Jason Gaboury's Blog, page 7

The Jesse Tree: Tears – How to Build a Prophetic Imagination

Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree

This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.  

Activist and new monastic Shane Clairborne writes in his book, Irresistible Revolution, “Protesters are everywhere, but I think the world is desperately in need of prophets, those little voices that can point us toward another future. …Whether in the church or in circles of social dissent, there are plenty of people who define themselves by what they are not, whose identity revolves around what they are against rather than what they are for.

 

Protesters are still on the fringe like satellites, revolving around the system.  But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one.”

 

In the fifteen years since Shane penned these words our need for prophets has only intensified.  We need people with the prophetic imagination to envision what a healthy, just, and humane culture might look like.  In a context of deconstruction, we need prophets with vision to build and plant for the future.  In the midst of dehumanization, we need prophets with vision of a beloved community.  In the midst of destructive and self-serving lies, we need prophets committed to confronting uncomfortable truth.  

Where might such a prophetic vocation start?     

 

Day Eighteen – Tears: Jeremiah 9:1-24

Jeremiah’s vision begins in tears.  “Oh, that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears!  I would weep day and night for the slain of my people.”  Jeremiah is not content to watch his culture disintegrate from a safe critical distance.  He does not use his prophetic insight or poetic ability to create distance between himself and the stubborn and rebellious people he’s called to.  Instead, Jeremiah weeps for his people, longing for their freedom, healing, and restoration, even as it becomes abundantly clear that judgment, death, and exile await them.  

 

This lack of schadenfreude is compelling.  Sadly, some would-be prophets in our world seem a little too keen to eviscerate opponents rather than weep for them.  The problem with such an approach is not that it lacks truth.  Our culture, like Jeremiah’s, is full of dehumanizing practices, economic exploitation, greed, envy, licentiousness, and idolatry.  To pretend that everything is ok is to collude with death.  It’s good and right for visionaries to confront evil in all its personal, relational, and systemic forms.  

Still, if our prophetic vision does not begin in tears, in empathy, we won’t be able to envision a truly better future.  Dan Jensen, who teaches innovation at the Air Force Academy, says, “All great innovation begins in an exercise of deep empathy.”  He’s right.  Perhaps that’s why we need weeping prophets, like Jeremiah, and like Shane, to show us how another way is possible.   

 

Can you think of a time that deep empathy led you to discover a creative solution to a difficult problem?  What was that like?  

 

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The Jesse Tree: Holy – Our deepest longing and greatest fear

Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree

This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.  

 

In his book, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality, Ronald Rolheiser writes, “We do not wake up in this world calm and serene, having the luxury of choosing to act or not act. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spirituality.”  

 

This vision of spirituality as a question of what to do with desire demystifies spirituality. To the degree that spirituality is associated with formal, culturally distant, religious practices, it seems inaccessible to tech savvy, secular, socially connected people.  But we don’t have to look too hard into the contours of contemporary life to see desire, spirituality, on full display.  Desire drives our communication and commerce from Tik Tok videos to political memes, from Etsy shops to food vlogs.  

 

Part of what makes Rolheiser’s insight so attractive is it’s wonderfully non-judgmental.  Stripping spirituality out of the clutches of a moralizing, judgmental, stigmatizing religious context helps us see just how essential spirituality is to our life and happiness.  But this strength is also a weakness.  Without being oriented to some good greater than itself, desire can quickly deteriorate into madness.  Take, for example, the passionate polarization within our political life.  Desire for political power, unmoored from old-fashioned notions of common good or civil discourse, is undermining the very political institutions themselves.  

 

Day Eighteen – Holiness: Isaiah 6:1-13

 

Isaiah’s vision in the temple is an encounter with holiness.  Unlike our modern, Western, vision of holiness as a kind of abstract moral perfection, the sounds and symbols in Isaiah’s vision evoke a more ancient, Hebraic understanding of holiness.  Holiness here has to do with the awe inspiring (and terrifying) distance between creator and creation.  We sense something of this sense of holiness when we admire the ocean in its vastness and beauty, perhaps even swimming in its water, all the while knowing that a single rogue wave could overwhelm and annihilate us.  

