And we didn’t talk about what it means to be barren, which is to say, in Sunday school we may have had this unfortunate term explained awkwardly as being unable to conceive, but really, we didn’t discuss the barrenness of the human condition, the wilderness of a desolate soul, empty, isolated, defined by longing, every moment unfulfilled, utterly despairing.  And we surely didn’t talk about sacrifice.  Deep, terrible sacrifice.  Or question who God was who could let such a thing happen.

Hannah’s song, that we chanted earlier, her prayer, is famous.  It harkens back to the song of Miriam when the people are delivered out of slavery in Egypt, and it foreshadows the song of Mary when the fetus John leaps in Aunt Elizabeth’s womb at the sound of the voice of the mother of the God.  Hannah is known for this song.  

And who wouldn’t sing a song of victory and vindication, a song of awe at God’s amazing, table-turning ways that lift up the poor and bring down the mighty – when you go from being desperate and hopeless to being given the very thing your heart most desires! That is something to sing about!

But her song doesn’t come when her prayers are answered; they are not about finally getting the child she has always wanted and being his mother for the rest of his life. Hannah sings when she leaves her son at the temple, when she gives the child back to God.  

When she turns and walks away from the one thing she most desired in the whole world, she does it with a song of praise.

There is something going on here that feels nearly impossible to grasp.  As we begin to ask our questions, “Who is God and what is God up to?” And “What is a good life and how do we live it?” specifically in the lives of people we are journeying with, right out of the gate we come up against a problem with Hannah.  Because our view, my view, of a good life, would be for her prayer to be answered and for her finally to be Samuel’s mother, and for Samuel to be hers to raise, forever. And God would be the one who answers that prayer, lets that fulfillment happen, doesn’t take back the gift God has given. 

But that’s not how Hannah sees it.  She names her son Samuel, a play on the verb sa-el- to ask- because she had asked him of the Lord. But this verb means both movements, both to ask fervently, and to lend back. The movements of giving and receiving, receiving and giving back. The gift of it all. So that Samuel’s very identity is one who is received and given back, the gift, in whom is experienced the movement of God toward us, and us in return to God.

For us, the good life is wanting something really badly and then getting it. The world’s stories are happily ever after endings. Rags to riches, humiliated to vindicated, worthless to important. Hannah’s identity changes in the world, she becomes Samuel’s mother. She is no longer the barren one, her own persistence means God heard her and answered her prayers. The story should stop there. The moral could be, don’t give up on your dreams. We’d love that kind of story. They make movies about those stories.  They write Sunday school books about those stories.  

But that’s not a way of God story.  Right in the middle between the creation and the eschaton, between the exodus and the promised land, between palm Sunday and Easter, is the part we skip over or race through or whitewash when we tell God’s story because it gets too messy, because we don’t know how to explain it.  We make it all cheery and shallow instead of painful and disconcerting, cute jewelry crosses instead of gut-wrenching “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” because the Christian life is supposed to be all victory and joy, and so we don’t talk very much about either the barrenness or the sacrifice, we don’t talk about the unanswered prayers or the terror of answered prayers and what they demand of us. 

Hannah has been drawn into something so miraculous that she envisions something so far beyond what we modern people are satisfied with.  She has changed. She’s no longer barren, written off, hopeless, but neither is she just Samuel’s mother.  She has been drawn into a bigger reality, and she wants nothing less than that for her own child.  What has happened can only be from the act of God, and so she will only let this baby participate in the act of God. Nothing less will satisfy.

So, as she leaves her child there, Hannah sings.  She sings a song of victory, and hope, and joy. She praises a God of strength and might, and thanks a God of power. 

She pronounces God’s preference for the weak, God’s deliverance of the poor, God’s partiality for the barren, the lost, in the story of salvation.

She speaks against the proud and the arrogant, those who think they have it all.  She declares God’s lordship over all the earth.  She sings this with all her heart.

The story doesn’t stop there, because God’s story never does.  

