"His mercy is for those who fear him"
Luke 1:39-55
Advent 4, Year C
Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, come. Take my lips and speak with them. Take our minds and think with them. Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you. In Christ’s name, we ask it. Amen.
I will admit that I have been of two minds in this Advent Season…that leads so very quickly to the Christmastide that follows…I have felt a tension if you will. A tension between on the one hand the deep pain and fear that is so much a part of the reality of living in this world, in this day. The fear that is the understandable result of the headlines we read in the papers and watch on the news, certainly not limited to…but like, climate catastrophes and acts of terror and never ending war, even ever expanding war oversees and mass gun violence and divisive political rhetoric and immigration and refugee crisis and the real challenges and struggles that come with income and racial and religious inequality…and surely the list goes on and seems to only grow. So all of this and so much more is on the one hand…and it’s hard to carry…and on the other is the hope and light and love that this Holy Season represents. The promise that we are indeed not alone in the midst of our pain and fear…that God indeed has come among us millennia ago as the Babe of Bethlehem, that Jesus has indeed defeated sin, evil and death on the cross and in his glorious resurrection. That Christ will come again to usher in his peaceable kingdom…a place beyond tears, loss and suffering. And that the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ Spirit, indeed comes to us even now, in bread and wine, in our relationships, in our talking, listening and praying…bringing much needed peace in our hearts and in our world, hope for a different sort of future for ourselves and our planet, strength to live into a new day, each new day we rise from our beds…strength to place one foot in front of another. I feel like I have two hands very full of very different things…that, if I am honest, again, live in great tension within me…maybe within all of us. Fear and hope co-mingled…all tied up together.
I want to acknowledge that the fear we experience…whether the result of things going on in the larger world around us or much more intimately in our own experiences of loss and financial pressure and ruptured relationships and being overwhelmed with hands simply too full…this fear we experience is entirely natural and not all bad. We talk about fear as the great evil, boogey man to be avoided at all costs…like we are weak if we feel afraid or anxious…like our fears make us somehow inadequate and not enough. Well again I want you to hear me say that fear is natural and not all bad. It is reasonable to fear much in our world…it is reasonable for fear and anxiety…for life…to overwhelm us from time to time. For fear can lead to wisdom…to practices and habits that lead to life-giving decisions and outcomes. We fear our toddlers falling down the stairs and so we rightfully put up baby gates. We fear retiring in poverty so we rightfully save for our future. We fear being unhealthy in a way that diminishes our ability to live a full life, so we rightfully seek moderation in what we consume and we move our bodies. We fear living in a world that is grossly unjust toward, at times, ourselves but especially others, so we rightfully give of ourselves generously on behalf of those in need and build relationships with those different from ourselves and organize, participating in political and social processes that seek to make our world more just, peaceful and equitable. This is what the people of God do…in the midst of…and in response to our reasonable experiences of fear. God made us with the capacity to create and to love, which is what being made in the image of God means…so that even in our reasonable experiences of fear we have agency, we have choice…we can create…we can love…there is something we can do.
But here, as Christian people, is what we don’t do…we don’t let our fears control us…shackle us…bind us…keep us from doing Godly things…for when fear controls us, we can become potentially dangerous to ourselves and others…and we don’t lose hope. For hope is what our faith uniquely provides us and all who choose the way of Jesus…hope is our guide…it illuminates the often dark path that we navigate through the chances and changes of life. Hope is the very thing that allows us to respond to fear, that we rightly experience, in ways that birth God’s light and love in transformative ways in our lives and in our world. And hope is what this season is really all about…(what the story we just heard told through the lens of scripture is really all about)…hope that God indeed came, comes and will come again. So in the midst of the darkness that fear seeks to overwhelm us in, we look, with the eyes of our hearts, to see the light…that indeed shines in the midst of the darkness.
This season blessedly reminds us year after year that God, Love its very self, came to us in the midst of blood, sweat and tears…through the womb of a teenager, in the presence of a carpenter, in an inconsequential corner of the known world, on the floor of a cave full of straw and manure…as a vulnerable baby…entirely dependent on the other to live and thrive…and all for hope’s sake. You see…if God comes to us in this way…in this fragile, vulnerable, fear inducing way…we too can take heart and find hope in the midst of our own fragile, vulnerable and, at times, fear filled lives and world as well.
God comes among us and hope is born…and coming together remains the means by which hope is born now and even now. Advent and the Christmas that follows reminds us of this immutable truth…that hope, which properly orders and controls our real fears, is born by coming together…joining together…with God and each other…as we share our lives and stories…as we sing together, pray together, work together, study together, eat together, play together, and work together in the building of God’s kingdom. Hope is born in togetherness…in the joining of God with us and us with each other.
Perhaps you have seen the bumper stickers that are showing up more and more frequently that say love is greater than fear, using the mathematical sign for “great than”. Indeed this is so true…yet hope is what makes room for love to take root and grow in our midst…hope is what this season and the one that follows calls us to inhabit in our lives…and hope is found when we come together…God and all of us…co-mingled…all wonderfully, lovingly tied up together. Amen.