 

Spirituality, what we do with the desire that burns within, needs to be tethered to something greater than itself.  If not, its fire is likely to burn us up, or at least burn us out.  That’s why we need holiness.  In fact, I think many of us crave it.  We want our passion projects to be seen, evaluated, and recognized.  We want to break through the barriers and limitations we’ve inherited and get, perhaps, a little bit closer to the inspiration we sense.  

 

And yet, holiness also terrifies. 

Isaiah’s vision holds both together.  In it we are invited to acknowledge our failures and faults, but also to experience mercy.  Despite his fear and failures Isaiah is not, “undone,” but is invited into deeper life with God for others.  

In Advent we await our encounter with holiness in the coming of Jesus. 

 

What does spirituality / holiness evoke for you?  

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The Jesse Tree: Offering: How to Find Hope in a Despairing Season

Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree 

This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.  

Yesterday a group of friends gathered, virtually, to pray for a former student in critical condition.  The outpouring of love and faith was inspiring.  Still, it’s impossible to see a woman, typically one who radiates joy, a wife and mother of young children, so close to death in what should be the prime of her life.  

 

Earlier that day another friend texted to say that her father, who had just entered hospice the day before, had passed away.  

 

Right before bed Sophia shared that a friend, one we’d hoped to see over Christmas, is in the ICU with COVID.  

Times like these I don’t want to pray, contemplate, or even pass on fruit of contemplation.  How do we find hope when rage or despair feel more natural?  

 

Day Sixteen – Offering: 1 Kings 17 & 18

 

Today’s readings center around various types of offerings.  The fruit of the land, a symbol of the covenant relationship between God and Israel, have been offered to Baal, a local fertility god, including young children. God’s response is a drought.  This isn’t arbitrary and capricious on God’s part.  If king Ahab insists on leading Israel in offerings to a fertility god as a way of ensuring a bountiful harvest, God will disrupt that plan by reducing the land’s fruitfulness.  

 

In the midst of this grand narrative of conflict between king and prophet, Yahweh and Baal, our story zooms in on a poor Sidonian woman.  She, like everyone around her, is suffering because of the drought.  When she meets Elijah and he asks for food, her response is pointed on the edge of despair.  “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.” (1 Kings 17:12) But, as this vulnerable woman offers hospitality to the prophet, she and her son are both sustained.  

 

This story is layered.  This Sidonian woman, from the community where Baal was worshipped, is sustained in the drought by offering a portion of her food to the fierce Yawist prophet.  

 

It seems to me we’re in a drought, of sorts.  Compassion, cooperation, resiliency, adaptability, and stability all feel in short supply.  While the bitter fruit of fear, rage, and despondency seems to multiply.  

 

In this season of drought perhaps we are invited to offer a portion of the meager emotional resources we have, to pray with those who haven’t given up hope, to grieve despite the fatigue, to pray our rage, in the hope of transforming it.  

 

What limited resource could you offer to God today?  

 

 

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The Jesse Tree: Love and Sin

Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree 

This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.  

Today is the third Sunday in Advent.  We light the rose-colored candle.  Joy is the theme of the day and week.  After two weeks of longing, for hope and peace respectively, there’s something rejuvenating about marking this third week as different from the others.  We need something to lighten the mood.  We need something to remind us not only that another way is possible, or necessary, but that another way is already here, the way of love.  

 

Maybe that’s why it’s counter-intuitive to start our prayers for the third week of Advent with these words.  

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.[1]

This prayer feels strangely off theme.  Shouldn’t we be praying something about God’s comfort in the midst of difficulty, or about the generous love of God?  Shouldn’t we be praying John 3:16 or Psalm 23?  

