December 11, 2011
The Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

Today we join with millions throughout the Americas who honor Our Lady of Guadalupe. You know her - she appears everywhere: on cars, store signs, decals, and tattoos. Our image of her is on the outside wall of our parish hall, made of tile in Puebla, Mexico.

You probably know the basics of her story. Only 10 years after the conquest of the Aztecs, she appeared miraculously to a native convert whose Christian name was Juan Diego. She sent him to tell the bishop that a temple should be built in her honor. The bishop didn’t believe Juan Diego until he returned with a cloak full of roses - impossible because it was December - and an image of the Virgin imprinted on Juan’s cloak.

Skeptics question this story, of course. They say the Spanish made it up in order to further their conquest, by appropriating an Aztec goddess and making her Catholic. Who knows, maybe they’re right. But to the millions who have been devoted to her for these 480 years, she has come to mean far more than conquest.

For some, she is the feminine face of God, offering motherly divine love. It is said that she told Juan Diego that her temple would be a place where she would offer all [her] compassion, help and protection to the people. At times this motherly love has otherwise been difficult to find in a church that has been male-dominated, demanding, even cruel. The kindness and mercy that Our Lady of Guadalupe brought were in short supply, and so God - or the people -  had to create her.

To a lesser degree, you could say the same about our church today. We’re still fairly male-dominated. That’s why we need new rites such as Enriching our Worship, with phrases like these:

You laid the foundations of the world and enclosed the sea when it burst out from the womb; You brought forth all creatures of the earth and gave breath to humankind.

As a mother cares for her children, you would not forget us. Time and again you called us to live in the fullness of your love.

For others, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a sign that miracles do happen, and they can happen for us, too. She appeared miraculously. She healed Juan Diego’s father. Inexplicably, the image on the cloak has not deteriorated in nearly 5 centuries, despite extreme changes in temperature and humidity, candle smoke, the kisses and touches of thousands of devotees, and a bomb thrown at it by an anarchist. Some inspectors claim that in her eyes, one can see the inverted image of Juan Diego, as if in a camera lens.

I know that there’s a lot of wacky stuff out there about miracles: television quacks who close their eyes, extend their hands, and claim to be healing someone of lung cancer who is watching the show as he sits alone in a hotel room in Des Moines.

But I also know that perfectly sane human beings can experience visions and miracles. Weird stuff does happen. Anything is possible if respected physicists can talk about the possibility of the world we live in being a projected hologram of things existing on the spherical skin of a distant black hole...(I’m not making this up!)

We are rationalist fools if we don’t recognize that the world is a mystical place. So who’s to say that a young Jewish woman from 1st-century Israel couldn’t appear in a parallel time and place? And who’s to say that something supernatural couldn’t appear to help you in your life?

But there is another meaning to the Virgin of Guadalupe, perhaps the most radical one of all. She came as a mestizo, a brown-skinned, mixed-race person. She appeared to a poor Aztec and spoke his language, Nahuatl.
She imprinted her image on a rough-woven cloak made from cactus. In the Virgin of Guadalupe, God was identifying with the poor.

More significantly, she didn’t appear to the Spanish bishop in his opulent residence. By sending a campesino with the roses, she was getting in the face of the bishop. Hey, Prince of the Church! You think my son was kidding when he said that the last would be first and the first - namely you - would be last? Blessed are the poor, you schmuck!

And so the Virgin of Guadalupe became the property of the people. For in her, God had become one of them. The skeptical bishop couldn’t suppress her, and neither could the Vatican, once they got wind of a movement that had taken on a life of its own. She continues to be fiercely held by the people, and they don’t really care whether some worry that they are idolatrous. They know she is Emmanuel, “God with us.”

This is the message that the liberation theologians so controversially taught in the 1970’s: God’s preferential option for the poor. Now this doesn’t mean that God loves poor people more than the rich, only that the most vulnerable hold a special place in the heart of God.

