Epilogue

In worship yesterday, Joe's sermon was entitled Epilogue.  He talked about the time between -- the time between Christmas and the next Holiday.  The time between one thing that has happened, and the next one to happen.

Some of us rush from one event to the next, but he encouraged us to wait in the Epilogue -- in the time between. 

On Christmas morning, I was up before anyone else.  The house was quiet -- even the dog was still asleep.  Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.  I turned on the Christmas tree and all the lights in our village, and read.  I sat quietly for about 20 minutes reading, and then another 20 minutes, doing nothing.  It wasn't Epilogue, really -- it wasn't the time after, but it was an Intermission.  It was unplanned time to breath, enjoy, relax, listen to God. 

Joe seemed to think that Epilogue was a time of nothingness -- an empty time between.  I think Epilogue -- that space between -- is a time of something.  In that time of quiet, we do something very important.  We are still.  We listen.  We turn aside to see God.

Remember in Moses' experience with the burning bush?  He turned aside, and saw the bush.  There are times when we must turn aside from what demands our attention in order to see God at work. 

We are called to Epilogue.

Back Story

One of the decorations we put up for Christmas (sometimes) is a hand painted Village.  This year, our village has a "back story."

If you click on the image, and look in the lower left hand corner, traveling along the road are three small figures -- they are Mary, Joseph and a donkey.  Each day, they move down the road.  My son says they are stopping at each building to see if there is room for them.  There is a shepherd and sheep on another end of town, moving toward the center, and three wise men, coming from another point.  There is even a lone cow, near the church, moving each day toward the center.

Jesus, thanks to our son, is inside the first building on the left, which is a movie theater.   He's in there watching a movie, waiting to make his appearance on Christmas Day.

The Nativity story, acted out in tiny figurines, in a small, quiet town.

I love that our son thought of it, and that he's moving the figures each day.  I think there is an application to what he is doing to our own lives.  We're moving toward Christmas, waiting.  Mary and Joseph, strangers from outside of town, are trying to find a place to go.  They'll end up homeless, in the park, on Christmas Eve, and Jesus will arrive.

Are we waiting for a day of gift-giving, or are we waiting, watching, for Jesus to appear, so that we can go where he is?

Laughter

Still reading The Meaning is in the Waiting.  Today I read about Sarah laughing when God told her (once again) that she would have a son.  I've always thought her laughter was natural and expected.  Who wouldn't laugh?  I hadn't noticed what Gooder points out -- that part of the laughter is cynical.  Sarah has been told that she will have a son before, and she has been waiting and waiting and waiting.  Who can blame her cynicism?

Later, when confronted about the laughter, she denied it.  God pressed her to admit to the laughter:  "Oh, yes, you did laugh" (Genesis 18:15).  He wants her to claim everything the laughter meant -- the disbelief, the hope, the cynicism.  In claiming those emotions, she would be able to recognize the pure joy of the birth of Isaac -- whose name means laughter in Hebrew.

What emotions do we ignore?  What experiences would God have us claim so that we would recognize the transformation God will bring?

We were talking in our staff retreat today (among other things) about harvesting loss.  God brings goodness out of loss.  What fruit can you harvest from loss?  Can you at least claim the loss so that God can bring goodness from it?

The transformation of Sarah's cynicism to joy didn't shorten her wait.  It didn't erase the years of hoping and impatience.  The good doesn't make the bad go away, but God can do what we think might be impossible, and bring joy.

Not Waiting

I'm sitting in my office.  Next door, one of my co-workers is waiting on hold for a technical person to help her with a computer problem.  Waiting.  We do it all the time, in so many different circumstances.  There are times when I enjoy waiting. It can be a period of stolen moments to use as a precious commodity - to read or knit.  To relax. 

That patience with waiting is removed when there is a pressure to accomplish something or be somewhere else.  Saturday, I had 30 minutes to run an errand before I picked up Josh from a piano "thing" he was doing.  I spent much of the time waiting in line.  Much more waiting, and I would have been very late (I was 4 minutes late to pick him up). 

Another person waiting kept moving from line to line, trying to find the shortest one, saying she needed to be at the funeral home and then downtown by 2:00.  What I noticed about her was that if she had stayed where she started, she would have finished much sooner.  Our impatience in waiting, and our attempts to circumvent the waiting can have negative consequences.

So it was with Sarah and Abraham.  Sarah became impatient with the waiting and told Abraham to "go into her slave girl" so that she could have children through Hagar.  The consequences were not what Sarai and Abram had planned.  If God had not intervened, Hagar and Ishmael would have suffered much more than they did from Sarai's frustration.

Waiting for the Lord sometimes means releasing the need to solve the problem in our own way in our own time.  Our impatience can result in negative consequences that neither we nor God intend. 

How do we know when God is calling us to action and when our own impatience and need for control are subverting his call?  Good question.  How do we know?

Go, and Come

Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.  Genesis 12:1

Paula Gooder, in The Meaning is in the Waiting says that the translation of the word go in the above verse brings problems.  This word go can mean go, if you are standing with someone, or it can mean come, if you are far away from someone.

I actually like the contrast.

We are told to Go.  Imagine the benediction of a worship service, with the one leading worship standing with us, in front us of, and relating God's word to us to Go into the world.  I can imagine God standing with us, giving us directions.

I can also see that when we are far away from God, he calls to us, and tell us to come.  There are times when we hear a call, as if from far away, and we know it is God giving us directions, giving us leadership.  Come, come to where I am and do what I am doing.

For a God whose kingdom is now and not yet, whose son died but is alive, a command to both go and come seems reasonable, and even just right.