 

Day Fifteen – Love and Sin

 

David is a fitting character to reflect on for the third week of Advent.  He embodies this counter-intuitive connection between love for God and being hindered by sin.  David is praised in scripture for being a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14), especially in contrast to Saul, who quickly turned from God to his own political posturing and grandstanding.  Seen in this light, it’s easy to turn David into a hero of personal piety.  After all, isn’t David the one who wrote, “One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.”[2]

 

Unfortunately, this vision doesn’t capture David’s full story.  David made a rash vow to kill the household of Nabal because of an insult (1 Samuel 25).  He became a murder and adulterer (2 Samuel 11).  David perverted justice, refusing to punish his son Amnon after he had raped his half-sister Tamar (2 Samuel 13).  Even the end of David’s life has an unsavory aspect of vengeance and spite (1 Kings 2:6).  

 

David’s life shows us that earnest love for and confidence in God does not exempt us from being, “sorely hindered by our sins.”  We, like David, are a jumble of good and evil.  We are monstrous saints, or perhaps, saintly monsters.[3]  

 

Earnest love for and confidence in God does make us honest.  The more we experience the love of God the easier it is to admit how desperately we need it.  

How have you experienced love that made you feel safe enough to admit your faults?  

 

[1] Episcopal Church. The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church : Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David According to the Use of the Episcopal Church. New York :Seabury Press, 1979.

 

[2] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. 1989. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.

[3] Deeply grateful to the author Don Everts for this phrase.  

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Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree: Anxious?

This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.  

 

It was three in the morning and I was up emailing Harriet.  My book was due to come out in a few weeks and Harriet had offered to share the reader’s copy around the highly networked and well-known ministry where she worked.  It seemed like an ideal opportunity to connect a timely resource to a community that could use it.  

 

The only problem was that Harriet had stopped responding to my emails / messages.  Like an anxious father I’d been up for hours thinking, planning, pacing.  Did she hate it? Was it something I said?  Perhaps my message came across too strong?  

 

A short time afterwards Harriet’s well-known ministry was in the throes of public scandal.  It hasn’t recovered.  Still, it’s worth asking why I was so anxious.  

Day Twelve – Anxious: Judges 6 - 8

 

The story of Gideon is a troubling but insightful story of the anxious cycle so familiar to those of us who lose sleep over difficult decisions, second guess our actions, or just worry.  Gideon, whose name means, one who cuts down, and who is later described as tall and striking in appearance / manner, is introduced as a man in hiding.  He’s threshing out wheat in a winepress in hopes that no one sees him and takes his family’s grain away.  

 

After being called by God to deliver Israel from foreign occupation, Gideon asks for three distinct signs, his famous signs with a wool fleece, as confirmation that God really has called him.  Even after three signs, Gideon still sneaks into the enemy camp to eavesdrop on a conversation so that he can be really sure God will grant him victory.  

Recently my friend Jared spoke to a group of entrepreneurs in New York City.  “I believe,” he said, “that a community of entrepreneurial women and men who are secure in God’s love for them will be more fruitful than a community who have something to prove.”  This is a radical thesis.  One of the investors in the forum shared with me afterward, “As an investor I’m always looking for the entrepreneur with something to prove.  I’m interested in that hustle.”  

 

When we consider the story of Gideon Jared’s insight seems to have some validity.  The high points of Gideon’s story are those moments Gideon acts in faith, trusting in God’s promise.  We see this when, for example, Gideon cuts down the Asherah pole, reduces the number of his army to a few hundred, and refuses to rule over his fellow Israelites.  Gideon is at his worst when he is anxious, reactive, vain, and vindictive.  

I’m a bit like Gideon, at my best when my trust is high and I’m not worried about whether I’m enough, there’s enough, or it will be enough.Perhaps Gideon’s story is a reminder to anxious hearts that another way is possible.

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Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree: How to Have Courage

This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.  

 

Most people I know are tired of change.  It’s going on two years since COVID swept across the globe changing daily life as we knew it.  School, family rhythms, work, worship, and relationships are all still adjusting.  Fears of a new variant and the winter flu season are causing new travel restrictions and health protocols.  Global supply chain disruptions are impacting the availability of cream cheese at bagel shops in NYC.  