They hold a special place in the hearts of those who love God, too. After all, we are God’s children, made in God’s image. And so if we are in touch with our Creator, we will naturally care, as God does, for those who are mentally ill, for children and the frail elderly, for the homeless and addicted, for the depressed and lonely, for those without access to medical care or education. We are made to be like the Virgin of Guadalupe, offering our compassion, help and protection to the people.

If we have no soft spot in our heart for the most vulnerable, if we do nothing to help them in their weakness, we do not have within us the Spirit of the One who does. And it may be time to get reconnected with that Spirit.

One good way to do that is to reconnect with our own poverty, our own vulnerability. It was the gospel of Matthew that changed Luke’s Blessed are the poor to Blessed are the poor in spirit,  and those two words brought in all of us. As the Buddha said, Life is suffering. B.B. King put it in his own way: Everybody’s had the blues.  

You may have an persistent medical condition or feel stuck in a deadening job. You may struggle with alcohol, depression, or an unhappy relationship with your partner or child. You may feel a creeping angst now and then, wondering what’s the point. Whatever it is, we all have some kind of poverty of spirit.

We can make the mistake of seeing our vulnerability as the enemy, something to be gotten rid of, fixed, or transcended. Why, I’d be happy if only...

But what if that is one of the primary places where God tends to appear? In your poverty? We certainly meet God in gratitude and satisfaction, but we sometimes overlook how accessible God can be when we are empty. It is in these times that dependence upon God can become a matter of survival - when we know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.

In this place we surrender; we give up on the exhausting effort to make ourselves full and rich. We humbly accept our emptiness. Not wishing or pleading anymore for something particular to happen - because we’ve already asked too many times, and it hasn’t - we nevertheless remain open, trusting. Not expecting a specific outcome, we dare to remain expectant.  Something will shift. Something or someone will come. We say to ourselves I don’t have to do this alone. And we don’t.

The Virgin of Guadalupe came to the Aztecs in their defeat. And she comes to us in our defeat, our poverty of spirit, offering to us, as she did in 1531 to all the Americas, God’s compassion, help, and protection.  

This is the spirit of Advent. For in this season that moves inevitably towards the darkness of the solstice, we watch for the coming of the light. And God’s light appears in the darkness, not instead of it. It will appear in our poverty of spirit, if we will but pray, watch, and wait.

Advent 2B
Mark 1:1-8, Isaiah 40:1-11, 2 Peter 3:8-14

John the Baptist joins us each year on the second Sunday of Advent to beckon us more deeply into this journey toward Christ’s birth. It is clear that he never learned how to win friends and influence people. He has a habit of calling people a brood of vipers which makes it tempting to ignore John and light another candle on the wreath. We are never quite sure what to do with this wild person with a strange sense of fashion and very undiscriminating taste buds. In Mark we encounter a kinder, gentler John. He is still calling people to repent and confess, but he isn’t calling them names.

None of us would suggest that repentance and confession are crowd pleasers, and yet people are coming from all over the countryside to hear him. Clearly, John is tapping into some deep longing in people. Somehow in the quiet, darkness of the season, we begin to encounter some of the deep longings we carry within us. I appreciate the invitation in Advent to grow deep. I am always eager to enter the season in a way that is meaningful, hoping that I will be ready for Christ to come into my life in a powerful new way.

But I noticed something different this year as I sat with these texts. First, I imagined the people gathering to hear John’s message. It reminded me a bit of us gathering for worship each week. We need individual spiritual practices to sustain us and help us grow, but we were created to be a body and to share this journey with one another. The people came together and they came from all over the place. I wonder if they were empowered and encouraged by the community. Maybe the message about repentance and confession was intended for them as a body rather than just their individual sins.

Isaiah was speaking to the people of Israel who had lost so much – their homes, their city, their security. He brought wisdom and hope to them collectively. Hope was rooted in God’s goodness and it would bring healing to all. “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all people shall see it together.” (Isaiah 40:5)

Did you hear the words from 2nd Peter “The Lord is…patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” The good news isn’t for a few individuals, but for all. Who we are in the waiting impacts others.

It really isn’t news to anybody that Christmas isn’t about us. People are more generous this time of year. But what if Advent isn’t meant to be a private experience? What if we are called to prepare for Christ’s coming as a body rather than just giving more attention to our individual prayer practices?

