Advent: Tenderly

Got a call this evening from someone feeling upset, overwhelmed and anxious. We talked for close to 40 minutes, and I hope at the end of the conversation that things were better than they were at the start.

Truth is, we're all broken; and the pain goes down far below the surface, sometimes into caverns where dark things lurk. Maybe it's an injury a friend once dealt us, maybe it's the fear stirred by the toxic air our president is brewing, or maybe it's the trauma of having to hide our true selves. It doesn't matter; the darkness is real, and so is the pain. "The darkness and the light are alike to you,: the psalmist writes. "I am fearfully and wonderfully made.'

Jesus, it should be remembered, never came for respectable people. He came for hookers and thieves, for traitors and sycophants, for the filthy, for the ignorant and for the unemployed, not to give them better manners or to make them acceptable, but to remind them that God was on their side. He knows where the pain is rawest, and he touches us there tenderly.

God willing, let us remember who his people are, and let us follow his example.



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


Tweet

Advent: Presence

My atheist friends may disagree, but I think it's fair to say that we spend most of our life searching for the Presence of God.

In some ways it's like the hour before lunch. Nothing drives us to food like hunger; to water, like thirst; to friends, like loneliness; to justice, like oppression. It's the very absence of God that makes us want to experience his presence. It's that very moment of need meeting satisfaction that glows with the light of heaven.

The gospels tell us that Christmas is when God saw our need and pitched his tent among us, making our life his and his life with us. We enter the Presence of God not when we cloister ourselves away with other like-minded people, but when we follow his example and shelter the immigrant from deportation, speak up for the woman being sexually harassed, reach out to the lonely with a call and offer of friendship, oppose favoritism for the wealthy, and resist evil in places both high and low.

At that moment, a miracle occurs. In meeting the need of another, we experience the Presence, and so do they.



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


Tweet

Advent 2017: Open

I've met people (and I'm sure you have too) who claim that by following God, they've been kept from illness, from calamity, from poverty and everything else. Blessed, blessed, blessed, that's the only way they know how to describe themselves. It's like they started sneezing and can't stop,and so they keep getting blessed over and over.

I'm always wary of snake oil faith. I can't speak for other religions, but truth is, Christianity presents a danger in being open to the things of God. Up until the point the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, her life was safe and ordinary. She knew whom she was getting married to, knew where she would live, had a solid reputation, and could comfortably predict what life would bring her.

She could have smacked the angel upside the head with a skillet and told him where to take his announcements, or calmly informed him that he had the wrong address and wanted her next-door neighbor, Bertha.

But she was open, and even if she had the sense not to run down the street excitedly screaming that she was going to have a baby and he would be the messiah; her life still got overturned.

Pregnant before she got married? There goes the reputation.

Joseph insists he's not the father? She'll be lucky to get out of this alive.

In a couple years she'll even be a refugee, running for her life from the king in the middle of the night, hoping they can find someone who will shelter a growing family and not send them away empty-handed.

Being open to the works and wonders of God is a dangerous thing.


Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


Tweet