Advent CN | Honest Advent Includes Assumptions & Surprises

 

Our assumptions hinder our spiritual journey in all kinds of ways, and the antidote to assumption is surprise. + Scott Erickson, Honest Advent: Awakening to the Wonder of God-with-Us Then, Here, and Now

I love Advent. And while Fleming Rutledge's exceptional Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ is my favorite book to return to during the beginning of the Christian new year, Honest Advent: Awakening to the Wonder of God-with-Us Then, Here, and Now by artist and author Scott Erickson has also been wonderful for me. Below is an excerpt from one of my favorite chapters, "Assumptions."

Honest Advent: Assumptions About the Christmas Story & Spirituality

It's assumed that Mary rode on a donkey, but the Bible doesn't say she did.

It's assumed that there was an innkeeper, but it doesn't mention one anywhere.

It's assumed there were three Magi, but it doesn't give a number of those who showed up.

It's assumed there was a star overhead when Jesus was born, but it doesn't say that either.

It's assumed that Jesus was born in a stable, but all it says is that He was laid in a manger – and that could've been any number of places.

Christmas comes with many assumptions – some helpful, some not so much. 

Spirituality also comes with many assumptions, and the ones that fail us are the ones we make about what it's supposed to look like, who is worthy for it to happen to, and what kind of outcome it's supposed to have for us. Assumptions like ...  

You should be more than you are now to be pleasing to God (assumption antidote: Psalm 18:19; Ephesians 2:8-9). 

Your weaknesses are in the way of God's plan for your life (assumption antidote: 2 Corinthians 12:9-10). 

Your lack of religious fervor is a disqualifier for divine participation (assumption antidote: Psalm 46:10; Isaiah 41:9-10; 2 Peter 1:2-4). 

You're probably not doing it right (assumption antidote: James 4:6). 

Other spiritual people have something you don't have (assumption antidote: 1 Corinthians 12:4, 11-25).

Honest Advent: Assumptions Antidote? Surprise.

Our assumptions hinder our spiritual journey in all kinds of ways, and the antidote to assumption is surprise. The surprise ... is happening every day in your lack of resources, your overcrowded lodging, your unlit night sky, your humble surroundings.

It's a surprise that life can come through barren places (Isaiah 54:1 + Galatians 4:27). 

It's a surprise that meek nobodies partake in divine plans (Matthew 5:3-6). 

It's a surprise that messengers are sent all along the hidden journey of life to let you know you are not alone (Luke 2:8-11, 24:13-15; Hebrews 13:2). 

It's a surprise that you will be given everything you need to accomplish what you've been asked to do (Ephesians 2:8-10; Philippians 4:19). 

It's a surprise that nothing can separate you from the love of God (Romans 8:31-39; 1 John 4:8-10). 

Nothing can separate from love (Romans 8:31-39 again). 

Your assumptions believe there must be something that can ... 

But surprise! Nothing can (Romans 8:31-39 one more time) ...    

+ May you thank God with joyful surprise at how much you have assumed incorrectly (Psalm 57:8, 10).

+ The content above is an excerpt (with Bible verse links and parentheses added) from Chapter 11: Assumptions in Honest Advent by Scott Erickson

Here are links to some other previous Advent City Notes that were also helpful: 

+ How to be a Saint in the Darkness  

+ A Divine Song of Protest for Good  

+ The Bold & Courageous First Advent Hymn 

+ Immanuel, God with Us, is God's Best for Us 

+ Making Room for Limits God Gives Us for Good 

+ Praying Luke 1:38 with Mary and Jesus in 2022

Christ is all,

Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan

Email Pastor Mike | Website | Visit Us | Support Us | Facebook Us

CN | Godspeed: The Slower Path to Being Known & Loved Fully

 

The late Japanese theologian

Kosuke Koyama wrote a book
titled Three-Mile-an-Hour-God.
Dr. Koyama was trying to convey
that if we want to connect with God,
we'd be wise to travel at God's speed.
God has all the time in the world,
and as a result He is not in a rush.

+ Rich Villodas,
The Deeply Formed Life

Living at Godspeed is not first about a pace of life, as though simply going slower will solve everything. This is a second birth into the childhood you never had, or once had but lost ... to discover what it means to be God's child again.

This whole pilgrimage centers on a pivotal question and answer in Scripture, a question and answer that repeat themselves in every story, every song. These are God's searching question of "Where are you?" and our reluctant response of "Here I am." I am frequently asked: "Where is God?" My experience is that the question is less the cry of a hardened skeptic and more the cry of a lost child.  

It is also a question the Bible itself asks.  