I am struck by the message in all three of these passages that we are all in this together.
How do we wait collectively for Christ to come in our midst? How do we tap into our communal longing for incarnation? I am not suggesting that we can clearly articulate our yearning as a community of faith as much as I am inviting us to come together and make room for Christ to be born among us.

The Called Back to the Well Living Water program finished this week. You may know that Living Water is a spiritual deepening program for congregations and part of its richness is in the way relationships are built between people from different churches in the community. The Disciples, Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians openly shared their lives over the last year and as they did so, they realized that together they are the body of Christ that Paul talks about in Corinthians. When one congregation suffered, all suffered. When one rejoiced, all rejoiced. Out of that sharing, a wonderful community was born.

We simply cannot call ourselves Christian and live as if others don’t matter. All of us are connected (whether we realize it or not). Do we know how the churches in our neighborhood are doing? What about the folks in the other services here each Sunday? Are we aware of the people who are sharing our pews? A real community is tuned in to one another and feels the impact of our shared life together.

Here we are in Advent once again and we are called to make room for Christ to be born among us. How do we do that? It seems to me that we come together as the early church community did. We pray, we care for those in need, we come to the table Christ has set for us and then we go forth to feed others. I believe we glimpse it every time we share our lives together.

One of the most beautiful things I saw this week was the food pantry in action on Tuesday morning. A large group of volunteers came together and worked in tandem to make food available for the community. There was a wonderful spirit in the group and I was very impressed at all they offered in terms of food and hospitality. Before they began serving people, Bill Hoezel prayed that they would see Christ in each person they met and it seems to me that they did. Part of the beauty for me was seeing how many people it took to pull off this ministry and how happy people were to be serving together. The people coming to get food seemed to feel that warmth and kindness.

Each week, we come to the table to receive sustenance at the hand of a God whose generosity is shocking over and over again. As we walk away from the table and out of the sanctuary, I begin wondering about how we will feed the world. I know that the food was not intended for us alone, but for all and it is our job to make sure everyone receives goodness from God’s gracious hand.

Fred Craddock tells about going to the University of Winnipeg in Canada to give two lectures in October one year.  “As we left the lecture hall after the first lecture, it was beginning to spit a little snow.  I was surprised, and my host was surprised because he had written, “It’s too early for the cold weather, but you might bring a little windbreaker, a little light jacket.”

The next morning when I got up, two or three feet of snow pressed against the door.  The phone rang, and my host said, “We’re all surprised by this.  In fact, I can’t come and get you to take you to the breakfast, the lecture this morning has been cancelled, and the airport is closed.  If you can make your way down the block and around the corner, there is a little depot, a bus depot, and it has a café.  I’m sorry.”  I said, “I’ll get around.  I put on that little light jacket; it was nothing.  I got my little cap and put it on; it didn’t even help me in the room.  I went into the bathroom and unrolled long sheets of toilet paper and made a nest in the cap so that it would protect my head against that icy wind.

I went outside, shivering.  The wind was cold, the snow was deep.  I slid and bumped and finally made it around the corner into the bus station.  Every stranded traveler in western Canada was in there, strangers to each other and to me, pressing and pushing and loud.  I finally found a place to sit, and after a lengthy time a man in a greasy apron came over and said, “What’ll you have?”  I said, “May I see a menu?” He said, “What do you want a menu for?  We have soup.”  I said, “What kind of soup do you have?”  And he said, “Soup.  You want some soup?”  I said, “That was what I was going to order – soup.”  

He brought the soup, and I put the spoon to it – Yuck!  It was the awfulest.  It was kind of gray looking; it was so bad I couldn’t eat it, but I sat there and put my hands around it.  It was warm, and so I sat there with my head down, my head wrapped in toilet paper, bemoaning my outcast state with the horrible soup.  But it was warm, so I clutched it and stayed bent over my soup stove.

