Christmastide and the New Year: Reflection on Titus 2:11-14

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled upright, and godly, while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.

One of the many debates I had with professors in seminary was focused on this passage. The question was built around how we understood God’s redemptive acts: is salvation FOR all people or did God appear TO all people. The question has continued with me as I never found peace with any conclusion. Yet peace is what is found when we’re willing to live with that ambiguity, and this scripture gets right to the point of why that is.

“While we wait.”

“While we wait” is a term that we’ve all heard in some form: “While we wait for permission to take off, please listen to your flight attendants as they review the safety instructions of this aircraft,” or maybe when we were young, “While we wait for dinner why don’t you go wash your hands.”

Waiting is a hard thing for us in this culture. We want to get to the point, get to a conclusion, get to a destination. A couple of days ago we GOT there as Christians! Christ is Born! Christmas happened! WOOOO! Okay, but now again, we wait. We wait, and we’re told to do things we know we should do, but don’t always (I know I don’t listen to safety instructions nor did I often wash my hands) while we wait. We wait for “Thy Kingdom Come.” A Kingdom that Jesus always referred to in the present tense. Well if we’re here, and it’s here, then what are we waiting for?

We’re waiting on us. Waiting for us to do the beautiful things that need to be done. That’s what good deeds are, they are the beautiful things that need to be done. Beautiful things like justice, mercy, and humbleness. Beautiful things like love. Beautiful things like peace. Beautiful things like joy. Beautiful things like hope. Beautiful things that make us all live into that image in which we are created.

Beautiful things were done on Christmas, beautiful things need to be done today.

18th Day of Advent: Joy – A Reflection on Philippians 4:4-7

Farewell, Greetings, Rejoice, Be Glad, Delight! One Greek word so many meanings, yet they are all connected–especially on this Advent journey we’re taking.

So often we take the idea of rejoicing as a happy term. Yet it has a salutation or a valediction that brings with it more depth–the depth of distance. Joy is not just a momentary emotion, but one built around a journey and a larger, longer connection between the parties involved. We are not called to simply celebrate God being God, but to remember the journeys we have been on and the life we share with God.

That greeting–that connection of joy–is not because we’re promised all we could ever desire or because God makes us happy and gives us reason to celebrate, but because of all the emotions we have experienced in our past in our relationship with God. It is that depth of emotion that causes us to say so many of those terms mentioned at the start of this reflection.

We express meaningful greetings and farewells with those who know us deeply and who we know deeply. We ask those closest to us to help us when we’re in need and worried. It is with this same sense of deep, longing joy that we speak to God.

It’s like a letter full of jokes, stories, and memories sent with a deep-seated need to tell someone about what is most important to you at this very moment. This is prayer, and it is the joy of our relationship with God. We don’t just ask, but we share. And the response is not a check in the mail or having everything fixed as we would like it. Like those letters sent to the ones who know us best and care for us most, what is most important is the peace that we receive.

The peace of closeness and connection, the peace of knowing that we are known fully and cared for beyond anything we can understand. And at the end of the day, that is Joy.

11th Day of Advent: What Is Love? – Luke 1:68-79

What is Love?

In our current society, we have moved to a place where romantic love trumps everything and is the reason most marry or enter into relationships. We also have decided that when talking about how we should interact with others that it is the correct word to use, but often we use it as a synonym for respect, or to recognize each other’s mutual humanity. None of these things are in essence wrong, they’re just different ways we understand this word called love–the hardest of terms–especially when it comes to being loved by a God who creates and calls us while also giving us freedom within the created world.

Love becomes even harder to understand when it seems that a God who has that much power leaves us seemingly vulnerable and weak. What kind of love is it that allows for abuse, inequality, crippling poverty, hate, and so many things that harm the very people created in your image, God?

It is in these desperate places that people will act out of their desperation for those they care for. God shows us love through desperate actions. God’s love is the love of promise. A promise is a desperate act, an act that says “I want you to know that not only do I care about you, but I also hear what is important to you, and I will do everything I can to make that happen.” God is a God of desperate love and promises. Thus God is always for those who have nothing but their desperation and their word.

For them, and thus for us all, God will see the promise through: that we will find a new dawn breaking that brings with it light for those in darkness and in the shadow of death. A promise that God will grant a way of peace for us all.

Yet we are not just those who are given that promise. We are participants in that promise–joining in the work, joining in God’s desperation, joining in the promise-making.

We are, as John the baptizer was, sent ahead to prepare the way, to give knowledge, to forgive, to move, to act, to promise, to love.

9th Day of Advent: Labandera

Guest reflection by Sophia Agtarap, Minister of Online Engagement for Rethink Church.

 3:1 See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight–indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. 3:2 But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; 3:3 he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the LORD in righteousness. 3:4 Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years. Malachi 3: 1-4 

 When I was 12, we moved to the Philippines. Dad felt the call to go back home and serve the people who called him to ministry to begin with. So we packed up all our stuff that wasn’t auctioned off and moved from small town Iowa to the Philippines–a place I had visited a few times but never lived.