In a very turbulent time for Israel, the people kept on asking God for a King, a human leader other than God, that they could turn to, so they could be like the other nations. And finally God relents. But God needs someone to guide them in this time, to lead them to this king, and to advise the king too. God needs someone to be the one who goes between God and the people. And it will take a special person, one who will see the bigger picture, who will not seek to simply be king himself.  It will require one who looks beyond personal fulfillment to the greater cosmic story, and chooses to participate, chooses to trust God with his very life.  This is Hannah’s son.

Hannah’s story begins another story, Samuel’s story, and Israel’s story, actually, because the whole book of Samuel is really the story of Israel, Israel who was lost, and written off, hopeless and futureless.  This barren woman becomes God’s bearer of a lost nation’s future, a symbol of hope. 

His whole life long Samuel is to the people the embodiment of justice and compassion, he represents the ear of God and the voice of God.  He belongs to God and he belongs to Israel. He is the embodiment of the relationship of receiving and giving, God to the people, the people to God, the giving and receiving that it the gift of life when you live as those belonging to God.

We see Hannah again later in Samuel’s story.  It says in chapter two that every year when they return for the sacrifice at Shiloh Hannah brings Samuel a little robe that she has made for him.  And every year the priest acknowledges and honors her for her sacrifice.  And she and her husband go on to have five more children.  And the boy Samuel grows up before the Lord, claimed and cared for by God.  And years later Hannah’s song is taken up by King David and woven into his own poetry, into our Psalms, our scripture, after her son Samuel grows up and becomes a prophet of God who anoints a shepherd boy to be King, the ancestor of the Messiah.

Life is for sharing with God.  Even when what we most want is deeply good, the good life is not getting what we most want. 

And to live a good life is not to be passive recipients of God’s blessings. 

The good life is being a full participant with God in blessing the whole world.  

Hannah does not sing because she finally gets what she most wants.  She sings because she gives the gift back to God.  Because she is in the position of being able to give to God.  But her sharing began in the darkness, not just in the light. Not just when she has something to share but before that, when she was empty.  Hannah made her grief God’s business. She invites God into her barrenness. 

And when she does that, God takes her at her word and holds her to her promise, what dignity there is in that!  God receives Hannah’s impossible gift, but not as a passive recipient either.  God participates in Hannah’s gift by making Samuel a blessing to the nation, a linchpin in salvation history. Hannah trusted God and shared her anguish, and God trusted Hannah and used her help redeem God’s people.

Hannah becomes a prophet, singing out with joy about the end of the story that awaits us all, because she herselfhas tasted the hope, the fullness and freedom, the blessing of a God who doesn’t play by the rules of the world. She’s released from competition and inadequacy, of an identity defined by what she can or can’t produce, and even of a good life horizon that ends with our own personal fulfillment and joy. Instead she has found her life taken up into the life and purpose of God.   The movements of giving and receiving, receiving and giving back. The gift of it all. Hannah sings because she has tasted the real reality.

Life is a gift.  All of it.  The light and the darkness of it.  We are neither in this desolate, alone and against, nor are we called to be passive recipients.  We are invited to be full participants, collaborators with the Divine. 

But to do so, we must go to our own barren places of longing and despair and refuse to sit in them alone. We must invite God into our suffering, tell God what we are experiencing, and demand God’s response. 

When we do, we will find that the places of death, and darkness, and discomfort that we’d rather skip past, that we’d rather make into shallow moral lessons, those are where the story really happens, where the end is glimpsed, and the beginnings are created, and the redemption is worked out, and people are made real, and life is deep and significant, and we touch the eternal.  

And the beloved ones we are given, and given to, on loan from God, in this short and miraculous life, are also participants in the real.  Our identity is as those who are received and given back; we are gift to one another, in whom we experience the movement of God toward us, and us in return to God.  And we can give one another to God.  We can pray nothing less than the life and purposes of God for one another, and accept nothing short of full participation in the cosmic blessing of the world for ourselves.  And God will receive and honor that gift.  Because God comes and give us God’s very self.  

This is how we enter Advent. Come, Lord Jesus.