 

What do you do when your life has been disrupted and the things you’ve counted on aren’t there anymore?  

Day Eleven – Courage: Joshua 1:1-11

 

“After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the Lord spoke to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, saying, 2 “My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the Israelites… Be strong and courageous…”

 

Can you imagine what it would have been like to lose a leader you’ve been following for over forty years?  A few years ago, our church had a sudden leadership transition of a senior leader who’d served for sixteen years, less than half of the time Moses led the Israelites in the wilderness, and it was still profoundly disorienting.  All of the rhythms of life that would have been meaningful to this community, from gathering food to managing health, from distributions of work to waging war, had been influenced and shaped by Moses.  And now, Moses was gone.  

The work ahead of Joshua is even more daunting than it seems.  Moses’ death outside of the Promised Land was the result of his disobedience, but it was also a stark reminder that the great work Moses had set out to accomplish remained incomplete, even after forty years.  Joshua must have wondered how he was going to be able to complete Moses’ work.  Perhaps that’s why the phrase, “Be strong and courageous,” is repeated so often throughout this section.

God’s call to Joshua to have courage is not an appeal to rugged individualism, denial, or recklessness.  Ammon Hennacy famously wrote, “Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. But the one who has love, courage and wisdom moves the world…”.  

The pace and amount of change in our lives does not show any sign of slowing down.  Perhaps we are all a little like Joshua.  The old ways are behind us.  The change ahead of us is daunting.  God grant us courage, love, and wisdom, not so that we can bend the world to our will, but that we might offer life to the change weary.  

How have you grown in courage, love, and wisdom?  

 

 

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Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree: Are God's Words Welcome or Weapons?

This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.  

 

“I love you.”  “You matter.”  “Well done!”  “I’m sorry.”  “Let’s go for a walk.”  “Is there more?”  “What’s important about that to you?”  Words like these are powerful, not because they’re novel or especially creative, but because they build relationship.  

 

We live in a world where words have been hijacked by advertising.  Whether we’re reading slogans cooked up in an office on Madison Avenue, conjured by machine intelligence in Silicon Valley, or churned up in the cacophony of Twitter.  We’re desperate to connect, to share our experience, and attend to the things that matter, but it’s hard.

 

How do you create connection with words in an age where language is co-opted by the marketplace and the political sphere?  How do we persist in our efforts to communicate and connect when a permanent record of our “social” engagements can be and are sold to entities that want to cash in on our behavior?    

Day Ten – God’s Words: Exodus 19:1 – 20:20

 

“Then God spoke all these words: 2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; 3 you shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:1-3)

 

The creator God of the Bible is a speaking God.  Unlike any of the ancient or modern creation stories, stories that focus on randomness, chaos, and violence, the Bible points us to a God who speaks creation into being with simple declarative statements.  God speaks, through dreams, through visitations, through his angelic messengers, through signs and stories.  The story of scripture is nothing if not the story of a God who speaks to and through specific people.  

Exodus 20 is different because here God speaks to the whole community at one time.  Christian imagination has captured this moment as the giving of the ten commandments.  This is a little misleading.  While there are ten directives included in these words, the standard Christian imagination of a list of rules doesn’t quite capture the relational dynamic at work here.   

The giving of these ten words, as they are referred to in Jewish thought, is meant to be rich with relational and communal significance.  Notice that it is God, not Moses, who is said to have delivered the people out of the house of slavery.  In the ancient world there was profound overlap between the religious and political.  It would have been easy for Moses to claim that his relationship to God justifies his power, and then to use that privilege for himself.  God’s words block the way to that kind of exploitation.  In these words, God speaks directly to all the people.  God is forming a bond of love and connection with his people.  

 

God’s ten words go on to establish rhythms of life and relationships of mutuality.  These are not “rules for life” but relational tools wrapped in words.  

How have God’s words been a gift to you?