 There were customs to get used to. A language to learn to speak and all the other do’s and don’ts you sometimes only figure out by trial and error. Not ideal for an awkward tween already trying to deal with adolescence. One of the things I did remember was the common practice of hand-washing clothes. Most folks didn’t own dishwashers or washing machines. Many of the domestic tasks from dishwashing to washing clothes to cleaning the floor were done manually. The cost of electricity and water were just too high and it didn’t make sense to buy expensive equipment for something you could do with your own two hands.

So we hired a labandera–-a laundrywoman-–a role just as common as a nanny for your kids [which was pretty common] and one that crossed socioeconomic lines. You didn’t have to be rich to have someone help with laundry or childcare.

Every week we got our dirty clothes ready for Aling [A title of familiar respect for a non-family member] Connie. She chatted with us as she prepared the soapy water and asked how our studies and life in general were doing. She told us about what was going on in her life [and sometimes the lives of others]. Her motherly instinct was always felt as we were separated from our own mother for a period of time while she worked in California.

Aling Connie approached her work with care and pride. She would ask for certain kinds of soap because she knew that washing the white school uniforms of three adolescent girls was going to take work. And she wanted to do her best work. She wanted to present us with the whitest, cleanest clothes. Regardless of the condition in which the clothes arrived in her hands, they hung on the clothesline looking brand new. A task not many are up to, yet have to take on. Allowing Aling Connie to handle our clothes week in and week out required a level of vulnerability. The garments we wore most close to our bodies, she was responsible for making clean. It was not just this level of intimacy that enveloped her work, but the love with which she carried it out.

I have shied away from the image of God as a refiner’s fire, as we hear in this passage from Micah. But this image of Aling Connie, I find familiar and comforting. She’s seen our clothes–-and sometimes us–-at our worst. Yet she still showed up and every week I knew that at the end of her time with us, I’d have clean clothes to wear to school, maybe a few new stories, and someone who cared enough to check in with me. 

We are in a season of preparation. Of anticipation of this promise that we will be refined and cleaned and prepared with loving hands so that all we offer might be done in righteousness–-in alignment with God’s Shalom. Where our relationships would be loving and just. But what will it take for us to prepare ourselves for that time?

A little honesty that we aren’t living as people of the promise, perhaps? Maybe even a little vulnerability as we carry around these dirty clothes ready for the wash?

5th Day of Advent: A Prayer of Unity and Deliverance from Thessalonians 3:9-13

My Creator, I want to pray from my heart for my colleagues in distant places. I have never seen all of them face to face but I know them by their marks around this strange brain we call ‘the Internet’.

Though we can deliver our words instantly, God we need your divine guidance as we work toward common goals. Our work draws us deep into our callings, even through difficult stages. Often, the scent of distraction is too much for us and we become lost not only to each other but to ourselves.

This Advent season, give us a collective beginning. Make us a community. Shape each piece of that community to interface with each other, on the one hand, and to fit with our working communities, on the other, so that we can become true bridges. Take that special part of ourselves, that oft forgotten soul element, and shape it to know you better.

As we continue, this Advent, bless each step we take to get closer to our messiah – an unexpectedly compassionate figure in our shared culture who, nevertheless, grew to be a source of courage and inspiration for all of society. We thank you for raising Jesus, and none other, to begin the ministry that we continue today.

We ask you to help us not to be short-sided as we look to the future, because we are not simply fire-keepers–we are all blessed with your fiery Spirit of Pentecost which was the definitive victory over despair. We became one that day because Jesus was able to become one with his Creator.

Please send your spirit into us. Make us thankful and contagiously joyful. Bless us through each other with a love that comes directly from you. In your sweet name,

Amen.

A prayer by John Daniel Gore (Missionary serving in Palestine.)

2nd Day of Advent: A Reflection on 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

Have you ever had that feeling of excitement when a good friend was coming to visit? You know, that excitement that may cause you to clean a little, cook a little, and sleep too little?

An excitement that, at the same time, means you don’t have to have the perfect looking house or dinner on the table because you know that just seeing each other is going to be all that really matters?

Well, that same excitement is present in our celebration of Advent and so often becomes the focus of our celebrations, but it’s really only part of the journey.

This scripture points to another kind of excitement, an excitement of a relationship that doesn’t end because of time and distance. A relationship that wishes the best for another even if that wish isn’t something you can provide for them–a deeper relationship that’s full of excitement, full of hope. A hope that some time, things will be like they used to be. That the closeness that comes when we think of one another will be fully realized when we’re together again. And even as we are apart, we are not separate.

Not separate at all, for we are part of one another, connected by a power we cannot easily escape. The desires one for another are so strong that the distance between us is but a minor hurdle that we know will be overcome. This excitement, the excitement of knowing that something WILL be even as we realize it is not (and may not be) soon is essential to our story as Christians.

It is a hope that when God comes, everything will be as it should be. It may not happen today, but we know it will happen. So, even as we wait for that day to come, we share in relationship fully, apart yet moving together. Hoping together, planning together, sharing together life.

And that, just that, is wonderful.