In Psalm 42, a writer wrestling 

with grief lists among his troubles 

the many times people ask him, 

"Where is your God?" 

Starting in Genesis 

and moving dramatically 

all the way to the cross, 

God gives startling answers: 

"Here I AM – closer than you think, 

and in places you'd never expect."

Many people don't notice the first place God appears in Scripture, nor the first image God gives Himself. In Genesis chapter 1, before the creation of the world, the Holy Spirit is pictured like a brooding dove hovering over dark waters. Tohu-Wabohu is the Hebrew word not only for the dark formless waters but also for the nightmarish chaos every child and adult fears. Yet, despite the darkness, this is an image pregnant with hope. So, what was the Holy Spirit doing hovering here? The rest of Genesis unfolds the scandalous answer: The God of heaven was making human children.

My wife, Julie, in her book, A Theology of the Ordinary, explains that if you were growing up pagan in ancient Mesopotamia, your parents would tuck you in bed with stories to help you make sense of the world, the gods, and why you exist. When the Genesis account was written down (at first it was told orally), alternative pagan accounts of creation taught that humans existed because the gods needed slaves. This was the preferred bedtime story Pharaoh hoped his slaves would use to tuck in their children. But Hebrew parents told a different story. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And God made humans not because God was needy, but because God loved making children. God didn't need slaves. God wanted children. God wanted kids. Slaves can only obey or disobey. Children can love and be loved. Now rest, my child. And remember, tomorrow is the Sabbath!"

Is it really true that the God of the heavens made human children to walk the earth? That God made humans out of love, not out of necessity? In case this talk of God wanting children sounds too good to be true or too scandalous to believe, the exclamation mark on God's intention comes in Genesis 1:26-27: "Let us make mankind in our image ... " So God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them." ... And in case someone doubts whether or not making human children in God's image was a good idea, verse 31 puts a second exclamation mark on God's joy in doing so: "God saw all that He had made, and it was very good." ... Genesis 1 reads like a new parent's journal entry in a baby book.

It wasn't the end of the story, but it was a great start. From the beginning, anyone reading Genesis would know that a loving God had made great kids and would provide for them abundantly, even if it cost Him. Years later, hovering over the waters of Mary's darkened womb, God's Spirit would again conceive a child who would shock the world. When people doubted his parentage, God's Spirit would again hover over the waters of the River Jordan, as God the Father declared the human Jesus to be His holy Son: "That's My boy! This is My Son, whom I love, and in whom I delight!" Few ears could hear it, much less believe. But Jesus, "the firstborn among many brothers and sisters" (Romans 8:29), heard those words for us so that by believing in Him, we might be born again.

What happens when you are born again? What do you become? A Christian, yes, but first a child. The path ahead with God is part pilgrimage and part pregnancy. The pregnancy is conceived in the divine desire for you to be born again as God's child.

The truth is that none of us can give a complete "Here I am" to God's searching question. Only Jesus can offer an adequate response on our behalf. He will do so from the places we avoid, the places we fear, the places we refuse to go. But Christ's "Here I AM" to the Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit, will chart a course to forgiveness that frees us to enter in the glorious freedom of the children of God. ... Tonight, don't fall asleep a slave. Join the Genesis rebellion. Be born again God's child.

+ Excerpt from Backyard Pilgrim: 

Forty Days at Godspeed  

by Anglican priest Matt Canlis

Bonus Song:

Child of Love

We the Kingdom
feat. Maverick City Music
2020 A.D.

I was walking the wayside, 

Lost on a lonely road.

I was chasing the high life, 

Trying to satisfy my soul.

All the lies I believed in 

Left me crying like the rain.

Then I saw lightning from Heaven,
And I've never been the same ...

I'm going to climb a mountain,
I'm going shout about it, 

I am a child of love!

I found a world of freedom,
I found a friend in Jesus, 

I am a child of love!

I've felt the sting of the fire, 

But I saw You in the flames

Just when I thought it was over,
You broke me out of the grave ... 

(Chorus)

Nothing can change the way You love me,

Nothing can change the way ...

I belong to You! Yes I do!

Nothing can separate! 

