Advent Week Two: Peace

So Advent helps us practice, year after year (will we ever get it right?), letting go of our certainties. Advent waiting entails letting go of our political posturing, our fundamentalisms and finger pointing, our hashtags and hubris. Rather, it teaches us to watch quietly, wait expectantly and prepare to seek the Christ child in humble places like a stable. Gretchen E. Ziegenhals

I invite you to light two candles: one for hope and one for peace as you read today’s meditation.

We enter the second week of Advent with the candles of hope and peace lighting the way.  These two candles guide us and ground us.  They both tell us the direction to go and teach us the way to be.  As Fred Craddock said, “Hope needs one calorie a day to survive.”  As Maya Angelou poetically penned about peace, “We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence. It is what we have hungered for. Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace. A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies. Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.”

The candles of Advent lead us to the most impossible and improbable place – a dusty, dirty, drafty barn!  God’s grand entry and social media strategy is as counter-cultural and counter-cultural gets!  God decides that an unwed young woman, named Mary, should be the God-bearer.  Rather than power, privilege, and prestige, God goes a different way.  I agree with Ziegenhals’ quote above, of course we don’t get this right, because we need to let go of so much of what we cling to as certainty in our life.  To let go of our plans for what God is up to in the world today.  At its core what we hear in the Gospels at Christmas calls us let go of being in control and in charge. 

But wait just a minute, you may think, does that mean I don’t stand for anything?  Or what about people who are on the fringe and fray?  Great questions!  Advent calls me to seek to stand with God’s way of hope, peace, love and joy.  These are not exactly the sorts of words we have been hearing much in 2020!!  Advent challenges me to listen and lean into those who feel on the fringe and fray – not assume I can solve all their problems or that I am super spiritual man to their rescue.  I, like the shepherds, stand in awe of what Ross Gay calls, “Structural Tenderness” and what God is up to in the world.

Advents calls each of us to:

1    Watch.

2.      Wait.

3.      Prepare with humility.

I need the candles of hope and peace to burn brightly before and within me to do those three tasks!  It is my prayer this week, we might let the challenging words of this season sink and sing to our souls in such a way that we realize, though we many never get Advent right…but that getting Advent right isn’t the point.  The invitation is to witness to the mystery and marvel of God’s presence with us and for us. 

Prayer: O come, o come Emmanuel and enter my heart, home, and whole life this day and this week.  May You find room and a welcoming, warm embrace.  Amen.