The door opened again.  The wind was icy, and somebody yelled, “Close the door!”  In came this woman clutching her little coat.  She found a place, not far from me.  The greasy apron came and asked, “What do you want?”  She said, “A glass of water.”  He brought her a glass of water, took out his tablet and said, “Now what’ll you have?”  She said, “Just the water.”  He said, “You have to order, lady.”  “Well, I just want a glass of water.”  “Look.  I have customers that pay – what do you think this is, a church or something?  Now what do you want?”  She said, “Just a glass of water and some time to get warm.”

“Look, there are people that are paying here.  If you’re not going to order, you’ve got to leave!”  And he got real loud about it, so that everyone there could hear him.

So she got up to leave.  And almost as if rehearsed, everyone in that café got up and headed to the door.  If she was going to have to leave, they were as well.  And the man in the greasy apron saw this happening and blurted out, “All right, all right, she can stay.”  Everyone sat down, and he brought her a bowl of soup.

I said to the person sitting there by me, I said, “Who is she?”  He said, “I’ve never seen her before.” The place grew quiet, but I heard the sipping of that awful soup.  I said, “I’m going to try that soup again.”  I put my spoon to the soup – you know, it was not bad soup.  Everybody was eating this soup.  I started eating the soup, and it was pretty good soup.  I have no idea what kind of soup it was.  I don’t know what was in it, but I do recall when I was eating it, it tasted a little bit like bread and wine.  Just a little bit like bread and wine.” (from the book Craddock Stories by Fred Craddock, Chalice Press, 2001 pp. 83-84)

In this season, we prepare ourselves for the one who comes among us. We do this as Christ’s body because we know that the gift of Christ was not intended for us alone. The invitation is for us as a body to make room so that Christ may be born in us and together we may bring healing and hope to the whole world.

Christmas Eve 2008
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

There are some who might think what we’re doing here tonight is quaint, but out of touch. Bearded and robed figures hover over a baby, surrounded by a numinous light and barnyard animals: a rustic fantasy, a brief, charming distraction, but no more than that. After all, what does Bethlehem have to do with the real world?

We all know what’s going on in the real world. We’re living with terrorism and war that are like a dark cloud, always on the horizon. We’re in the middle of an economic freefall - many of you are directly affected, and you’re in real distress. And, of course, the usual dysfunction and suffering that afflict many of our families and become painfully obvious during the holidays. 

But it would be a shame if we just wrung our hands over this current state of affairs and didn’t see the possibility for transformation within it. As Bishop Mathes told us 10 days ago during his visit here, “A catastrophe is a terrible thing to waste.” We have something spiritual to learn from the time we are in; we needn’t waste it. 

It would also be a terrible waste of our time tonight if we were to use Christmas Eve merely as a pleasant distraction and then went back to slogging our way through this hard world. We might as well stay home and watch It’s a Wonderful Life. 

So let’s take a closer look at the nativity scene and see if it offers something deeper than spiritual entertainment. But first, I have a confession to make. Sometimes I get weary of the baby Jesus in the manger. Sometimes I tire of Christmas carols, Santa, angels, and holiday sparkle. Give me something meaty, like the doctrine of the Incarnation: In the beginning was the Word…and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. 

But then the manger scene sneaks up on me like a Trojan Horse. It is so deceptively innocent and charming on the outside. But inside, it is full of the mystery and power of God. Here, in this ancient story, lies so much more than a sentimental diversion. Here is the key to meaning and hope: for our times, for our real life, here and now. 

Joseph, a poor man, made his living with hard labor. Mary, a very young woman, perhaps a teenager, was in the last term of her pregnancy. Along with thousands of others, this little family was compelled by the occupying forces to travel a hundred miles on foot to fulfill some bureaucratic requirement – a census for Caesar. It was a cold night; there were no rooms to rent. But a kind offer was made - a stable out back with animals and straw. Then the everyday miracle of a human birth -  those little fingers, those clear eyes. Village shepherds wander by to have a peek; tears, laughter, wonder, and peace for all, in spite of the hardship. 

