“In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord” (Lk. 1:39-45).

I arrived back home in North Carolina yesterday to visit family en route to our new home in Washington State. I wasn’t certain I’d ever get to see my grandfather again. My mom has been taking care of him for the last twelve years. He’s 95. We came here a few months ago not knowing if he would make it through the night. But he seems to have found a second wind—for the thousandth time. So today I got to introduce him to my perfect daughter, Radley, his newest great granddaughter. As soon as he saw her he lit up with buckets of light and began to giggle. When we put her on his chest his laughter and light and life just spilled out all over the place. Mom and I got caught up in the moment. Everything did. We were laughing, they were laughing, the room was laughing, all the children of the earth and all the angels of heaven were laughing. The cosmos itself had cracked open in a fit of sidesplitting joy.

I suppose it was really just a very old man who has lost most of his mind amused by a very young girl who has yet to find most of hers. On the surface at least there wasn’t a shred of evidence of anything out of the ordinary, not even a speck of angel dust. And since humans typically forget to look beneath the surface, these aren’t the types of experiences we spend our lives pursuing or filmmakers spend millions of dollars trying to recreate. It wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t dramatic—and what even was funny? And yet, there we all were, swallowed up in the most naked and sincere laughter. It was somehow both forgettably unassuming and borderline apocalyptic. It was something like the Incarnation. And it was exactly like every experience of God I’ve ever had.

I have personally never had an experience of God that was visible on the surface in any real measurable sense, like a person’s stump growing back into a leg or an Egyptian river turning into blood. But I did just two weeks ago hold out my hands and receive my daughter into this world. I did just this morning look down at her face and see her looking up at mine.

I fully believe God has and will at times continue to use Nile-sized miracles to reveal his power, but I do not believe that is what he is ordinarily most interested in revealing. I think he is still most interested in revealing himself through miracles the shape of the Incarnation, the truly God showing up in the truly human, like infants and old people, because he wants us to pay attention to infants and old people, the least and the last—the only place we are guaranteed to find him (Mt. 25:31-46). And that’s the only real surprising thing about God. No human has ever struggled to believe that God can be as powerful as a god, but we have all struggled to believe that God could be as powerful as a baby.

It was just this kind of disproportionality in the moment that suggested God was in the room. The two mismatched mothers-to-be, one too old to be a mother, the other too virgin to be a mother, standing belly against belly, giggling their way into a prophetic frenzy. It’s the kind of scene that can’t really be seen for through the windowpane. You’ve got to enter in. You have to laugh yourself to hear the angels laughing too. You’re either swimming in it or it’s empty. It’s like the flag-wavers at church who are genuinely dancing in the Spirit while everyone else is genuinely distracted by the flags. The only way to ever start dancing in the Spirit is to start dancing. If you want the pool to be filled, you first have to jump in headfirst.

By this point, Mary and Elizabeth and their unborn babies were all dancing around the room, “filled with the Holy Spirit” and “leaping for joy” (Lk. 1:41-44), while the whole world was looking in through the glass. But from out here it still looks like little more than two women filled with child and a little too much wine. Until Mary opened her mouth and thunder came out (Lk. 1:46-55). There, with only a one-cousin-congregation, Mary stood up on the bar stool, raised her glass, and gave the most revolutionary speech in human history, the ‘Magnificat’, announcing that the Divine revolution had begun—in her belly. Granted, it was still in its embryonic form, a revolution that could still legally be aborted, and sometimes it felt like little more than acid reflux, but It was here nonetheless. God was here. Emmanuel—in utero.

God refuses to be found in the places we insist on looking for him. The center of Israel’s temple and the top of Babylon’s tower both turned out to be empty. The further away humans ascend from the world of the least and the lowest, the further away they get from the world of the Most High God. The Incarnation reveals that there are a number of things humans care about that God doesn’t care about and there are a number of things God cares about that humans don’t care about. God became an unborn child long before he was laid in a manger. And God made sure his mother was not sent to a nursing home just before he was laid in a tomb. Jesus loves the little children. Jesus cares about the old widow.

