(Image: ice lantern in dark and snow, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
My first Sunday here in Portland, the second Sunday of Advent, I was all ready to head out to my new church – when L., my hostess, pointed out that it was, uh, snowing. Right now. Sticky little flakes were indeed drifting down from the sky and alighting on the pavement as if they intended to stay. I headed to Trinity’s website for a livestream instead.
Happy Solstice, pals! How peculiar, here in the Northern Hemisphere where the sun has been slacking off so notably, that Christians have chosen to site a holy season that exhorts us to greater efforts to bring about the Kingdom, and to open our hearts to the possibility for new hope entering the world. Isn’t it enough that we’re just surviving these darkening days? Add to this the modern “Christmas season” that grips us to go, go, go, buy, buy, buy, consume, consume, consume – in pursuit of images of family idylls and abundant acquisition that many of us neither have nor want. Can’t the prophets of Advent just leave us to curl up under a blanket and wait out the dismal dark? Surely spring will be a better season to make straight the highway for God to come into the world.
How very peculiar that many of us tell each other a story of the Spirit coming into the world tiny, vulnerable, unwanted by anyone who “mattered” in the place and time chosen. That incarnation came when it was uncomfortable, unwise and just plain dangerous – and that God had faith that we would welcome and care for this scrap of life that had so many gifts to offer us. If we tended it. If we welcomed it. If we made it a priority that it should grow and learn and make choices and rejoice and suffer and share the fruits of its learning and living. How did God have that much faith in us?
So that is the pondering I invite myself and invite you into this season of cold, of limits, of both surfeit and hunger in the world around us. Hope can arrive small and helpless and messy and inconvenient and against all the rules of decorum and prudence. And demands immediate action from us – actions as homely as scooping out a hollow in a pile of straw, as amazing as listening to an angel.
(Not-so-lofty footnote of a personal nature: Yes, I’m in Portland, Oregon! Yes, that place where they had the big earthquake is the place I left! And today we’re doing inspections on the delightful house I’m buying! Rather stunned by how quickly all this is happening, and very grateful for all the good fortune and loving support I’ve received. More soon!)