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We Need a Little Christmas

I know you can’t wait for Christmas this year. I don’t blame you. I don’t think it’s the gifts, visiting loved ones, or sugary treats. I don’t think it’s the music or the decorations. I suspect it’s that you just can’t wait for the chance to rest. 

 

It’s been a long and difficult couple of years, and I bet you just can’t wait to have the space and permission to slow down and rehearse the unforced rhythms of grace. 

 

As I was thinking about this, I couldn’t stop remembering the most popular Christmas hymn of all time.The story goes that in 1818 the curate of a parish in Orbendorf Austria , Joseph Moore, sent a poem he had written to a friend of his, Hans Gruber.He asked heir Gruber to write music for the poem for two solo voices and for guitar accompaniment, the organ being broken, he desperately wanted music for the Christmas Eve service.

What makes Silent Night the most popular Christmas hymn of all time?  I think it’s the way this particular song captures the almost magical experience of the first hours after childbirth.  If mother and baby are healthy, then there is this quiet, attentive, silence that envelops you.  I don’t know if you’ve experienced it, or remember it, but it’s incredibly powerful.  

Can I go out on a limb here?  I think that underneath your desire for Christmas is the longing for this kind of quiet, attentive, connection.  We actually crave these kinds of moments, especially after a something difficult.  Have you ever felt a hand on your shoulder in a moment of grief and suddenly felt safe… and seen?  Have you ever walked quietly with someone in a moment of need and felt that somehow just their being there lifted your spirits?  

 

That’s what I’m talking about.  

At Christmas we celebrate and long for the quiet, attentive, connection with God that we find in Jesus.  As we remember the scene with Mary, Joseph, and the manger, we’re invited to know God with us.  Immanuel.  We’re invited to come to Jesus, to love him, to know him, and to give ourselves in love and friendship to him.  

In my book, Wait With Me; Meeting God in Loneliness there’s a chapter on called Ponder.  In that chapter I invite us to reflect on the Christmas story through the perspective of Mary who is said to “ponder these things in her heart”.  

This practice is important because although we long for that sense of quiet connection, most of us, most of the time struggle to receive it.  And that’s because we live in a culture of distraction.  We’re easily distracted by our phones, by the sights, sounds, and smells of this season.  We look at a light show and say, “Wow was amazing…” but even our enthusiasm is a bit hollow.    But when we ponder something, when we take a moment, an interaction, an experience and ponder it… we’re transformed by the experience.  

This Christmas I invite you to ponder the story of Jesus.  Let the vision of the word becoming flesh sink into your mind and heart.  Don’t be distracted by the lists, presents, cousins, carols, and preparations, just… ponder the wonder and beauty of Jesus.  Let the holy, attentive, silence of this scene give your heart the connection you crave, and you just might find yourself renewed in the new year.  

Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree: How to be a Hero

This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.  

 

 “We’re fools if we can’t see the fools, who fooled us all before… Except when I read books and dream, I don’t believe in heroes… anymore.”  I’ve been thinking about this line, (from an obscure 1980’s off Broadway musical) a lot recently.      

 

The last few years have been devastating to the “heroes” of the American Church.  Sex scandals, collusion with partisan politics, abuse of power, and financial mismanagement have coincided with testimonies of abuse from survivors of #churchtoo and conversion therapy contexts.  Books like The Color of Compromise and Jesus and John Wayne have testified to historical alignments between the church and racism, sexism, and militarism.  

 

What do you do when your heroes crumble and your community is revealed in its full compromise?  

Day Eight - Heroes

Exodus 2:1 - 4:20

Moses

 

But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”  12  He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”  (Exodus 3:11)

 

Moses is everything we want in a post-modern hero.  Rescued from a murderous plot as an infant, Moses grows up in the seat of intellectual and political power.  He is multi-cultural leader who will kill on behalf of oppressed Israel.  But, at just the point where you’d think the story would catapult Moses to raising up a slave rebellion, he flees for his life and spends forty years tending sheep in the wilderness.  

