Love Comes Anyway

We are probably not ready for Christmas. I bet there are at least one or two people on your Christmas list that you just have no idea what to get them, still. Or, you still have not been able to locate the exceedingly rare but high in demand toy for the child in your life. I asked around and I think this year it is a Frozen themed boom box of some sort. I’ve kept my eye out for one as I’ve gone through stores and I haven’t seen any, so there is a good chance they have become exceedingly rare at this point. For me it’s the men’s gift exchange at my extended family’s house. A 30 dollar gift for a man, but I know that the men in my family are anything but alike, and I will probably end up with a power tool or some sort of knife. The family is coming over for Christmas and the house isn’t quite ready yet. Between work, maybe school, maybe kids, you are lucky the tree is even up, but you need to vacuum and gosh those bathrooms. Yes, the days come closer and closer and we are just not ready for it yet.

I bet St. Joseph didn’t feel ready, either. He certainly wasn’t ready to hear that his fiancé was pregnant with a child he couldn’t account for. I bet he didn’t feel ready when the Angel told him in a dream to take care of the child as his own and take Mary into his home. And now Mary is eight months pregnant, and he has been inspired and in awe of the grace and patience with which she has handled the whole pregnancy. She is going to be such a great mother, he must have thought, but am I ready to be a Father. And to such a special son. There is a scene in the movie the Nativity that I often think about this time of year. Mary looks at Joseph and says, ‘I wander when we will know that he is not just another child, will it be when he looks at us in a different way, or will it be something he says or does.’ Whatever it is, will Joseph be ready for it? And now a census has been called and Joseph has to take his pregnant wife to Bethlehem. This is an eighty mile trip, four days on foot and probably longer for Mary’s sake. This journey would take them through Samaria, unkind territory for the Jews, through Jericho and Jerusalem and finally to the small town of Bethlehem. Could he possibly be ready for such a task? When they arrive in Bethlehem, they can find no place to stay, can you imagine how this must make Joseph feel, not being able to find a proper place for his family. And on top of this it is this very night that Mary will give birth to their son, among animals, with no proper bed. My guess would be no, Joseph probably never felt ready.

And we will probably never be ready, either. I am not talking about gifts and decorations anymore either. Are we ready to welcome the Christ child into our hearts? We have tried this advent to prepare a space, but as hard as we try our hearts are still places where fear dwells, fear about an uncertain future, fear about health, about relationships, about responsibilities, fear about money. There is fear and there is sin. Sin that keeps holding on, forcing our eyes back to ourselves instead of in charity to those around us, sin that leads us to hatred, hatred of our enemies, maybe even hatred of ourselves. Pain, pain from all of this fear and hatred, or the loss of someone we love, or pain from broken dreams, or broken friendships, broken family. I don’t know what it may be for you, but all of these common enemies of hearts trying to be open to God make it hard to welcome him. Yes, there is fear, sin and hatred in our hearts but love comes anyway!

Love comes anyway into our broken world. Love comes to us in the form of a little child, born to Mary and unprepared Joseph, worshiped by Kings, and Shepherds and angels. Love that has existed from all eternity, poured forth from the Father into his Word and shared with the Holy Spirit, now shared with us, made flesh in our midst. Love is born into our unprepared hearts, because the love of God is the only thing that will heal them. So love is born in the midst of our fears, born In the midst of our hatred and pain, because the love born this Christmas morning can wipe them away if we let him. And if we can’t let him, this child of Mercy will dwell there anyway.

In the midst of the egg nog, and family parties, work parties, cleaning, cleaning up, frozen boom boxes, and last minute shopping, take some time this Christmas to reflect on this Child, the manifestation of God the Father’s great love for us in the form of such innocent beauty. Make him the center of your celebration, the center of your heart, the center of your whole vision of our world. Hold the child of beauty and love in your arms and rock him, sing hymns and carols softly to him, adore him, he loves you so much that he came anyway.

 Merry Christmas.       