Amen.

This is part of a series, journeying with some of our Biblical ancestors: Hannah, Mary, Anna & Simeon, John, Samuel, David*, The Samaritan Woman, 

(*This is an older message about David, in this series, we had a wonderful performance of 'David" by Theater for the Thirsty)

Zoom (Waiting in Wonder, Week 1)

Isaiah 2:1-5

Matthew 24:36-42

Why does Advent always begin with apocolypse?  Why, dear God?

In one way, I appreciate it because we are already well into our consumeristic coma – spending and pressure and Christmas cheer and family guilt and to-do lists and baked sweets all swirled into a frenzied frapaccino that I, for one, almost never hesitate to guzzle. 

Nothing like getting slapped awake by a little bit of end times terror on the first Sunday in December. 

As a kid, I always heard these apocolayptic texts with a kind of fear and foreboding. I wanted to grow up and get married and have kids and grandkids and accomplish lots of great things and be super old and ready to die before Jesus came suddenly like a burglar to snatch me out of the world.   It was a toss-up, which was less desirable, actually, being left behind or being taken up. 

What a massive disappointment to God I would be, because of my reluctance to be reunited forever, and what a massive disappointment God would be to me, if I had to trade in the chance at a full life on earth for some kind of pearly gates and golden streets and a boring eternity with a harp (no offense, Jeanne).

So on our first Sunday of Advent, here we are suspended between two end timesy texts to kick off the season.  One is a dire-sounding warning about the suddenness of God’s impending return, KEEP AWAKE! You don’t know when its coming – dramatic and unexpected, snatching us out of a life of order and duty and predictable roles, and into the realm of God!

The other, though, is a vision of the realm of God.

That people from all over would be united in their common desire to be guided by God. That what we’ve made for destruction would be turned into tools for sharing and feeding in a completely different game than we’ve been playing at all along.  That the yearning within us -- that would God speak to us, would show us the way to live, correct the things we’ve messed up, that God would hear our complaints, arbitrate our disputes, set things to right-- this longing would be fulfilled. 

My kids found a picture book at my mom’s house this summer, that someone gave my sisters and me when we were kids. 

It is called Zoom, and it starts with a picture of, say, a red wavy line, then it zooms out and you see that it is the comb on top of a rooster’s head, and then it zooms out and you see that the rooster is sitting atop a barn, and the next page shows the whole barnyard with animals, and then you realize it’s a toy barnyard and wooden animals and two kids are playing with it, then you see that they are in a window of a small house surrounded by its own yard, and then you realize the yard is part of a picture, and the picture is part of a postage stamp, and the postage stamp is on a letter, and the letter is in a mail carrier’s hand, who is in a biplane over a tropical island, which is on a travel poster,

which is on the side of a bus, which is on a busy city street, and so on, out and out and out until you are looking at the entirety of earth in the distance. 

Advent uses today’s apocalyptic texts to zoom us way way out, out of Christmas, out of winter, out our routines, out of ordinary days of giving and being given in marriage, going to work in the field and grinding wheat, thanksgiving meals and cancer treatments and commuting to work and long-distance phone calls and petty arguments and meeting new neighbors, and earning degrees, and retirement parties, and it zooms us into the realms of hunger and pain and longing and justice and hope, and it keeps going beyond that until it reaches past and future, life and death, eternity and God, and there it stops us. 

It will turn around and plunge back in the next few weeks, all the way in, until we arrive at the very specific picture of a baby in a manger and a mom and dad and animals sitting nearby, the event of God’s coming, the moment when God breaks in – in flesh and blood and hot tears and scratchy hay.  It’s super present-tense, you can smell and feel the reality of it, tension and elation, a baby comes into the world. It doesn’t get more personal, more concrete, than that. It will take us there eventually.

But first, it wants to pull us way out here.

Why?

Zoomed way, way out here, we’re in big picture territory. We are shown history and eternity, what is and what hasn’t yet come to be, embracing way before we were and inviting dreams of what could be -promises of what will be- and then saying to us, It begins HERE!