It is a scene of so many basic human realities and emotions: fear, vulnerability, poverty; generosity, tenderness, and love. If we take away the heavenly chorus and the 3 Wise Men and the angels, it could be anywhere, anytime. It could be a peasant family in medieval China or in a modern African refugee camp, a laid-off autoworker’s family in Detroit, or the home you left to come here tonight. 

Every family, every human person knows what it is like to feel powerless; we all know the joy of intimacy. We all see light in a newborn baby’s eyes; we all know the protective parental instinct. We too are comforted by animals and kind strangers. We look up at the starry sky and see the glory of God. 

It is this simple, basic, human scene that we hold up tonight and say This is holy. Our common, earthy life is divine. Here, in our humanity, is where God is to be found. Not all of reality is defined by the dangers and crises of the world, what kind of house or apartment or car we can afford, what shape our bank account is in, or even how comfortable or happy we are. 

The manger shows us a more secure reality, something that is always close at hand. For nothing can take away the sky above, the embrace of a friend, a song and a shared meal, or the opportunity to be kind. Our life is holy; everything is always filled with God. The manger brings us down, out of our heads, out of our worries, into this basic fact. This is the glory of Christianity on our principal feast day: not some overblown holiday spectacle put on by a cast of thousands, but the tenderness of a little family one night. 

I remember years ago when my family took a rare vacation abroad, to Fiji. I was standing on the deck of a boat, cruising close to tiny islands. My young sons and I saw barefoot people coming out of thatched huts, hanging clothes on the line, picking fruit off of trees, chasing chickens. I was suddenly struck by a picture of how I live. I said to the kids “What a bizarre world we live in back home.We zoom around in metal boxes on asphalt streets, go in and out of large stuccoed buildings to buy more and more things we don’t really need, stare at electronic screens, and worry about numbers on a financial report. Look at these people.” 

Now I don’t romanticize poverty, and I like living in the modern world. But there is another dimension, close to the earth, that I don’t want to lose touch with. That’s why I love to travel to third-world countries; that’s why I love living here in New Mexico. I want to be grounded in the divine that is always found close at hand. 

Jesus said “Blessed are the poor,” “You must become like children,” and “those who humble themselves will be exalted.” His mother Mary said that God “has lifted up the lowly.” Don’t think of Jesus, however, as a naïve escapist who believed that if you just magically regain your innocence, you can ignore the ugliness of life and the mandate to make this world a better place. He, like us, was no stranger to suffering, complexity, and conflict. 

But he also knew that in the midst of all this, there is God, always God. There is always hope and meaning and beauty, here and now, in the gift of our humanity, in the gift of creation. All is alive with Spirit, everything is infused with the divine. We can live in love, gratitude, and awe at any time, no matter what struggles we also endure. We can humble ourselves, like children, becoming lowly, close to the ground. Paradoxically, this is what will exalt us and lift us up. 

This is what the Christmas manger brings us back to. It is not a sentimental distraction from “real life.” It is real life. This is what the Incarnation is all about. God is not off somewhere in heaven, but here and now. Spirituality is not limited to the prayer experts. Happiness need not be postponed until we fix up this broken world, until we solve our personal problems. All we have to do is awaken to what already is. To remember this is always liberating, for it frees us from being dependent upon circumstances going the way we want them to, and it grounds us in something that can never be taken away. 

And so this present financial crisis is a golden opportunity for each of us. For when things get hard enough, they can also become quite clear. Perhaps this crisis and whatever hardships you endure will turn out to be transformative; perhaps they will have the effect of returning us to this manger, to a truer, more human life; perhaps we will remember that our common, earthy life is divine. 

If we do, then we will not have wasted the catastrophe of our day or the passing struggles of our personal life. And we will not have underestimated the power of this little nativity scene. We will open our eyes, soften our heart, and receive the miraculous birth of new life that God offers us this, and every night. 

We're sorry, the full text for this sermon is not available at this time.

We're sorry, the full text for this sermon is not available at this time.

St. Michael’s and All Angels Episcopal Church 
Sunday, November 30, 2008 Advent 1B 
Gospel: Mark 13:24-37
Preacher: Christopher McLaren 
Theme: Addressed by God, again and again.