Advent Faith

This talk was written for and delivered to a group of young adults.          

         My brother and sister in law got a new puppy this past summer. In case you were wandering, it is some sort of mix between a boxer and a lab, and his name is Barley. If you weren’t wandering about those things, and the names of breeds don’t give you any kind of idea, I would call this dog medium sized, light brown, very dog looking. Anyway, one of the first things that my brother decided to do with this dog is sign him up for dog school. This was a new idea to me, but this is the kind of place where a dog learns to sit, roll over, not bite people, wait to eat on command, and the ever popular: not pee on the carpet. Well, whenever I go over to my brother’s house now, the doggy diploma is displayed prominently on the refrigerator, and my brother likes to show me how well trained Barley is. And I have been very impressed, my brother says sit, the dog sits, my brother says roll over, it rolls over, he tells Barley to wait to eat his food, and maybe one out of every three times he actually waits, he yells come here boy and O my goodness is that a squirrel, I love squirrels, I want it! Shoot it went up a tree. I will wait here for it, and then surely I will get it. Meanwhile I will dig up this mushroom. It will make me sick it always does, but it is so tasty. What is that noise I hear, it sounds kind of like that guy that feeds me, but who needs him when I have this squirrel and this mushroom. In all fairness to Barley, he is a puppy, and this is what puppies do, perspective is not an easily learned skill for a dog. Because, you see, Barley doesn’t see how good he has it. He gets all of his meals, plus treats and hot dogs. He gets two walks a day and a big backyard to play in, and trust me he gets plenty of attention and belly rubs.