The countdown to God’s coming, the place to stop wait, slow down and wonder, wake up and pay attention – it starts here. 

WAY bigger than you and me. A little bit scary. A lot mysterious.

This is a big deal. Advent says.  This is beyond anything this world has ever, even contemplated- greater than nations at war, stronger than waves of unending violence, more powerful than the weapons we use to protect and divide ourselves. This has cosmic proportions that call us into a reality well beyond what we see and hear and participate in every day. 

And you know you want it.

You can feel that part of yourself deep within that is sick and tired of being sick and tired. That part that moans with sighs to deep for words at yet another school shooting, not even bothering to read the details it is so heartbreaking and appalling. 

That place within that holds your breath when the images of war or disaster scroll across the news, Syria, Palestine, Iran, the Philippines, India… because you feel so removed, so horrified, and also so afraid of what it might mean for everyone. 

It calls out the part of you that has deep sadness that terrible and awful things happen to children, that hunger rages fierce, and alzehimer’s attacks loved ones, and marriages crumble, and inexplicable evil or apathy or deterioration seem to be everywhere. 

It grabs hold of that part by the shoulders, shakes it into awareness, and then it points it to a promise. 

Justice will prevail.  

And all people everywhere will find that part of themselves summoned together in one voice to point our questions and our fears and our longings and our hope toward God, who will take in the pain and repair and redeem and restore a broken world and the brokenness within us all. 

And that is a big, fantastic, crazy kind of promise.

Who is this apocalyptic God who comes like a thief, like a flood, in the blink of an eye in our ordinary moments when nobody at all would expect it?  Who is this God? we ask our text, we ask Advent, And what is God up to?

Not a stranger to this thing.  Not a distant judge, an uncaring critic. 

This is the God made known in Christ Jesus, who came to share it all with us, that is the God who will come. The God who will break into both the horror and the humor, the things we hate and the things we love and the things we pay absolutely no attention to and completely take for granted. The God of justice comes to interrupt whatever we’ve got going and make right all that is wrong.

Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord! the text ends.

Let’s just walk in that. 

That light-  that streams down from the mountain of God oozing hope and shared desire of all for peace and connection and restoration – let’s walk in THAT light. 

Let’s live in that Hope.  Let’s help one another trust in what we cannot see, let’s remind each other and everyone else that we don’t have to live like it’s not coming when it is.  Let’s stop a moment and zoom out, with our questions and our longing, and see all around us all the people who hold those same longings and questions inside and anticipate together the day when the magnet pull will point us all in the same direction and love will draw us all in.

So, then Advent advises, keep awake.

Notice it.

The ways the longing flares up painfully – pause a moment before tamping it back down. Sit with it, and wonder.  When, Lord?  

And then, can’t you feel the waiting? 

The waiting comes then. 

The kind of waiting that makes us get up and do something. 

The kind of waiting that makes us want to prepare for what’s coming.

We are waiting.  Always waiting.

Not so that we’re not surprised on that day.  (Jesus himself will be surprised!)  But because God surprises us everyday.  There are signs of this promise breaking into our present from God’s future, every day.  

Notice them, Advent invites. Be ready.

Come, Let us walk in the Light of the Lord!

Amen.

Longing with all the Honesty of a Prophet

Advent Candle Lighting 1: Hope

In the beginning was the Word,

and the word was with God, and the word was God.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

The Word has come to live among us.

We come waiting for the light of Christ.

Tonight we remember the Prophets,

who spoke of things unseen,

giving words to the longings of a people

and their God.

Tonight we light a candle for HOPE.

Dear God,

As we begin our Advent journey we pray for hope.

Give us the courage to anticipate hope.

Hope that we are not alone,

Hope that this is not the end,

Hope that you are always with us now and you promise always to be. 

Amen.

Isaiah 64:1-9

Advent is a gift to us-  the darkness and hush of these weeks before Christmas.

A time of preparation and awareness, a waiting that lets us feel our longing for hope.  