I once heard a wise man say that the health of a society can be measured largely by how its people treat the very young and the very old. There is hardly much principle difference between the advent of abortion clinics and the nursing homes. They both suggest a mass rejection of the most vulnerable, a refusal to live with the least and the lowest, a refusal to live with God. They are both a rejection of Christmas.

Most of the time God-with-us feels more like us than it does like God. Most of the time it feels exactly as miraculous as taking care of people who can’t take care of themselves, like changing the diapers of ancients and infants. Most of the time the Incarnation just feels very carnal. But then there are times, right in the middle of the mundane, right between the two women feeling each others bellies, right between the face of an old man and the helplessness of a little girl, the heavens opens up and the splendor of the living God fills the room as the waters cover the sea. And you can’t help but laugh, because it feels just like Christmas.

—

The baby was born. They called him James.

There’s not much to say about James. He doesn’t say much about himself in the letter he left for us. The only other thing the Bible says about James is that he was the brother of Jesus (Gal. 1:19). All we get from Church history about James is in fragments, no cohesive narrative. A guy named Hegesippus called him James the Just. It stuck.

But it’s no surprise there’s not much to say about James, because all that is said of him is said under the shadow of his big Brother. James the Just, brother of Jesus the Judge, born in the shadow of the Savior. A hard act to follow.

I wonder if Mary felt guilty. She was found to be with child, again, but not by the Holy Spirit again. This time by plain ol’ unholy Joe. This child surely would not be so godly as her First. I wonder if she felt guilty before James was born, knowing that she could not love him as much as her Firstborn (of all Creation)?

But even more than that, I wonder if she felt guilty after he was born. I wonder if she felt guilty when she realized that she loved her second-born just as much.

—

I remember when we were expecting our firstborn. All Keldy thought about was the baby. She loved him in I suppose the way only a mother can love an unborn child. I on the other hand felt guilty. I could not relate. For those nine months my reaction to her pregnancy was a kind of surprised “Oh yeah…”, coupled with a nagging fear that I wasn’t going to love him like a father is supposed to love his son. I literally feared that I would love my dogs more than my son. Babies just hadn’t been all that impressive to me, because I am not a woman. The honest men out there know what I’m talking about. Women have no clue.

Except for maybe Mary. Mary knows. Mary had, after all, held at her bosom the one who came from the bosom of God the Father (Jn. 1:18). Mary had indeed “kissed the face of God.” But this second-born would be just another face in the shadow of the Almighty. Mary wasn’t yet used to having children who weren’t God. Middle children already have a syndrome named after them, but what of the one that comes second to the Savior of the world. Mary knows.

When Kezek was born, I started treating my dogs like dogs. I loved my firstborn so intensely that I was afraid I loved him more than God. I was afraid that if anything were to happen to him I would hate God. That fear lingers.

When Keldy told me we were expecting again, I was doubly guilty and doubly afraid. Not only did I love my firstborn more than or as much as God, now I feared that I would not love my second-born as much as my firstborn, perhaps only as much as the dogs.

—

The baby was born. We called him Levi Ryser. There was no sound. He was blue. The voices of the people in white raised an octave. They stopped looking us in the eye. They were looking at some protocol that was visible only to those who knew some unspoken “code.” Ryser needed decoded.

The doctor handed him to me to carry him to the NICU. It seemed far too much like a formality for my first embrace of my second-born son, like it was a consolation, the beginning of some process necessary for some Contingency Plan Z. It felt like I was greeting my newborn son with a goodbye. They escorted me at an anxious pace. And they apparently could not hear any of the 75 questions I asked in route to the NICU.

There are no words here that will do.