              For us, squirrels and mushrooms do not hold the same kind of sway over our attention, but there are things that can grab our attention. In fact there are so many possibilities of things that we could focus on, that we could choose to dedicate our time, energy, and wallet to; that companies spend billions of dollars to try to get us to prefer to spend our time, energy, and money on their product rather than others that may be very similar. And we do, many times for good reason. For example, we have to eat, so we have to buy some sort of food. Beer can be a good thing, and If we are going to drink it we have to choose one to drink, and so we decide among the options that are presented to us. However, companies do not present products merely as an option. Can you imagine a billboard that said: Coors Lite, if you are looking for beer, this is one of your choices. No it sets up a picture of a world that the product is part of. Do you want the Rocky mountain freshness? Do you like the idea of mountain climbers risking their lives to dig your beer out of an icy cliff? Don’t you think a beer would be more cold if it was brewed cold? If you like cold, if you are a cold loving kind of person, then Coors light is for you. And then you become part of a community of Coors drinkers. “O, you’re a Coors guy, my friend Joey is a Coors guy, ‘hey Joey, James is a Coors guy.” I wish I could tell you that that has never been said to me. But this process is replicated over and over: favorite sports team, favorite burrito place (Chipotle), favorite soda brand, favorite kind of movie, favorite music group, etc. Then it just makes sense to build our culture, our view of the world as a whole, based on our own preferences, rather than any account of what is good, meaningful, of value, or real.                      Our lives can become centered on many different kinds of visions of reality much more substantial than beer preference. We can think ‘Everything would be right in my world if’ . . . if I could get the job I want . . . if I could live in the neighborhood I want to live in . . . if I could just make that relationship work . . .  if I could finally meet my mother’s, boss’s, father’s husband’s, insert person here’s expectations for me . . . if I could meet my own expectations for myself. These goals can quickly consume us and become our main outlook on life.This is a problem that the people of Israel faced throughout its history, as well. Though our Lord and God had made a promise to the people of Israel time and again that he would take care of them, they were always looking for new gods who could do for them what they thought the Lord could not do as well. After they had seen the Lord part the Red sea in two and lead them through it safe onto dry land. After the Lord had made bread fall to the ground to feed them, and after he had made delicious ‘flightless birds’ appear in the middle of the desert, they grumbled against God and thought up a better God, forming this God out of their own hands, and worshipping the golden calf in the desert. God the Father, after some swaying from Moses, responded in love and Mercy to his people, taking them back, and continuing to pour out his good gifts on them. And this is the story of Israel repeated time and again.  Just as the unfaithfulness of Israel grew and grew, so did the intervening love and Mercy of our God. And at the heart of God’s continued faithfulness, the prophets began to hear of the love of God coming to them in a way all together unexpected. God had sent prophets, judges, kings, and priests to help guide his people, but they came to know that one would come who was greater, the one that would save the people definitively from the oppression that repeatedly came from their turning away from God.                  For the faithful people of Israel, the promise of God toward Israel was not the promise of one god among many gods, in their faith they saw that all they had and all that was came from the Lord their God. In their faith they knew that what the prophets foretold of a new messiah would come true, they knew that a pattern of sin thousands of years old would be definitively taken away in the coming of this new Messiah.              And in the history of Israel there was one person who had the kind of Faith that knew this history of Israel in her heart in the fullness of its meaning. She knew the turning away and in an even greater way she knew the extent to which God had poured out his love on his people. Mary grew up under the care of Joachim and Anne, and though we do not know from scripture anything about her early life, we can imagine that she would have heard the stories of Israel, and that as she would with her son, she pondered these things in her heart. The heart of Mary held the whole story of Israel and the whole of their expectation in the work of God that was still to be done in her midst. We can imagine that this faith would have become the whole of her vision of the world in which she lived. Israel was everything, God’s promise was everything, the whole of who she was, the whole of the world around her. With the eyes of faith she saw the need of Israel and with ears of faith she was ever ready, unbeknownst to her, to hear the Angel Gabriel’s greeting, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you” “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.” Mary, the one who had given her faith so totally over to the belief that the whole of her life and the whole of her history and her people’s history, everything was subject to the God who continued to give his people his love, was chosen to help in bringing this very vision to life, to flesh.            This is Mary’s faith, and this is the faith that Advent calls us to. As we await the remembrance of the birth of our Savior, and as we look to the coming of our Jesus Christ again, we are called to see all things in the light of faith. Our world cannot be neatly separated into convenient visions of reality. Our world is not constituted by the sum total of our preferences or our distractions, or even our own goals as much as sometimes we want it to be. There is something more fundamental going on, something more radically true than all of those things we can let define us.So what if you moved into your dream house, what if you your mother finally approves of your choices. What if you are able to momentarily live up to your own expectations. What if Barley finally lives up to the promise of his obedience diploma. What if I do find solace in being a Coors man. What if the Virgin conceived and bore a son, what if the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. What if he will come again to judge the living and the dead. Faith knows. Mary’s faith, our advent faith can examine these possibilities, and will help point us toward which ones to count on. 

Lamenting with the Father

It was a familiar seen, a mother had brought her three children to McDonalds for lunch on a Tuesday afternoon. You could see the excitement in their eyes as they jumped up and down, flinging themselves at mom’s legs and other extremities to express their excitement in only a way children can do. All three of the children were excited at the prospect of the happy meal to come, but particularly the little boy; I overheard that his name was Teddy. Teddy ran from his mother’s side over to the display case of happy meal toys, pointing with force to the one he wanted, only to cling back to his mother’s leg. The mother all the while, through the veil of pretty constant exhaustion, had a quiet love and pride in their excitement and energy. When the happy meals came, they went over to the table, detached themselves from their mother, and Teddy and his brother and sister sat down. When they opened up their happy meals, Teddy dug to the bottom of the square red box, pushing the French fries and chicken nuggets to the side and pulled out the shrink rapped toy and quickly realized that this was not the toy he had been hoping for. With disregard for his mother he ran over to the toy display, wrong toy in hand, crying and banging the toy on the display.

            There are many things as we get older that can hold that same promise of happiness for us. We think that if we can just move onto that street, live in that house, and drive that car, that the problems of the world will melt away. Often times, though, it is something much smaller than the dream for upward mobility. We have dreams that one day we will have a better jump shot, weigh a certain amount, have the perfect number of friends, finally get to pick Peyton Manning in fantasy football. And little by little small desires in our lives become bigger expectations.