(Chorus)

Next Post: An Impossible Marriage

Here are links to previous City Notes books: 
A Meal with Jesus; The Art of Neighboring; 
A Praying Life; Family on Mission;
 Encounters with Jesus; The Rest of God; 
Letters to a Birmingham Jail; 
The Pursuing God; Yawning at Tigers; 
Faith Without Illusions; Tattoos on the Heart; 
Drop the Stones; He Speaks in the Silence; 
A Beautiful Disaster; Glorious Weakness; 
Discovering the Freedom of Limitations; 
Bread for the Resistance; Gentle & Lowly; 
Facing the Fear Question; 
How to Be a Saint in the Darkness

Christ is all,

Rev. Mike "Sully" Sullivan

Email Pastor Mike | Website | Visit Us | Support Us | Facebook Us

CN | Prayer in the Night in the Midst of the Pain & the Dark

Francis Spufford: "We don't have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story." This is why, no matter what we claim to believe or disbelieve, what rises to the surface in our most vulnerable moments is inevitably the story on which we build our lives. + Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night

Christianity does not give us a concise explanation for vulnerability, loss, or pain, but it gives us a story – a real story in history. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that, "There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil (and human suffering)." 

It takes the whole story of redemptive history to shape our questions about God's presence in the darkness. There may be no tidy solution to the problem of pain, but this is not because these questions are unimportant or, in a final sense, unanswerable. If there is anything remotely approaching a Christian answer to our questions about theodicy – the logical dilemma of how God can be good and all-powerful even as horrible things regularly happen in the world, including the crisis of faith that often comes from encountering suffering – the story is the answer.

When my friend, Julie, sat in a hospital waiting room as surgeons carved her infant son's tender skin, she committed herself to deciding whether God could be trusted, regardless of the result of the surgery. She had to decide if she believed these claims that Christianity makes about God's goodness. She quit the poker game, folded her cards, and decided to trust a God who did not guarantee that bad things would not happen to her or her son. 

But this was not an arbitrary decision; not a leap in the dark. She was not simply ratcheting herself up to affirm the goodness of God in spite of contrary evidence. She did look to evidence, though not the evidence of her life, nor the tally of the total amount of good in the world versus the total amount of evil. Instead, she looked at the life of Jesus. It's on this story that she anchored her decision about whether she would trust God, without knowing what would happen next. The Church has always proclaimed that if we want to see what God is like, we look at Jesus – a man "acquainted with sorrow" (Isaiah 53:3), no stranger to grief, a peasant craftsman who knew suffering, big and small, and died as a criminal, mostly alone. Mysteriously, God does not take away our vulnerability. He enters into it. 

Jesus left a place where there is no night to enter into our darkness. He was met with blisters and indigestion, with fractured relationships and the death of friends, with an oppressive empire, the indignity of poverty, and the terror of violence. One night He sweat blood, asking the Father to spare Him from agony, weeping in the lonely darkness while His friends fell asleep. He said, "Not My will, but Yours, be done" (Luke 22:42), and soon afterward He was tortured to death.

God did not keep bad things from happening to God Himself. To look to Jesus is to know that our Creator has felt pain, has known trouble, and is well-acquainted with sorrow. But our hope in suffering is not merely to gaze on the biography of an ancient man frozen in the pages of the Bible. The story of the Gospel is not a mere mantra or a relic of history. It is alive and ongoing. The work of Jesus continues, even now, in our everyday lives. So in hardship we do not look to Jesus solely as one who has been there before, once upon a time in a distant past. We find He is here with us, in the present tense. He participates in our suffering, even as – mysteriously – in our suffering we participate in the fullness of Christ's life. 

But we cannot embrace the Christian story or Christ's ongoing presence in our lives by an act of sheer will or an exercise in cognition. Our hope in sorrow is not something we carry around as a brute fact or, worse, a pat answer. I do not come to trust the Christian story in the same way I trust that Lake Superior is the largest of the Great Lakes or that bread is made of yeast and flour. 

The story we live by is one that we somehow enter into – we discover our own small lives and stories in the larger story of God and His Church. We do that through the practices and prayers we receive from those who have gone before us. We take up and learn the craft of faith that allows us to know an actual, surprising, frustrating, and relentlessly merciful God. In the present tense. 

Years ago, during a vacation in New Hampshire, my husband, Jonathan, and I climbed Mount Washington, which is notorious for erratic weather. It can change from sunny and warm to snowing in a few hours. The wind is so strong that it once held the record for the fastest wind gust on earth ... So the good people of New Hampshire have made cairns along the trail: massive, towering rock structures that plot the course. When the fog descends and the weather is dangerous, hikers can make it to shelter at the bottom of the mountain or at the top by walking from cairn to cairn in the white out.

In times of deep darkness, the cairns that have kept me in the way and story of Jesus were the prayers and practices of His Church. When I could not pray, the Church said, "Here are prayers." When I could not believe, the Church said, "Come to the table and be fed." When I could not worship, the Church sang over me the language of faith. Inherited ways of prayer and worship – liturgical practices – are a way that the ancient Church built cairns for us, to help us endure this mystery, to keep us on this path of faith, to guide us home.

