Honest Advent: Awakening to the Wonder of God-with-Us Then, Here, and Now

by Scott Erickson

In any divine annunciation, you receive revelation as a gift, yet at the same time you receive notice that all that you had planned is ending. It’s all over. Everything will change—most of all you.

To see Jesus as full of grace means there wasn’t any perfection checklist that was met to deserve His presence. His arrival stands against the idea that if you do it right, you get access to His presence. His presence was freely given. He never withheld it. Grace is presence not withheld.

A religion based on trying to earn love inevitably fails, because works can never truly heal the fear of being left alone because of your real. At some point, you just want to be loved for your real—the actual state of the matter of you.

Each one of us, in a way, is a genealogy of all kinds of histories that are worthy of both celebration and regret. We are a culmination of holy moments and juicy moments too (you know what you know), and it is this paradox of interior genealogy that we carry into the season of Advent, wondering if Christ could come into our complicated midst as well.

Grace and truth is the invitation to be seen, and in that seeing to receive the gift of presence not withheld. It is this loving presence given to who we are right now that will truly heal us. It releases us from the janky treadmill of religious striving and invites us to a long walk on the beach as ones who love each other.

Our assumptions hinder our spiritual journey in all kinds of ways, and the antidote to assumption is surprise. The surprise of Christ’s incarnation is that it happened in Mary’s day as it is happening every day in your lack of resources, your overcrowded lodging, your unlit night sky, your humble surroundings. It’s a surprise that life can come through barren places. It’s a surprise that meek nobodies partake in divine plans.

Nothing can separate you from love. Your assumptions believe there must be something that can . . . But surprise! Nothing can. May you thank God with joyful surprise at how much you have assumed incorrectly.

AA meeting, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Why is being seen so hard? It’s hard because when you decide to live into your true self—your strengths and weaknesses, your light and shadow, your superpowers and your kryptonites—you are revealing yourself to the world, and you can now be touched. Loved, rejected, embraced, ignored . . . and all of the other complicated interactions that come with human relationships. This is the exciting and terrifying proposal in an everyday life, so that some of us are questioning whether revealing yourself is worth it.

But what we see in Jesus is a spirituality that is grounded in the never-ending spring of love that was the source of everything He did. It was the source that enabled Him to forgive the haters. It was the source that emboldened Him to meet others in their pain. It was the source that ignited Him to speak hope in a culture desperate for a new way. It was the source that empowered Him to lay down His own life for those He loved . . . which is humanity.

May it be known that the Giver of existence took the same risk we all have to take daily—to be seen and known as the person we really are. The risk of incarnation is the risk of love. And love risks heartbreak, rejection, and being sold out by your friends, because love is also the animating source that brings about all the wonderful things in an incarnation, like companionship, joy, healing, wholeness, and being seen and known in the world.

To make something sacred is to give reverence to the weight of its importance.

Every good counselor has a heart of empathy for one’s situation and how they got there, but also a zeal for the individual to become healed from deep trauma and to walk down the road to a restored, healthy self.

Maybe this Advent, we can see the incarnation of Jesus as the very way He is answering these questions as a Wonderful Counselor. He became human so we would know He had nothing to hide. He lived in a complicated world so He could relate to the complexity of being in our world. His name is God-with-Us so we would know we are prized and in that feeling of being prized would come to a deeper prizing of ourselves.

If Jesus embodied mightiness through an overcoming through physicality, He would’ve appeared in a golden onesie, ripped like a CrossFit trainer, kicking the can of anyone in His way. But instead we find a humble servant wrapped in human vulnerability who is obedient to that vulnerability all the way to death, even if it happens to be death on a cross.

Jesus is mighty not because of His capacity to overcome hardship but because of His willingness to go through human hardship, like we have to do. It is this compassionate empathy that has the power to transform the human heart.