Paradox

I'm finishing up The Meaning in the Waiting.  One phrase caught my attention this morning:

Advent beckons us into the nonsensical paradox of God in which deep truths can be found.

Sense found in nonsense.  Truth found in paradox. 

To gain, we must lose.  In dying, we will live.  The first will be last.  To live, we must die. 

What deep truth can be found in the paradoxes of our faith? 

The first, most simplistic answer I have is that what we are taught is of value as members of society is wrong.  What we hope to gain -- money, wealth, success, security -- isn't worth gaining.  What is of value, isn't valued.  In order to trying live, we must die to what we think we hold dear, and at dying, we will find life -- here, on earth, and then later.

Paradoxes. 

Witness

Steve told me yesterday that someone told him that his goal was to be needed but not seen.  That's really the opposite of what many of us strive for -- we want to be needed and we want our necessity to be obvious as well as our hard work.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.  He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.  He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. John 1:6-7

John was a witness.  He was needed but not the focus of what was to be seen.  He pointed to someone else.

We use a lot of technology in worship (and in other arenas).  It's purpose is not to be seen, but to instead point others to God.  When we see the technology, our eyes are taken off the goal -- the focus -- God.

How often does that apply in our lives?  How often are we to be the witness to something -- to God -- but not the focus?  Does that position set well with us? 

It's not about me.  It's about God.  And that's my calling.

Comfort, O Comfort

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term...  Isaiah 40:1-2a.

In reading again from Gooder's book, The Meaning is the in the Waiting, I found her comments about this passage applicable to today, in the light of the tragedy on Friday.

She says that our modern translations miss part of the meaning.  This command is not one from God to the Prophet -- it is not singular.  It is plural.  "Is there anyone who will go out and comfort my people?"

It seems to me God is calling for people to comfort people. 

And not only that, Gooder says, but also that those words will speak to the heart of the people.  The words spoken will be transformational.  The words will convince those hearing them that God is there.  She says, "It will comfort their brokenness but also resonate truthfully, deep within them."

What words can we say?  What actions can we do?  What is our role to provide comfort to God's people?  What can we do that will convince people that the absolute, life-changing truth is that God is present?  God is present in what feels like exile -- what is exile? 

A Modern Prophecy

Inspired by Isaiah 11:6-9

The wolf shall live
with the lamb.
The homeless shall find a place to sleep,
the vulnerable shall be secure,
and no one will
know violence.
The bully, the nerd and the popular kid,
shall sit together,
and faith shall unite them.

The black man and the white man
shall share a meal,
share a city,
share a world,
without distrust or prejudice.

The woman shall stand for justice,
find her voice,
preach God's word,
without worry of being out of place.

The young child shall walk to school,
come home from school,
sleep in his own bed,
without fear of harm or pain.
He shall not experience hunger or humilation,
and he shall not cry out in desperate want,
anymore.

No one shall hurt or destroy
on all of my Holy earth.
Everyone shall have full knowledge
of the Lord,
as waters cover the sea.

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.