By the time the story picks up again Moses seems no longer interested in rescuing Israel.  His complaint is a variation on the theme, “I’m not qualified or capable.”  God’s response to Moses is also a variation on the theme, “I will be with you.”  

 

As I reflect on this story, I can’t help but notice how many of our American Christian “heroes” are highly competent, self-assured, and charismatic.  Moses complains that he’s not a good speaker, but our American Christian heroes are nothing if not compelling communicators.  Moses argued with God to remain out of public life, our American Christian heroes jockey for the most influential spaces.  

 

An Arab proverb says, “The further you go into the desert, the closer you get to God.”  I think this is because the desert is great at burning away our self-importance.  Forty years in the desert seemed effective in reshaping Moses’ character.  If I was an optimist, I might hope that the crumbling of our American Christian heroes is the start of a rediscovery of humility.  

How has God reshaped your self-importance?  

What might a humble hero look like in your context?

 

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An Advent Sermon...

From a Sermon Delivered at All Angels’ Church introducing Advent

If you look closely at the Christian year you’ll notice that our liturgical calendar is tightly woven around a story.  It’s the story of our humanity discovered, redefined, rescued, and lived in God through Christ by the Spirit.  Marking these seasons is meant to form us as faithful witnesses of Jesus Christ. 

The Christian year ends (usually Sunday before Thanksgiving) on an incredible high.  We do not end our year looking backward at the trends, fashions, and events of the year that’s past.  We look instead to the Son of Man who is running the universe in all its beauty and all its complexity. 

I’ve often wondered why, for the liberated imagination, this end of the year isn’t significantly more raucous than Times Square on New Year’s Eve. 

But then, I think I know why.  The assertion that Jesus Christ is in charge of everything is bound to meet with incredulity.  The typical New Yorker asks, “What planet are you living on?”  Or, “Just how much communion wine have you been drinking?  It’s obvious that Jesus isn’t running the world.  Or, if he is… he seems to be doing a terrible job.  Have you seen the numbers fo people dead because of COVID?  Did you know that the number of black men killed by the police the last few years is greater than it was during the civil right’s movement?  Terrorism?  Job insecurity?  Climate change?”

It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by the scope and magnitude of need around us.  It’s easy, perhaps even unavoidable, to enter into the tension between a faith that says, “Jesus is Lord of All” and the experience that says “life is a painful struggle.”

The season of Advent anticipates the tension between announcements of God’s goodness and power and the pain of our world. The raucous and faith filled celebration of Jesus as Lord of All is immediately followed by lament.  On the Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the church year, we traditionally sing, “Crown him with Many Crowns, the Lamb upon His throne.  Hark how the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own.  Awake my soul and sing, for him who died for thee and crown him as thy matchless king throughout eternity.”  In Advent we sing, “O Come,  O Come Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lowly exile here until the Son of God appear… “ 

Advent invites us to respond to the challenge of our darkening world by waiting, watching, and bearing witness. 

Waiting

We read the prophetic books during Advent. Words like Jeremiah’s, “I (the Lord) will fulfill the promise… I will cause a branch to spring up for David… Judah will be saved… It will be called the Lord is our Righteousness”.  All of these promises are future tense.  Even if you didn’t know that Jeremiah was written during a time of conflict, destruction, and exile the longing and reassurance in the words would suggest these are promises to wait for.

New Yorkers stink at waiting.  Anyone who’s ever walked through Times Square during the holiday season knows this.  Have you ever done this?  You find yourself walking behind a family, or a tour group from out of town, and they’re taking up the whole sidewalk?  It’s as if they’re oblivious to the fact that there are 50,000 people who’ll be using this sidewalk to actually get somewhere in the next few minutes.  If you’re like me you feel a certain righteous indignation rise up in you.  Am I right?

We don’t like to wait in traffic.  We don’t like to wait at the grocery store.  We don’t like to wait.  Period. 

Advent invites us to wait.  Specifically, Advent invites us to wait for the Lord.  We are in a hurry.  We are urgent to find a solution, to build our projects, to resolve conflicts, to force change, to move on, move up, and move out. 