I held him as close to my heart heart as humanly possible. I tried to hold him as close to my heart as inhumanly possible, or as humanly impossible. I tried to pour my life into his. I tried to empty myself to fill him up. I tried to breath for him. I wanted to cut out my heart and put it into his body. I wanted to die so I could raise him from the dead. Anything. Just please…

I think that was the first day I ever actually interceded for someone. I beat on heaven’s door like one of those old grandmothers who’s earned the right to act that way. I was pleading, then I was demanding, then I was crying. I had felt the joy of a father’s love with my firstborn but with my second-born I was brushing up against the prospect of a father’s grief. I was feeling the very sharp other edge of love for the first time. I learned that day something about the sword Simeon told Mary about (Lk. 2:35).

—

Four days later, he was stable. Over those four days I started to understand what I suppose Mary had come to understand with her second-born: that the love of God and the love of a son are not two separate loves. I started to understand that God is love in a very nounish sense of the statement, or like the nounish sense of the Word Incarnation. She couldn’t compare her love for Jesus with her love for James, because her love for James came from the life of Jesus. There is no love apart from that Life. Indeed, there is no life apart from that Love. If it is in God that we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), then Love is the ether of all our relationships. To love is merely an act of alignment.

—

His name has become more fitting than I had intended. Levi Ryser means, by my assignment, death and resurrection, or offering and acceptance, or more simply “Gift of God” (with the intentionally ambiguous genitive). It is the second-born of Mary, after all, by whom we discover ourselves, since we all are second-born of the dead. We discover that unto us a Child is born, to us a Son is given, in order to restore love to its proper form, that we might love our own as we love God, because he loves us as though we were his own. That is the meaning of yesterday’s Birthday and therefore every birthday in the light of its shadow.

Levi was born on the altar, where all gifts are born. He was born without breath, blue. But while he was yet unknown and unknowing, in route to the NICU, he was already being born in the bosom of his father. I think in that moment, if for only that moment, I understood Mary. I think I understood something about motherhood that day. I understood what it was like to carry a life that could not carry itself apart from my own. I understood what it was like to carry life with a sense that if one dies, we all die, if one lives, we all live. I think I learned something about being the Mother of God that day. I’m certain I learned something about being a father that day, maybe even something about being a Son.

We had decided to call him Ryser before he was born. But Levi was Ryser before he was born. He was raised in his mother’s heart for nine months. And he was raised in his father’s for four days. He is now growing up in both. And all this is from God, because he has been raised from eternity in the heart of Love. And my only plea for his life is that he will continue to grow in that Love. God help me.

Ryser is our number two, but he is loved just as much as the Firstborn, even if he was born in His shadow, even if we did use leftover nativity scene wrapping paper for his birthday presents this year.

—

Happy Birthday, Ryser. You are loved with an everlasting love, my son.

“How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of man take refuge in the shadow of your wings.”

~ Psalm 36:7

“For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you? Indeed, you are our glory and joy” (1 Thess. 2:19-20).

The day is drawing nigh. We have been waiting for the coming of our Lord, the Advent of Jesus Christ, for just over two millennia now. But for just over four weeks, we have been waiting for Christmas. The season of Advent is the season we learn again what we have forgotten again: how to wait. But it’s a special kind of waiting, an active waiting. Advent is our dress rehearsal.

Dress rehearsals are the final rehearsals before the main attraction: full costumes, stage propped, spot lights on, everything ordinary strangely dimmed. Reality is altered. Advent is the time for the Church to decorate the world, to create the context to remember, and to deliver, the Advent message.

In ordinary times we brown-bag our Advent message and don’t bother wrapping it in the songs of the heavenly hosts, but only so we can share it at the table of IRS agents and other brown-bagging sinners. If God can wrap himself in swaddling sin (Rom. 8:3; 2 Cor. 5:21) to deliver his message to the world, then surely the Church born of Christ should learn how to become all things to all people in everyday life (1 Cor. 9:22). So in ordinary time, we deliver our Advent message in any and every context.