 

Theodicy is in no way "solved" for me. It is not in fact solvable in the here and now. In many ways I am still wandering in the fog. But I have found cairns to follow, and they have guided many others in the midst of this crazy and unpredictable weather.

*As Flannery O'Connor wrote, theodicy is not "a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured." ... (the mystery is) an acknowledgement that the world crackles with possibility because it is steeped in the shocking and unpredictable presence of God.

+ The content above is an excerpt from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren focused on the Scriptures and prayers of compline.

Bonus: Here is a recent song to complement the content above:

The Story I'll Tell

Maverick City Music, 2020 A.D.

The hour is dark and it’s hard to see

What You are doing here in the ruins,

And where this will lead ...

Oh, but I know that down through the years,

I’ll look on this moment, see Your hand on it,

And know You were here ...

And I’ll testify of the battles You’ve won,

How You were my portion when there wasn’t enough.

I'll sing a song of the seas that we crossed,

The waters You parted, the waves that I walked ...

Oh, my God did not fail! Oh, it’s the story I’ll tell!

Oh, I know it is well! Oh, it's the story I’ll tell!

Believing gets hard when options are few,

When I can't see how You're moving

I know that You're proving You're the God that comes through!

Oh, but I know that over the years,

I’ll look back on this moment and see Your hand on it

And know You were here ... (Pre-Chorus + Chorus)

All that is left is highest praises,

So sing hallelujah to the Rock of Ages ... (Chorus)

Next post: CN | Godspeed: The Path to Being Known, to Answering "Where are you?" with "Here I Am"

Here are links to previous City Notes books: A Meal with Jesus; The Art of Neighboring; A Praying Life; Encounters with Jesus; One Thousand Gifts; The Rest of God; Everyday Church; Letters to a Birmingham Jail; Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith; The Pursuing God; Yawning at Tigers; Evangelical, Sacramental, and Pentecostal; The Eternal Current; Learning to Speak God; Tattoos on the Heart; Drop the Stones; He Speaks in the Silence; A Beautiful Disaster; Glorious Weakness; Discovering the Freedom of Limitations; Bread for the Resistance; Gentle & Lowly; Ready or Not; Facing the Fear Question; The Path to Being Known

Christ is all,

Rev. Mike "Sully" Sullivan

Email Pastor Mike | Website | Visit Us | Support Us | Facebook Us

CN | No Longer Strangers: Belonging in a World of Alienation

 

If Jesus is telling the truth, we gain much more than we could possibly lose. + Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers

For this Special City Notes released on the day of this book's release, I'm honored to be part of Gregory Coles book launch team for his second book, No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation, after his inaugural work, Single, Gay, Christian: A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity. Greg has already had much to teach me about Jesus' beauty and faithfulness in writing and in person when I had the pleasure of meeting him at Revoice: Fostering Peace. Honoring Dignity. Preserving Faith. back in the summer of 2019, and I'm grateful to continue to learn from him in what I'm sure will be one of my Top 10 books from 2021.

If we only ever pay attention to our own sense of belonging, without giving a second thought to the belonging of others, we might miss out on the moments when our location in the world matters most. Those who belong like Jesus belonged don't just receive the gift of belonging; we turn around and give it away. + Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers

The "Gaining More Than We Could Possibly Lose" excerpts below are adapted from Chapter 11: The Origami Artists in No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation by Gregory Coles

No Longer Strangers: Gaining More Than We Could Possibly Lose

I said a tentative goodbye to the idea of having kids in the same moment I concluded I was probably going to be single and celibate for my entire life. I told myself it was fitting for someone so obviously ill-suited to childcare to remain childless. Sometimes I even felt relieved ... But sometimes, Greg-Without-Kids didn't want to be passionate about things in solitude. Sometimes I dreamed of sharing my life's ordinary moments with mini-humans who might adopt my fascinations and mimic my mannerisms – who might grow up differently because they had grown up in my company. Sometimes the thought of never having kids felt like a tremendous loss. Sometimes it still does ... 

I am not, in the physiological sense of the word, a eunuch. And yet, based on the amount of sex I'm currently having and the number of biological offspring I expect to leave behind when I die, the distinction between me and a eunuch sometimes feels negligible. I am, as far as I can tell, precisely the kind of person Jesus has in view when He says in Matthew 19, "There are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others –

 

and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven." I seem to fit that third category rather well: the people who live a sexless and childless life, not because they have no other options, but because they truly believe that the Kingdom of heaven is worth every ounce of their devotion.

