As I begin the first draft of this meditation, I want to start with telling you that it is 10:24 in the morning on the 30th of November and a big wind storm is blowing through Munich.
With Snow.
Which swirls up in grand circles or rushes by in straight lines both marking the wind’s energy and passion.
My apartment is on the top floor of a 110 year old building that was remodeled over 40 years ago. The window frames do not seal well and the wind pushes its way around the edges. The clouds are thick, low, and even. It is true winter light bouncing off the snow on the ground, in the air, waiting to fall.
I look at this and think, this is the weather of all the old Advent carols. Maybe if we were alive in those times, we’d trudge through snow and head off to the village church or along very cold monastery halls to the chapel to make repentance or listen to the end-of-the-world readings in order to be ready for the God-baby.
If you are churchy, you may already know that for centuries Advent was a penitential time, not a party season. If you are not churchy and you accidentally wonder into a church in December, you may be surprised to see all the doom and gloom in the words, prayers, readings, and singing in the worship service. True Advent worship is not concerned with the corporate Christmas shopping attitude. Church gets real during December. Or at least many churches are trying to get real.
It’s easy to stay light in Advent worship, to keep your focus on the family lighting the advent wreath or some project that the Sunday School has come up with and is being presented during the children’s sermon. It’s safer to savor the choir’s four part harmony or the praise band’s devotion to Jesus. It’s harder to listen to the Scripture readings with intentionality because of the anger, the fear, the call for renewal and restoration of the world God calls us to be. Real Advent isn’t for sissies. Real Advent acknowledges that the world is broken, humans are not all good, and something has to change.
Ho Ho Ho, Merry Apocalypse.
The early church said that our bodies were important. That how we navigated the world and how the world navigated us mattered. That being hungry was not okay. Nor was being cold, or sick, or alone. We are supposed to see each other and take care of each other. And God cared about our well being. God cared so much that sooner or later Jesus was going to return to bust some heads together and restore the proper order. It matters to God that all of creation take good and tender care of each other.
After reading Peter Wohlleben’s book, The Hidden Life of Trees as well as starting Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake which focuses on Fungi’s network of communications, I’ve been struck by how the God who is a community of three created a community-connected world. We’re supposed to take care of each other.
And by other I mean all of creation.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, tells important and beautiful stories about how to harvest from the forest respectful of the existing and intertwined eco-system. Take some, but not all, and leave a gift as a thanksgiving. She shows how taking care of the natural world that sustains people is as important as taking care of each other.
When we read the gospel texts we also see how Jesus prioritizes taking care of people’s physical needs. Feed the hungry, cast out demons, share shelter and compassion. And then Jesus dies, returns, and leaves this material world again. Leaving us to find our way in this physical space with our physical bodies that need so much tending. Trees take care of each other, so we should figure out how to do that as well.
And, to be fair, we do. Most of us. Food is sent into famine, hospitals are built for the sick, and we’re starting to understand that we need to not just rip every tree from the forest but instead we must leave enough for the community. Just one example.
Is there hope for us then? That somehow, working with God’s tender prompts we’re going to get through all this after all?
Or is Jesus still coming to save us from ourselves?
Or will God lets climate change have its way with God’s carefully balanced world and we will perish?
This Advent I am also hearing the call into repentance, but I am mindful that I am only one person where a whole world needs to respond. And for that to happen, I find I must trust God to call us home, to call us back into community with each other and this world. I don’t think Jesus returns in violence, no matter how much any one of us may want somebody else get their just rewards.
I don’t think love works like that.
Violence disrupts community.
But I’ll still sing the Advent hymns that lift up a restoration of wholeness.
We need to remember that all of us are important to God. Our well being is important to God. Our taking care of each other and all of God’s beloved creation is important to God.
The storm that started this reflection ended three days ago. It is now 12:20 on the 3rd of December and there are sparkles of sunlight out in the open and blue sky colored snow on protected rooftops. And thats what I know about God and this world today.
You may not be looking at snow where you are. Nor may you be near any of the other visual or audio prompts of Christmas/Advent that you grew up with.
Maybe water can be your way into this seasonal time of anticipation and memory. Maybe the never ending sound of an ocean wave can remind you that you still belong where you belong, no matter how far from home God’s own currents take you. Waters and salmon eventually return. Wise guys traveled a long ways, following the faint prompts of a star, and still arrived where they needed to arrive. I sometimes think that cultural Christmas – the trees, the foods, the lights, are not just a homesickness for a particular place but also for a particular time. I’ll never sit down at my grandmother’s table with my aunts and uncles and cousins again. So I’m learning to sit at the table I’m near for now which is small and quiet. And still beloved by God. Waters keep flowing. What is now will change again. Near or far –
We belong to each other and to the one who made us.
And may the Peace of Christ be with us wherever we find ourselves.
Also – this Hymn by Carolyn McDade: Long Before the Night.