But the season of Advent is different. ‘Tis the season we insist upon obnoxiously decorating everything around us, because Advent means nothing less than that everything around us will one day be altered. Sure, it at times can be a little forced—the begrudging dog in his jingle-bell sweater, the divorced family in the strained “family” photo, the holiday that invariably requires more work than work since it is a holiday built on relationships—but it’s also somehow irresistible. All the pretense. All the happy. Neighbors walk across the street, strangers talk in lines, people awkwardly sing at the door of others who awkwardly listen, people smile. We all roll our eyes just thinking about it, but we simply can’t resist it. Even soldiers stop shooting each other so they can sing together instead, to pretend, if only for a night, that the world is not at war, to pretend there really were peace on earth, good will to men (cf. “The Christmas Truce of 1914”).

The day after Christmas we may be back in our respective bunkers ready to fill the silence with shrapnel, the house with hostility, but we still can’t get the songs out of our heads. We may hate our ex-spouse till the day we die, but “Nurse, could you please put that ‘family’ photo right next to the heart monitor.” There is a hatred that lives in all of us—an inherent need to create a “them” to secure ourselves within an “us,” the need to accuse and to blame and to gossip—but there is also the love of an idea of not having to hate. We really just want to live at peace in a world that runs on fear, a world where love is always weaker than grief, where Goodbye is more enduring than Hello. The world we find ourselves hoping for just can’t be the one we find ourselves living in. So we settle for the one where we must compete and take and lock the doors and pick sides. Except on Christmas, that day imaginations run amok, the day for pretending peace on earth, good will to men, the day the world is permitted to hope.

Perhaps this is why Christmas festivity is both the most alien and the most contagious thing the Church has ever created. The world won’t copy our theology or our piety or our prayers, but the world will copy our holy days. It will not prepare for Christ’s coming but it will prepare for Christmas. This is simply because the Christmas message is little else than an articulation of the world’s longing from the other side of the promise. We all want peace, joy, love, and eternity more than we want power, but power is more believable on the surface where it is more available than hope. And indeed, the Church’s hope is in the exact the shape of the world’s longing. It’s just that we remember that our Longing was made flesh and dwelt among us (Jn. 1:14). It’s just that we believe Emmanuel (Mt. 1:23)—and so we wait, we hope for, Emmanuel (Rev. 21:3).

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).

An Open Letter to My Skeptic Friends

Dear Friends,

I am writing this letter to try to help you see where I am coming from when we debate and why I will likely never be able to satisfy your questions with my arguments.

The elephant in the room of every Christian-nonchristian debate is there because Christians have not only been asked to affirm an apparent contradiction, but we have been asked to base the universe on that contradiction. God was not oblivious to this design. He set it up so that the contradiction would have to run its course before it can do the work of drawing people back in. We must first look away only to realize we cannot look away. We must be repulsed by the death of Christ only to be seduced by it. We must see who God is in Christ, so that we can see decisively who God is not in us. We must first see the infinitive qualitative distinction of Christ crucified in order to see the infinite qualitative beauty of Christ crucified. We must behold the One lifted up as we behold the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as an unattainable spectacle of impossible grandeur, as something that is kept from our reach but given to our eyes, as something so absolutely alien but somehow so absolutely at home. We must learn not only to handle the truth of God, to follow the goodness of God, but, perhaps at the very center of it all, to behold the beauty of God. But we cannot run to the academy for proofs of God’s beauty, because, in Von Balthasar’s words, “Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another.”

I find that what I’m really trying to do when I share the Gospel is not something that is possible for me to do, because the Gospel itself suggests that those who believe it do so because God himself compels them to, because he will speak to your heart in a way you will not be able to deny, in a way similar to your inability to deny the beauty of a sunset or the delight of a shooting star. So what can I do but point away from myself into the infinite space between us and God and declare a deep mystery. What context is there for me to describe this cosmic enigma but in the gap of the otherwise unknowable? It’s not like I can ever assume a direct correlation between what I say and how you respond, so if you are going to really hear what I’m trying to say, you will simply have to listen for Someone Else’s voice. And if He doesn’t speak, I have nothing to say.