            We begin to live in the promise of the next thing, our hearts set on things of this world and then we find ourselves staring at our new cell phone or new car saying, ‘I thought this was supposed to make me happier than I am right now. Then we come to Church on Sunday asking the Lord and ourselves, why do I feel hardened, why do I feel full of guilt, Lord, why do you seem so far away?

The Israelites in today’s first reading are facing the same kind of questions about their relationship with God the Father. The author of this lament has just finished remembering the great works that God has done for Israel in the past, how the saving God brought them through the red sea and out of the desert on the fertile land. The author remembers the Lord as victorious, leading Israel’s warriors to drive out Israel’s enemies, and he remembers the Lord God as Israel’s loving Father, giving to her all of his good gifts. But now the Israelites are in exile, driven from the land the Father had given them, because even surrounded by so many good gifts of the Lord, the lure of a better life with a more powerful god led them to worship the idols of the foreign lands. They collected wooden idols, looking for the next most powerful god that would provide new benefits in the new land. They joined cults dedicated to these new gods, losing touch with their tradition and their God. Those who still dedicate themselves to the Lord lament that there is almost no one left who is faithful to the Lord. So today we hear Israel crying out to the Lord, why have you let us wander in exile, why have you let our hearts become hardened, our hands unclean, and our hearts full of guilt. We have withered like leaves and the Lord has turned and hid His face from us. Seeking the allures of this world took them not toward the promised joy, but to alienation from their Father in heaven.

But the very structure of this lament highlights God as the Father who despite the people’s experience of alienation has never abandoned his people. “You Lord, are our Father: our redeemer you are named forever.” Even in the act of lamenting of their alienation from God, God puts this realization on their hearts, so that they can’t even get to their lament, to their alienation, without pointing to this most basic fact of their existence as a people: God is their Father. God’s fatherhood is proclaimed at the beginning of the text and as its final exclamation, “Yet O Lord, you are our Father, we are the clay and you are the potter: we are all the work of your hands.” If God is present as Father at the beginning and present as Father molding and shaping at the end, then God is present working as Father through the whole of Israel’s crying out. It is God the Father who puts on the lips of his people “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down.” God puts the hope of a loving Father on the lips of his people. Even as the Israelites are lamenting that they have hardened hearts, that they have become unclean, that they full of guilt, and that the Lord has turned his face, God is working to move them toward the hope that God the Father can still act. This hope is a reversal of what you would expect from a people who have alienated themselves from the Lord. It is not just a request for God to come back in the picture, or erase the guilt, but to tear the very fabric of heaven apart and come down. God the Father gave them the hope that He was doing something new for them.

            Teddy ran away from his mother and started hitting the display case of toys in tears, his desire of a toy took him away from the reality that the most important thing at that table was not the toy but the love of his mother and family. Of course we can fill out what the rest of the scene looks like in our heads. The mother might get frustrated, try to go get him. At some point he will make his way back to focusing on his mother, she is too important in his life not to. I can bet you at the end of the day his mother still tucked him in and kissed him goodnight, and he kissed her back.

Just as Teddy’s mother still loves him after being sidetracked by a toy, so God our Father loves us even when we move away from Him. Every year he interrupts our normal way of approaching him. He gives us anew the gift of these four weeks of Advent. He puts on the lips of the Church in the midst of our distracted journey these words of hope: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. O Come, O Come Emmanuel, rend the heavens and come down. O Come O Come Emmanuel, be with us when we are more interested in our new car then you. O Come, O Come Emmanuel, be with us in the moment we realize our new phone can’t bring us fulfillment. O Come, O Come Emmanuel, be with us when we place our hope in status.  O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, reveal to us God’s constant and loving fatherhood. O Come, O Come Emmanuel. God our loving Father puts these words of hope on our lips. Light the lone purple candle in your homes and God will take these words of hope and mold them deep into your heart this Advent season.