But the first week of Advent is always jarring. We’re all turkeyed out and geared up to plunge into the Holiday season along with apparently everyone else in the world – we’re sentimental and ready, but then we come to our scripture to begin us on this journey of prayerful, joyful waiting, and we find either dire end time predictions or disconcerting lament.

Where are you God!? Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down!

Today our wait for Christmas is shaped by a view of life through the eyes of the prophets.  Throughout scripture the prophets have a profound role.  They speak to the people for God, telling the people what God has done, or will do; standing in the gap they interpret God to the people.

But they also raise their voices to God on the people’s behalf.  They interpret the people to God.  They are emboldened to convey the message back and forth, almost like the angels ascending and descending Jacob’s ladder, the prophets are both the messengers of God and the voice of the people’s true experience back to God.

Our lament tonight comes from a people who were driven out of Jerusalem into exile by the Babylonians and have just returned- some sixty years of prayers have been answered and all the hope that sustained them while they were in captivity in Babylon is coming to fruition. Finally! They are free to go home! God is going to help them rebuild and they will be as glorious as of old!

 Only it doesn’t happen that way, and all that kept them hanging on while they were in their wilderness of exile turns out to be false, or at the very least extremely overly optimistic. They return - and most of them don’t, so the disappointment starts there, but those who do - come back to a home different than when they left, it barely remembers them, and it’s not so easy to get it all up and going again. The tension and conflict between those returning and those who had moved in in their absence and those that remained behind comes to a head, and this is not turning out like anyone had believed it would when they dreamed of rebuilding their lives.  They are frustrated and disheartened.

This week our friends Matt & Annamarie were all set to move back to Jordan tomorrow – Blaze had his last day of preschool and said goodbye to his friends and teachers, they packed up and moved out of their missionary housing apartment at Luther, and were spending Thanksgiving with Matt’s family before they said goodbye and eagerly returned home. 

Then on Wednesday Matt fell down the stairs and broke his leg in two places.  Now he’s laid up with rods and pins in his leg and their dream of returning home is postponed a minimum of 8-10 more weeks, and they are really, really disappointed.

I have been watching the well wishes pour in on Facebook, and a few of them have really rattled me.  They imply – or state directly- that God must have some reason for keeping them here, or even that God made it happen and must not want them to go.  

It’s the same as when we tell people at a funeral that God called their loved one home, or pat someone’s shoulder and say God has some reason for the sickness they are going through or the layoff that pulls the rug out from under them. 

It’s our way of coming to terms with the disappointment, I suppose – or avoiding it – our way to try to find hope.  But it’s not real hope, this optimism that keeps God on a pedestal and makes us have to stuff down our disappointment or sorrow and keep a positive smile plastered on.  It’s the stuff of a holiday season, if you think about it.  And while this might be what we’ve decided it means to be a good Christian, or to honor God, it could not be farther from what a prophet does.

In this lament the prophet does a rather astonishing thing, actually.  Even while affirming God’s steadfast love, the prophet lays the blame for the distance between God and humanity on BOTH God and humanity.  Because you were angry, we sinned, because you hid from us, we rebelled. 

God, this is not like we thought it would be. It’s not like we believe it should be. It’s not like we feel was implied in our relationship with you.  We’re mad, and we’re disappointed. And we feel a little abandoned. And we get it, yes, that we abandoned you too and have really dropped our end of the relationship so maybe we even earned this, but you never were one to pay people back by what they had earned – who could stand then? No, you always acted from your own faithfulness and commitment to us, your own unending love, so will you please do that again now?

Where are you God?  The prophet boldly cries.  And this question, we discover, this very human and honest, Where are you God?  is astoundingly not a forbidden cry. It is actually a cry of faithfulness.

Only one that knows God can be there, one that has seen God in the past and believes God is capable of showing up again can utter such a cry. 

Crying out about the absence of God is an act of great faith.  It can come only from trusting in the presence of God, and grieving when God lets us down.  We let God down too-  that’s not in dispute, but here the prophet is holding God to God’s character and capacity – not ours. 