But wait….  The Christian year begins with waiting.  The waiting we’re invited into isn’t like waiting in the doctors office, or waiting for the train where the goal is to distract ourselves.  We’re invited to wait attentively.  We enter the story of a people waiting for God to act.  We read the prophets who point ahead to the coming messiah and we enter into the longing of Israel.  We read the prophets who speak of a world finally set right, of the kingdom of God dwelling with people and we enter into the longing for that kingdom. 

Without waiting our faith is shallow, escapist, and triumphalistic.  Waiting increases our ability to lament, to long for change, to learn all we can, to work in hope.  We need these skills and habits to help us become the kind of people who can respond to the challenges in our world with faith, hope, and love.

How are you doing with waiting?  Perhaps this Advent you might learn to wait? 

The words of Jesus stress the importance of watching.  “Be on your guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly like a trap.” 

Jesus’ words similarly look ahead to a time of Jerusalem being surrounded by armies. The expectation that ‘every day and every way we’re getting better and better’ is not a Christian view.  Jesus’ followers then, and his followers now are to be people whose eyes are open to the world, who see the difficulties, challenges, and tragedies; but also watch expectantly for the saving work of God. 

Some interpret Jesus’ teaching as referring to a distant future still unrealized.  Some interpret Jesus’ teaching here as fulfilled within a generation of his death and resurrection in the terrible events of the destruction of the temple in 70 CE.  I’m not sure it matters, in either case the call to watch and discern is central for those who follow Jesus. 

This is a struggle for New Yorkers whose lives are so frenetic and time poor we are easily weighed down by the worries of life.  As Jonathan Larson wrote, “I’m a New Yorker, fear’s my life…” 

Discernment… the ability to understand what God is doing in my life, the life of my community, or the culture at large is a spiritual discipline we need to recover.  This summer we as a vestry worked through a series on spiritual discernment.  This fall Jen Knight offered the same material after the morning service.

It’s difficult to overstate how important this practice of discernment is for us.  If prayer is akin to spiritual breathing, then discernment is like spiritually seeing.  You can live without sight but you’ll bump into things without some means to discern appropriately.  

One of the ways that our family has practiced watching with and for Christ during Advent is to practice ‘the Jessie Tree’.  Every evening for about 30 minutes before bed we stop, light the advent wreath, sing O Come, O Come Emmanuel, and read part of the grand narrative of scripture (beginning in creation and ending in the incarnation).  We talk about what this passage means in the context of the story, but also in the context of our life / world.  Then we hang a symbol on our tree that captures a big idea from this passage.  This practice of sitting together waiting and watching has become one of the most formative practices of our life together.

Witness. 

Our activities during Advent bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.  One of the best ways they do this is by the ways they relate to popular culture.  (They are not oppositional, but neither are they in the stream of popular culture.  Instead our practice of Advent relates at a whole new angle.)  As our culture gets really busy and frazzled, Advent invites us to become still and attentive.  As our culture rushes to acquire things Advent invites us to lament alongside those who long for home, health, and hope.  As our culture becomes louder and louder we are invited to become quieter, contemplative, and discerning. 

Jesus Christ is Lord of All!  And yet there are many parts of our lives, families, communities, city, and world that are living in profound dissonance.  It is time to tell the great story again.  To ponder…to contemplate… to wait and to watch. 

Ultimately, our waiting and watching will witness not to ourselves, but to the beauty and wonder of Jesus in whose life we have life.  The story that shapes our year is the story of a God who did fulfill his promise to Jeremiah.  It is the story of a God who did become our Righteousness.  It is the story of a God who entered into hunger and want, displacement and disruption, wars and rumors of wars.  It is the story of a king who came to his own people, but was rejected by them.  It is the story of a God who made himself one of us so that we might participate in his life.  It is the story of a coming kingdom where there will be no more war, terror, disease, divorce, displacement, or despair.  It is the story of life with God in the face of Jesus Christ.  

And so we wait… and we watch… and we bear witness.  

Amen.

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