For future reference, I want to put out a disclaimer, so as to not mislead. I want to say that the distance between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the highest link on the chain of reason is like the distance between the highest tidal wave and the moon. And yet, for all lack of appearances, and in an act of self-humiliation, I am still commanded to proclaim that there was a day that the moon plunged itself into the heart of the sea, only to return three days hence to rule the night sky. I do not expect that I can prove this actually happened, nor do I pretend it is not a foolish story, as though we should have expected it to happen, as though Via Negativa should always lead to Via Delarosa, no matter the God, no matter the universe. More foolish still, I need to concede that I was not even there when it did happen, and yet I have been commanded to proclaim it as though I witnessed it myself, because I did witness it myself.

It is such an absurd story indeed that if you ever do find yourself believing it, it will be nothing short of a miracle, and your faith will not rest in the wisdom of men but this miracle of God (cf. 1 Cor. 1-2), so please don’t try to persuade yourself into believing it, and neither will I try to persuade you. When you do believe it, it will only be because you cannot help but believe it, only because it is in your head not like people are in an airport but like busyness is in an airport. It will be in your head unlike any other idea or fact or truth is in your head because it will be in more than just your head, as though its roots have grown down and wrapped around your heart and your gut and begun sprouting its life in a way that distorts your vision, like the suddenly permanent image of the sun after you foolishly behold its beauty too directly. Even in your doubt, you’ll have to stop and have a little chuckle at yourself after suddenly realizing you are in an impassioned argument with the God whose very existence you are questioning. You won’t be able to doubt him like you can doubt every other god. You will always find yourself doubting him to his face. He will be for you like the presence of a fresh memory, always just an immeasurable moment away from being as tangible as the bread and wine in your mouth–invisible but indelible.

And you would rather it be so, because you will know that anything nearer than that would be confined to time; that the permanence of his presence as such is precisely why his presence is not fleeting, why the Bread of Life must hide itself from our tongues to remain hidden in our hearts. You will know that to keep from being objectified and made into an idol, God mustn’t objectify himself to those who desire nothing more than to make him an idol, to make him a possession so as to avoid becoming His possession. Indeed, you will know that his single pendulum swing through time in Jesus Christ was his perfect, unrepeatable form, so that his cruciform temporality is as necessary to behold as his reigning eternality–for it is The Infinite whose form is perfectly revealed by his becoming The Mortal–the reality of which will become for you so irresistible, so radiant, so beautiful, that you will long for others to see as you see, not because it makes you feel so large and in control, but precisely because it makes you feel so small and out of control; precisely because it will have restored for you a vision of the wonder and mystery that you had only as a child tromping around in an infinitely large and wonderful world; precisely because you have again become a child. And indeed, unless you become a child, you will never see it (cf. Mt. 18:3).

So my only hope of your understanding why I must speak of him to you, is that you see him for yourself. And you will know when you have really found him with your eyes because you won’t be able to keep him out of your mouth. But you won’t speak of him as a man with a unified theory of the universe, rather as a child pointing aimlessly into the night sky, not with great confidence but with great delight. You will not do it because you think you’re right about Jesus and others are wrong about him. That’s just not the point. You will do it because you think Jesus is beautiful and will eagerly want others to see in him what you see. But, I must warn you, there will be moments of heartache, the kind of heartache that is felt the day the most splendrous sunset begins to fall into your vision, but you’ve no time to find someone to share it with; the kind of heartache the anxious museum curator feels as he begins fumbling over desperate words trying to capture the attention of a distracted group of teenagers, who at some point will have to realize that nothing can persuade a person to see Beauty but Beauty itself. But never stop pointing and naming what you see, even as you concede the great gap between the end of your finger and the beginning of the moon. And never stop praying that naïve prayer, as naïve as a child’s birthday wish, that the moon would once again descend from the heavens and land in the abyss of another’s heart, that is, of course, if you ever do find yourself believing. And that is my prayer for you even as you read this: simply that you would be able to see his glory and unable not to.

“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Mt. 6:34).

Not too many months back a well-meaning man and his son knocked on my door, awkward, tracts in hand. Below is the conversation as I remember it. I don’t think it is far from verbatim.