And Advent begins with this view, this call, this voice of the prophets:  To raise up on behalf of all people a great cry of disappointment, to point out God’s absence and wonder if God is going to step in and do something.

We would feel much more comfortable, perhaps, if we just tried to explain away God’s actions or lackthereof; we’re pretty good at big rationalizations that get God off the hook for the state of the world and put it all squarely on human shoulders.   But the odd invitation of both Advent and this text is to hold God to account. And certainly to be aware of what we are asking as well, that human beings would fare poorly indeed if God actually did tear open the heavens and come down and we were scrutinized by the Divine for our own faithfulness and goodness because most of us are rarely very faithful or good - but nonetheless, this text says, nonetheless, we are to come to God and ask for God’s presence.  Not based on our own righteousness or fidelity but on God’s.

And the beauty of beginning Advent this way is the irony that it represents – the prophet speaking for the Hebrew people has no way of knowing that God will indeed come down – God will indeed enter intimately into the scene - just not at all like he is asking for God to.  He has no way of knowing that God doesn’t smite enemies or come to us in power and intimidation with awesome deeds and trembling onlookers– instead God comes in utter humanity, in the weakness and vulnerability of a poor, illegitimate and homeless infant, and experiences all of it with us from the inside.

For the next four weeks our lives are going to get crazy.  We will project onto Christmas irrational expectations and nostalgic optimism, and we’ll spend more money than we should and eat more junk food than we should, and I’m just acknowledging that this is the reality and I don’t want anyone to feel too badly about it, because that’s just how it goes.

 But there is something else going on these next four weeks that is really significant and a lot less noticeable.  And it is this invitation to deep honesty, to step into the shoes of the prophets- to see the world with stark candor and not be afraid to bring our complaints to God, and also to speak into the world the hope of a God who enters in.  A God who comes near. A God who shares all of it.  And joins us just as we are.  That’s quite a celebration to anticipate.

The beginning of Advent is a chance to let down our guard, and our weird pressure about being good or right people, people who believe in the right causes and stand up for the right issues and give to the right charities and never lose sight of the larger global crises and our own cushy existence and earn the respect of our neighbors and our God with just the right attitude and faith.

No, the prophets would say. It is what it is, and we are who we are. And also, God is who God is, so God, will you be who you are?

Advent is a chance to open our eyes and hearts and minds and be brutally, refreshingly honest with God and ourselves.  Some really terrible things happen and are happening.  And we are brokenhearted about it.

And we don’t’ have to have it all worked out – how God comes or what it looks like, so we can’t even make sure we are asking for the right thing with the right motivations - we just have to ask. To speak out of our own deep honesty. 

To answer the incessant invitation of God throughout all of scripture to be in this with God! To drop all the religious and polite filters we usually put on, and to speak right to God who already knows who we are and how it is, and just longs for us to be real with each other, us and God, and who really, really likes it when we are.

We’re called to put voice to the longing. These next four weeks, we function like prophets, or rather, all together like a prophet. With boldness we call God out and are not afraid to lift up to God those things that have broken our hearts and confounded our faith and cry to God, If only you would tear open the heavens and come down?

 Wont you come down, Please?

It’s no mistake that the cry of Advent is “Come, Lord Jesus!”

Someone once said, “Hope is what is left behind when your worst fears have been realized and you are no longer optimistic about the future. Hope is what comes with a broken heart willing to be mended.” (Patricia E. DeJong in Feasting on the Word)

This Advent, let’s be people of Hope.  For each other and for the world that will be rushing through to Christmas with smiles plastered on their faces and God at a distance let’s be prophets who give voice to our longing for God’s compassion and companionship, and who recognize that the steadfast love of God holds us even when it doesn’t feel like it. 

Let’s invite God to strip away our optimism and religion so we can stand bravely with our broken hearts and the world’s broken hearts waiting to be mended.  Let’s not be afraid to see and say things as they are, and then to put our trust in the savior who crawls into it all right beside us.

Come, Lord Jesus!

Amen.