Our reading today comes from what is called the “little apocalypse” in the Gospel of Mark.  It is kind of call to vigilance, a wake-up call to the faithful to pay attention, to eagerly await the coming of the Lord.  Apocalyptic writing such as this tends to come out of historical periods of great suffering, communal struggle, or calamitous events.  Biblical scholars tell us that this particular writing is a key to dating the gospel of Mark after 70 C.E., after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman legions in response to a series of failed Jewish rebellions. For all of its troubling imagery and darkness, apocalyptic is a genre of literature that has its roots in the human longing for salvation, the leaning toward hope of rescue, of the good guys riding in on their white horses to save the day.  In essence apocalyptic writing, focuses not on the present but on a hidden future, soon to be revealed in which things will be set right, healed, redeemed, made new.  Apocalyptic literature asks us to look for what is truly real, to look beneath the surface of things in hope of discovering God at work. 

It is this hidden future, this surprising in-breaking of the kingdom of God, or “the Son of Man coming in the clouds,” that this passage instructs us to wait for.  Over and over again we are told to keep awake, to be aware, to keep alert.  There is urgency in the text that is both troubling and attractive to us.  We know that there are things we are waiting for, things we have waited for all our lives.  They may be childish longings, the horse for Christmas that never came, the sports team that never quite made it to the playoffs. But we all have our poignant and perhaps secret hopes, the quiet hope that mom and dad would rediscover their love for one another and restore the family, that our loved one would be healed, that the child we so wished for by conception would finally come, that the carelessly lost friendship could be rekindled. We all have these deep longings within us, these hopes we waited for and will find ourselves waiting for again and again.  

Advent is about one of the most essential things in our human makeup.  We all wait, we all live, with great hunger to be spoken to, to be touched, to be loved, to be known, to be valuable enough to be judged, and honored enough to be absolved or forgiven.  And the truth of the matter is that the things we most desire, the experiences we most need we cannot create or make for ourselves. No one alone can assure themselves of being loved. It is not possible to be known in isolation.   We carry a deep need to hear these foundational affirmations but not merely from something of our own making, we want to hear it from something outside ourselves, from the realm beyond our control. We desire revelation, which is what the word apocalypse means. The discovery of the thing you’ve been hoping for or wishing for all your life and suddenly you see it, for the first time, like a sudden gust of wind or a sneaker wave.  

As a culture we are unable to assure ourselves of our own worth, our own dignity, our own “lovableness.”  In response to our enlightened culture’s denial of any divine affirmation, of a word coming from beyond ourselves to assure us of our worth or value, we seem to have wrapped ourselves in things, surrounded ourselves with toys, and gadgets and objects of great beauty to assure ourselves that we are worth a great deal.   At one very basic level our own environmental crisis seems the result of human beings as a species trying to affirm their own worth by using up creation in a way that is unsustainable. We have it seems mistook our need of God for our use of creation. Our insatiable desire for more is what is left of our longing for the divine. At the same time, our generation is so aware of humanity’s corporate responsibility, for so much violence and neglect, that we are in need of affirmation of our own basic humanity.  How are we to be forgiven for standing by while genocide ravaged Rwanda, while ethnic and religious cleansing continues to litter the globe, while undocumented immigrants are targets of ongoing hate crimes and exploitation? We are so deeply compromised as a people.  We know that our tax dollars support the largest military in the world. We know that our money funds wars.  We know that there is blood on our hands.  We know that the environment has suffered from our hungry way of life.  We know that we have developed and pursued arsenals that could destroy the inhabited world several times over in an awful display of self-annihilation.  We know that our greed and thirst for debt has sent shock-waves around the worlds financial markets. 

In the mist of all this troubling news, all of the moral angst of our age, we long for some kind of word of hope. We long for a fresh word that will put us back on track, that will bring us back into recognition of who we are.  It doesn’t have to be just a kind word, it could be a word of deep truth that at once judges us but assures us of our value, that we are worth judging that we are worth saving, that we are worth healing, that we are worth new life and new direction.  