Me: “Hi…”

Man: “If you died today, do you know for certain you would not go hell?”

Me: “No.”

Man: “Would you like to be certain of that?”

Me: “Yes.”

Man: [Handing me tract] “Read this…”

Me: “Jesus said not to be anxious about tomorrow. I feel like you are trying to make me feel anxious about tomorrow.”

Man: “I thought you said you didn’t know for certain whether or not you would not go to hell when you died.”

Me: “I did. But I’m not anxious about hell. My faith is in Jesus, not in heaven, and certainly not in not going to hell. At any rate, Jesus is the Judge, so I’d rather put my trust in the Judge than in the verdict. Wouldn’t the latter just be mistaking myself as judge?”

[Very long, awkward pause–I waited.]

Man: “Okay, well I hope you get a chance to read this.”

Me: “Thanks. Have a good one.”

When the angels proclaimed the first Advent of Christ it came with a message: “Fear not!” (see yesterday’s reflection). I can’t help but think that our preaching about the second Advent of Christ should sound similar. Below is an example of what I think that might look like, singing with the angels and whatnot:

I’ve probably watched this video 100 times. I love it. To me, it is a symbol of true evangelism, of what it should look like to herald good news: not a hit-and-run proposition of ‘the kingdom-of-God-and-way-out-of-hell hereafter’ but a public declaration of ‘the kingdom of God at hand’. Its aim is not to promote the wretchedness of man or the rightness of the Church but rather to proclaim the glory of God, for which the most appropriate mode of communicating is song.

All evangelism is imposing, but true evangelism like this is imposing in the right way, like a sunset is imposing on the western horizon, like stars are imposing on our attempt to gaze only into the dark matter of the universe. It’s an imposition of of light, of beauty, of joy–whoever has complained of such an imposition? Satan himself must struggle with this temptation, biting both tips of his tongue with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength to keep himself under constraint. I wouldn’t be surprised if even that dried up old prickly pear occasionally falls off the wagon in the irresistible desire to join in with what all creation was made to do (Ps. 19)–to “worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness!” (Ps. 96:9). What is evangelism if not public worship? What is public worship if not Harking the Herald angels’ sing?!

And, indeed, worship offered up to God–be it in a life lived, a sacrifice made, a song sung–always is about gravitation, not polarization, because it seeks to articulate not how fear-worthy hell is and anxious we should feel about it–that’s just not the point–but how love-worthy God is and how peaceful we should feel about Him. That is, it points to the centerpiece of all time and space in the One who was lifted up on a cross to “draw all people to himself” (Jn. 12:32).

So the syntax of worship is not ‘If…then…’ as much as it is ‘Hallelujah!…because:

“The kingdom of this world is become
The kingdom of our Lord,
And of His Christ!
And of His Christ!

And He shall reign for ever and ever!
And he shall reign forever and ever!
And he shall reign forever and ever!
And he shall reign forever and ever!

King of kings–forever and ever–Hallelujah! hallelujah!
King of kings–forever and ever–Hallelujah! hallelujah!
King of kings–forever and ever–Hallelujah! hallelujah!
King of kings–forever and ever–Hallelujah! hallelujah!

This must have been similar to what John saw and heard from the angel that flew over “all tribes, tongues, and nations,” singing “everlasting good news” (Rev. 14:6): News that is always here. News that is always good. Indeed, news that is always new, and thus the only news that is ever new–God with us!

“Jesus said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm” (Mt. 8:26).

My four year-old Kezek calls it his “blankey.” My two year-old Ryser has just recently adopted the term. Charlie Brown’s best friend Linus called it his “security and happiness blanket” (Good Grief, More Peanuts, 1956). Child psychologists refer to it as a “comfort object” or “transitional object,” often referring to a (literal) “security blanket” but sometimes to a stuffed animal or other such item. These are objects that are typically used in early childhood as children begin to develop self-awareness and a sense of relative independence. Newborns see the world as an extension of themselves, but soon that illusion is reduced to just the mother, who “brings the world” to the infant. Desire is translated to screaming in the middle of the night; screaming in the middle of the night becomes the faithful mother who is there to satisfy the desire. But eventually, the child must necessarily be disillusioned if s/he is going to make it in the world. The child must learn that mom isn’t going to be around forever to bring the world at every beck and call.