Pre-Advent Devotional

Isaiah 30:18: Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you;
therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you.
For the Lord is a God of justice;
blessed are all those who wait for him.

This is a devotional I wrote for our JM Devotional Ministry, cross-posted here.

This morning I picked up a book by Paula Gooder called The Meaning is in the Waiting. I haven’t started the book itself yet, but I did read the forward by Lauren F. Winner. She says this:

We are told, by advertisements and by our Blackberries, to squeeze time dry, to use it well, to maximize it. The church tells us a different story about it (time) -- it is God’s and there is enough of it, more than enough. The church’s narrative about time is never clearer than during Advent, when we are invited to spend our time very foolishly indeed. We are invited to wait. Just to wait.

Take a breath. Take some time. Waste it. Waste it during a season when everything around you demands that you make the most of your time. Wait on God.

Lauren Winner tells us that something amazing happens when we do. We find that God is waiting on us. The image that came to my mind was of a parent waiting up at night for a teenager to come home. God is waiting for us. “The Lord waits to be gracious to you.”

I find myself in a time that feels like limbo. Thanksgiving has come and gone; Advent has yet to come. We are waiting to begin waiting. My devotional challenge to you this week is to give some thought to Advent. What will you do as you wait for God? How will you prepare yourself to begin?

My commitment this Advent is to find some quiet time each day for devotionals and prayer. I commit to more spiritual reading during this month. Our pastor this Sunday said that “we belong to the Truth.” I want to draw closer to the Truth during this time of waiting, and I am going to be intentional about it.

It is God’s time, and there is enough of it. Do what seems wasteful, and wait for God.

Prayer:

Creator God, who stretches a hand across the heavens and spreads the stars in the sky,
meet us in our waiting.
Loving Son, who came and comes and will come,
come today and meet us in our waiting.
Abiding Spirit, who waits with us,
speak to us in our waiting.
Loving God, grant us the courage to wait for you
and the grace to realize you wait for us.
Amen.

Salvation Story

Seven years ago yesterday I started this blog.  I don't have anything monumental to say about seven years of blogging except that in some ways that feels like a long time, and in others it doesn't.  I feel as if I have been doing this forever, and yet it is hard to believe it has been seven years. 

Thank you to those of you who are out there who keep reading.  Blessings.

I'm just beginning The Meaning is in the Waiting by Paula Gooder.  I imagine over the next few weeks I'll be writing alot about waiting. 

In the introduction she mentions that one of the difficulties of Advent is that we feel as if we are waiting for something that has already happened.  Christ has come.  Christmas (the first Christmas) has come and gone, and yet we spend December waiting for it. 

Gooder encourages the reader to think about time and the Bible in a different way.  As we think about God's salvation work in the world, we are tempted to think about individual events -- creation, Noah, Abraham (blessed to be a blessings), Jesus, Paul -- the list of individuals and individual events can go on and one.  Instead, she says, think of it all as one big event.  God at God's salvation work.  Then, creation and the work of a prophet become part of one purpose -- layers of an onion (my own week analogy).

With that in mind, read this quote from the introduction:

...the Gospel writers are standing in this same tradition of biblical salvation history that sees Jesus' presence on earth as yet one more -- even more wonderful -- example of God's intervention in the world.  Thus Jesus' presence is creation, Exodus, return from exile (and much more), all rolled into the one glorious snowball of salvation.

I remember when I was working my way through the Bethel Bible series.  At the end of two years of study, one of the revelations to me was the view of the Bible not as a series of perhaps unconnected books, but one book -- the story of God's work of saving the world.

What does that mean for us?  We aren't waiting for something that has already happened.  We stand here in the midst of it -- we stand here waiting for what happens next in God's salvation work, hoping to be allowed to take part.

You Can't Handle the Truth

On Sunday, Joe based his sermon on John 18:33-37. The last line of that passage is this: "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."

He compared the idea of "belonging" to the truth and following the truth or knowing the truth. Belonging to the truth has an inescapable nature to it. If we belong to the truth, the truth will pursue us, never letting us go. Even when we turn away from the truth, we still belong to the truth.

I am the way, the truth and the life.

As Joe told the children about belonging to the truth in the Children's moment, my older son wrote something on a piece of paper and then turned around and showed it to me. It said, "You can't handle the truth!" He meant it as a joke; it's the famous line from the movie A Few Good Men.

You can't handle the truth.

In the movie it means that we don't want to accept the truth; we aren't prepared for it; we would rather not hear it. But as I think about it, I think it has another implication, one that Grant didn't mean in his joke. We can't handle the truth. We can't control God. We can't manipulate him or trick him. All of our regular "tools" of handling something -- of maintaining control of our lives -- don't work with God.

We can't handle the truth. And that is another frustrating part about waiting. We aren't in control. We wait upon the Lord.

To Wait -- Hannah

1 Samuel 1:17

The night was still thick and heavy
across the land. 
The sun was only a hoped for light.
Hannah couldn't sleep.
She traveled with her husband.
They were returning home.

In the darkness, she touched flame
to kindling,
encouraging the fire to burn again
in the dark.

Her life had been hopeless, empty,
but now, the spark of Eli's words
burned small and tiny in her mind.
"Go in peace,
God will grant your petition."

She blew gently on the flame
to keep it alive,
as she prayed for the hope within her
to continue to burn.

Was it better, to wait now in the midst of hope,
fearful that the hope would die within her?
Or was the security of hopelessness better,
without the fear of loss?
She blew the gentle breath of prayer on the flame within her.
"Please, God..."

To wait.  To hope. To fear.
To fear even to believe.