All of our human longings, our desires to be loved, accepted, known, and forgiven assure us that we are quite literally talked and touched into life.  None of us possess life in ourselves. It comes to us as gift as grace from another.  All our longings hold within them a danger, that we will attempt to construct something to meet our own needs, this is the human temptation,  our idol-making habit.  But nothing made of our own initiative can truly speak the words of affirmation, the words of life into our souls that we need.  

The Christian story, our story takes its cue from the story of the people of Israel who were summoned to be a people by God, affirmed by their deliverance out of slavery and nurtured by a covenant that asked them to reject any idol of their own making in favor of a living God.  As Christians we too were summoned, summoned by a mysterious child, summoned to an unlikely stable along with shepherds and angels, peasants and wisdom seekers, by the love of God taking on fleshly form. Addressed by something beyond us that could only be described as God’s glory. 

This child grew up and in surprising ways spoke and touched people into new life. He awakened people to God in uncanny ways, ways that no one could fabricate on their own, ways that spoke to the deep longings inside each person.  While Jesus walked this earth he was constantly waking people up, wiping the sleep from their eyes, pulling them out of their dreams into a reality that made them feel so alive, so free, so open to God that one realized that they had been spoken to by something beyond themselves, something beyond just a merely human companion.  In and through Jesus people heard the words they most needed to hear, you are loved, you are valuable, you can change, you can be forgiven, you are worth my judgment, you matter. 

The person of Jesus was and is a being too wild to be domesticated, too unpredictable to be made into an idol though it has been tried many times. In the end Jesus was killed not because he was found boring or irrelevant but rather because he was found to be dangerous, dangerous to the status quo.  His death, however, had a curious effect. For some reason his followers seemed to grow stronger and to feel in their very bones that in a real way Jesus’ life continued unseen and that in time he would come back, that there would be another Advent of this life-affirming person.  In fact, the early followers of Jesus sensed in their very bones, in the center of their souls, the ongoing life and love of Jesus so strongly that they described it as the Holy Spirit working within them.  They began to sense that God was at work in the world in surprising ways, even though Jesus was no longer with them. 

They remembered strange stories that Jesus told, like the one about the fig tree which seemed to say that if you want to know what God is up to you can begin by attending to the ordinary world around you.  The world it seems is full of parables happening on every street corner and in every office cubicle.  There are clues to the kingdom of God in every nook and cranny of the earth but most of us are not looking for them.  By saying hey look at this fig tree, Jesus was saying look for the signs of new life around you and you will find me there at work.  You don’t have to look too hard, you don’t need to focus on earthquakes or hurricanes to see me. I’m at work almost everywhere, in the food pantry, in a South African prison, in a small private school for immigrants, in a youth program in the south valley, in the Arizona border town, if you just have eyes to see it. I’m at work in the most ordinary of events in your life. 

Advent is the reminder that all around us God is trying to tell us something. That through the mundane and ordinary aspects of life God is reaching out to touch us, to address us, to speak into our lives.  Advent reminds us that we are not alone, or if we think we are, Christmas will and has shattered that aloneness forever. God will invade his own universe. God has addressed us in such an ordinary and surprising way that we cannot escape into isolation.  

The point of Advent is not only to prepare for the coming of Christ in the manger at Bethlehem, the point of Advent is that God has already come, that God continues to come, that if we will only prepare ourselves, if we will only wake up, if we will only snap out of our habitual slumber we could see God at work in the fig tree, in the difficult words of those who love us most, in the longing to grant forgiveness, in the urge to meet a real need in front of us, in the eyes of stranger, in the laughter of children, in the numbers of your checking account, in the pain of a friend, in the surprising gesture of kindness. The challenge of Advent is that God is fierce and wild, unpredictable and beyond our language.  God will not allow himself to be caged within our own ideas, he will constantly exceed or deepest longings, and our wildest speculations about who he is.  Newness breaking into history, newness breaking into our lives, surprising turns, and wild outcomes can remind us of who God really is, a being who will not be tamed but at the same time is secure enough and willing to come close to us to speak and touch us into life. God is constantly coming to speak to us again and again. We only need to wake up to see it and by God’s grace we will.