This is where blankies and passies and teddies come in handy. It’s about having something familiar to hold onto in a world that often forces the unfamiliar upon us. Ambulances are stuffed full of “emergency blankets” to give to victims of trauma, not because trauma victims are necessarily cold, but because there are times we all need a “blankey.”  Indeed, after polling over 6,000 people trying to track down the owners of about 75,000 stuffed animals in 452 hotels, the hotel chain Travelodge discovered that 35 percent of British adults still sleep with a teddy bear. Life is scary, especially for adults.

That’s why we prefer the illusion. It’s also why we refer to retirement funds as “security blankets,” which is just another way of talking about the “blankey” we take to our death bed. We hold on to the illusion because between recessions, ISIS, teenage texting and driving, not to mention the inevitability of death, letting go of the illusion would mean holding on to…what? What is there to “bring the world” to us that isn’t terrifying?

Perhaps that is why we don’t take Advent seriously anymore. Resurrection of the dead, reconciliation of all things—the most basic promises of God’s future—are the promises Christians doubt most. We have that in common with atheists. We may believe God will bless our nation, prosper our business, secure our retirement fund, grant us traveling mercies, eliminate life’s storms. We will believe just about anything about God other than what he has definitively promised. This is how we can still talk about having “faith” in God without having to have either faith or God. Faith in God is not truly faith in God unless it requires us to let go of our attempts to control or avoid the future.

Advent means that though the world attempts to control or turn away from the unfamiliar future, the Church looks futureward with open arms because we are familiar with God’s promise: that Christ is coming to bring the world to us. 

In that case, we could all learn a little lesson from Linus. Linus was known for being the kid who refused to let go of his blankey. But who can blame him when the alternative is to begin exchanging one illusion for another, when life begins with a baby blanket and ends with one for the death bed? But, in fact, Linus did let go of his blanket. He just waited till the right time. He waited till he found something else to hold onto, something he need not fear, something real, the world that was being brought to him–Advent.

Just notice the exact moment he drops it.

Now go and do likewise…

“He who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen” (Rev. 22:20-21).

And with that, the Bible concludes. We are left on Scripture’s last page with two basic claims about the course of history, the fate of the world: Christ has come. Christ will come again. Between the times is born a people called the Church, an Advent people. The Church stands on the first Advent of Christ and stretches itself out toward the second. That is what makes the Church what it is. We are a people formed in the exact shape of a promise.

God always comes in the form of a promise, every act a promise to act. Every Advent is two Advents, one done and another to come. There was Egypt and there was Canaan, slaves of Pharaoh and the land of giants, but suddenly Egypt was the Exodus and Cannon was the Promise Land. It was the same day a no-people became the people of God (1 Pet. 2:10), a promise-shaped people. Israel was born.

God makes promises in a way that only he can make good his promises, in the space between impossible and nevertheless, between heavy chains and wild honey, between no more life and no more death. Between whence and whither is the world of faith, sometimes called the wilderness, other times just “the world.” The world is the place where God makes faith possible, because the world is the place stuck between impossible and nevertheless, the place of Advent.

So Advent gives birth to a people who point to God in both directions, and we need God in both directions. Too much has been lost and there is too much to lose for God to be otherwise. Creation groans, waves swell, mothers cry, children hurt. If Christ has not come, there is no consolation. If Christ is not coming, there is no hope. The world regularly points in one direction or another, promising to rebuild what once was or to build anew what never has been, but only the Church points in both directions at once. Donald Trump promises to “Make America Great Again.” Bernie Sanders promises “A Political Revolution is Coming.” The world always promises a gospel of yesterday or a gospel of tomorrow, but only the Church heralds the promise of the an “eternal Gospel” (Rev. 14:6). Only the Church has the nerve to point as far back as Paradise and as far forward as forever. Only the Church is shaped like a promise-shaped cross. For us, there is Advent or there is nothing.