For people of Jesus' day, one of the great tragedies of a eunuch's life was that he would never have the opportunity to become a biological parent. His bloodline would end the day he died, leaving no one behind to carry on his legacy or to prove that his time on earth had mattered. Infertile women of that era faced the same fear. So did every married couple unable to conceive children together for any reason. To be without offspring was to go unremembered. Perhaps it's fitting that Jesus' next act in Matthew 19 – just after describing people who, like Jesus Himself, live as eunuchs by choice – is to place His hands on and pray for the little children who are brought to Him.

Jesus doesn't withdraw from the lives of children simply because He's not the one parenting them. On the contrary, Jesus declares children central to the Kingdom of heaven. He invests in them, takes them seriously, invites them to follow in His footsteps of passionate love for God and neighbor. For Jesus' disciples, biological parenting isn't meant to be the only way we leave a legacy or build a family. It's not even meant to be the primary way we leave a legacy or build a family. Jesus treats the family of God as something much more substantial than just a pretty metaphor. It is a concrete claim, a literal state of being. Those who follow God together are family to one another.

 

At the end of Matthew 19, Jesus promises that the people who give up the usual trappings of home and spouse and children for the sake of the Gospel will receive a hundred times as much in return. In short, he is promising us the family of God.

Jesus is promising us to one another. If this promise doesn't sound like good news – if the family of God sounds like a cheap substitute for a spouse and a picket fence and two-and-a-quarter children – perhaps it's because we in the Church have failed to really live like family to one another. Do we believe that nuclear family is in some way superior – more permanent, more dependable, more meaningful, more concrete – than spiritual family? Jesus certainly didn't seem to. Maybe it's time for those of us who claim to follow Him to step up our game and start acting like actual sisters and brothers and fathers and mothers to one another. Maybe we need to start being for one another the family Jesus promised we would be for one another.

Another of my favorite biblical promises for single people comes from Isaiah: 

And let not the eunuch complain, 

"I am only a dry tree." 

For this is what the LORD says: 

"To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, 

who choose what pleases Me and hold fast to My covenant –  

to them I will give within My temple and its walls 

a memorial and a name 

better than sons and daughters; 

I will give them an everlasting name 

that will endure forever." (56:3-5)

I'm not saying that those of us who remain single, or those couples unable to conceive biological kids, can't still become parents. Fostering and adoption are beautiful and necessary modes of parenting that are open to us all – even the celibates. My point is, rather, that every follower of Jesus is called to leave a legacy, to partake in the family of God, to participate in the lives of those younger than us, regardless of whether we ever become parents in a biological or legal sense. There is something we lose when our obedience to Jesus leaves us childless ... 

But if Jesus is telling the truth, we gain much more than we could possibly lose. 

+ Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers, pgs. 107-109

Bonus: A Song to Complement Content Above:

You Keep On Getting Better

Maverick City Music, 2019 A.D.

I will sing of Your goodness,

I will sing of Your love, 

Though the seasons come quickly, 

You have always been enough. 

Though the night may get darker, 

Though the waiting seems long, 

You have always been faithful 

To remind me of Your love.

You are good, 

In the morning "I’ll sing You are good!" 

In the evening, "I’ll sing You are good!" 

You are good to me. 

You have always been patient, 

You have always been kind.

You’re consistent through the ages, 

Oh, what a friend of mine. 

So I’ll remind my soul to bless You, 

Standing firm upon Your Truth 

Knowing You cannot be shaken, 

‘Cause I’ve seen what you can do!

(Chorus) 

You keep on getting better! You keep on getting better!

Next post: An Exercise in Hope: Black Identity in the Story of God

Here are links to previous CN books: A Meal with Jesus; The Art of Neighboring; A Praying Life; Family on Mission; Encounters with Jesus; The Rest of God; Letters to a Birmingham Jail; The Pursuing God; Yawning at Tigers; Moving Towards Emmaus; Evangelical, Sacramental, and Pentecostal; The Eternal Current; Learning to Speak God; Tattoos on the Heart; Drop the Stones; The Ultimate Exodus; He Speaks in the Silence; The Dusty Ones; A Beautiful Disaster; Glorious Weakness; Discovering the Freedom of Limitations; Gentle & Lowly; Insanity of God; How to Be a Saint in the Darkness; The Path to Being Known; An Impossible Marriage

Christ is all,

Rev. Mike "Sully" Sullivan

Email Pastor Mike | Website | Visit Us | Support Us | Facebook Us