But there is not nothing! That is why we are here and why we speak. We are the people sent to the wilderness world to tell the truth about both sides beyond the waters. On one side, there is a slavery too strong to escape, on the other a life too good to be true. There is only impossible on both sides—nevertheless, there is Advent. And it can only be seen as the Advent of God when it cannot be mistaken for the Advent of anyone else. The Virgin asks how the news could be possible, so the angel assures her, indeed, it cannot, not apart from God at least—“For nothing will be impossible with God” (Lk. 1:37). Only when the world can expect nothing to happen is it prepared to receive the happening of God. Advent. The Promise of Advent. Jesus has come. Jesus is coming.

“For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory” (2 Cor. 1:20).

[Originally published by Asbury’s Seminary’s publishing house, Seedbed.]

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Lk. 1:35-38).

It was biologically impossible. But it was also socially impossible.

I’m thankful not only that the virgin Mary embraced her Unplanned Parenthood but also that “Joseph was a righteous man and did not want to disgrace her” (Mt. 1:17). I’m thankful that Mary consented to mother the Son of an unconsented conception and that Joseph consented to father a Son of another Father.

I’m thankful too that when Mary received word of her pregnancy from God, that with it came the assurance that she need not fear, that she had found favor with God (Lk. 1:30). She had found special favor with God, because in the life of her unborn Son, who had already been named, was the Life of every son and daughter (Jn. 1:4). His Life made flesh proved that every life made flesh has found special favor with God (Jn.1:14; 3:16), for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these (Mt. 19:16; Mk. 10:14; Lk. 18:14).

I’m also thankful that when her unplanned Son was hanging on a cross the moment before he was able to declare all his work “finished” (Jn. 19:30), that his final provision for the human race was to ensure that his mother would not be left alone and that she would be cared for by the beloved disciple: “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home” (Jn. 19:26-27). If Christ shares the burden of human death, surely He can expect us to share the burden of human life, whether that means adopting babies or adopting mothers–for we all are adoptees (Rom. 8:15; Eph. 1:5).

Jesus became the Son of Man so that we could become children of God (Jn. 1:12-14; cf. 2 Cor. 5:21; Rom. 8:1-4, 28-29), but if we embrace God as Father and claim our right to be his children in Christ, we must embrace one another as family (Eph. 2:19; cf. 1 John–the whole book). “Welcom[ing] one another as Christ has welcomed [us], for the glory of God” (Rom. 15:7; cf. Eph. 4:32) means the embrace of every potential life of a baby, planned or unplanned, for indeed these are the least of “the least of these” (Mt. 25:40). However, welcoming one another means no less than the embrace of every potential mother. When Mary found herself with an unplanned pregnancy, she did not find herself alone. She found herself within the embrace of God and the community He placed around her, and so was empowered to embrace her seemingly uncertain future.

The Church of Jesus Christ must be pro-life, but it must be pro-life in the way Joseph was pro-life at Jesus’ conception and the way the beloved disciple was pro-life at Jesus’ death. We must embrace the life of the unborn precisely by embracing the life of the mother. We can be no less than Joseph for every fatherless child and no less than the the beloved disciple for every lonely mother. But that’s costly. It means making room in our homes–literally. It means welcoming young guys and gals before they find themselves in such a situation. It means welcoming young guys and gals during and after they find themselves in such a situation, as well. It means: we make room for their lives so they can make room for life when it comes–planned or unplanned.

Indeed, Jesus’ Plan all along was to send that defining message to the disciples, that “I am ascending to my Father and their Father, to my God and their God” (Jn. 20:17), so that “those who believe in his Name would be given the right to be called children of God” (Jn. 1:12). So our calling, indeed our right, is to “conform to the image of the Son…the firstborn among a large family (Rom. 8:29).

I’m thankful that the gospel announces God’s Planned Parenthood for all humanity: Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Man. An impossible plan, God’s plan.