This morning I am sick at heart. The killing of Eric Garner, the ongoing cries for justice in Ferguson, the continuing ebola epidemic in Africa all wrench my heart and make me weep. And all this in the midst of Advent, the season of waiting. But I wonder do we really want God to appear? Remembering the babe born in a manger is one thing, being confronted with the God who desires justice and righteousness is another.
This morning I read in Isaiah about God’s judgement of Israel because
He expected a crop of justice,
but instead he found oppression.
He expected to find righteousness,
but instead he heard cries of violence. (Isaiah 5:7)
Are we really waiting for the coming of a God who desires justice and righteousness and who will shake the very foundations of the earth because it is not present? Will we be those who were prophesied about, that hide in caves to escape the judgement of God?
I hope not, but as I look at how easily I focus on the non essentials and turn a blind eye to the injustices in our world, I wonder. Who or what am I waiting for this Advent season?
Reflecting on that this morning brought to mind the two diagrams I have incorporated in this post and stirred me to write this prayer. I pray that I do wait for the God whose desire is for the fullness of shalom: a healed world and a redeemed humanity.
How long, O Lord must we wait
for your appearing?
Sick at heart I listen.
The cries for justice seem to go unheard.
Racism kills.
Walls to keep the strangers out.
Lets keep ebola in Africa.
When will you rend the heavens
and com down, O Lord.
We wait in this season of waiting,
But do we really want you to appear?
Where to begin? Perhaps with our neighbor Çiğdem in our entry. “Çok güzel bu beşik! Ama, Momi, neden burada?” Good question. Why would I have an old handmade cradle parked in a corner near the front door?
Or with Yasemin and Halil. As they pull on coats, Halil points to the wooden figures of Mary and Joseph and asks his daughter if she remembers the story I told them last year. They admire the cradle and I tell again how we wait in this season for Jesus to come. How we remember that He did come, and we look for Him to come again.
We discuss our varying Jesus traditions, and once in a while the heart question is asked: “So, Momi, what is the difference between the Muslim Jesus and the Christian?”
Or I could begin with my daughter Cait, who wonders how to care for friends in her choice to leave Santa out of her childrens’ world. Or with a first-time-pregnant friend who asks on FB how friends talk with their children about Santa and Jesus.
“And the Word became flesh, and made His dwelling among us.” (John 1:14) And angels sang and shepherds worshipped. And a star appeared and drew a few who could read the skies to a child in a manger to offer their riches.
This season loads of blogs and articles ponder ways to master the craziness, to find time to wait for and with Jesus in the midst of the commercialism and hyperactivity of modern Christmas traditions. I notice and wonder. Why don’t the writers and the readers just, well…stop?
But I can talk. I live on a Turkish hillside in a Mediterranean village where people have barely heard of Christmas. Before Çiğdem and I talked she thought “Noel” was the Western name for New Years, which is more and more marketed in commercial centers of the Middle East just as Christmas is in the West. Trees, gifts, lights, Santa–all of it. Except the Jesus part. Christmas traditions are a money maker.
I can talk, but I struggled with the same stuff. We did things to simplify and refocus, but always for me the space to appreciate the truth and wonder of Christmas began only after Christmas Day. After the gifts and the feasting and the social dos. Until we moved here. While some expats mourn the absence of the trappings of Christmas, I rejoice in the freedom to quietly watch and wait for Jesus.
Noel. Christmas. The incarnation of Jesus. In this locale where we are the only followers of Jesus, we are the incarnation. So we give thought and prayer to ways to communicate Jesus’ coming to our friends and neighbors. As well as to what might obscure Him. It’s the same question everywhere, but here we have a blank slate.
We keep it simple. A wooden nativity that children can handle. Mary and Joseph wait by the empty manger while shepherds watch their flocks in a “nearby field” across the room. The angels watch from on high, and the wise men are far away. Baby Jesus hides in a drawer until Christmas Day. A few lights strung on the balcony. Advent candles to mark the journey.
Last year I found this old cradle in a junk shop. It is handmade, amateurish. I fixed it up, prepared it for a babe, but left it empty. Through it we share about that simple family long ago. We tell how we wait for the One who will come as a babe. We put it in a corner of the entry. We tell about how the government required people to journey to their home places, and so the house was overfull with other visitors. But this pregnant couple was family, so a place was found and made as welcoming as the host could manage.
Simple. Making it natural for us to tell the good story. A prop that augments our limited language. Nothing showy to distract. Rich with context.
As always, if people are to experience our story, we must make them welcome, make space for them, too. So we invite, cook special food, and include friends, neighbors and strangers in our celebrations and our everydays. We offer love and delight whenever they can be here, desiring always that they will encounter Jesus, the source of that love and delight.
I love this. Which is not to say that I would not hang a wreath on the door and put up a pretty tree, or join the choir to sing the Messiah in another place. Where such things communicate goodness and truth and family and love. For this place and this time, though, I am grateful. And Jesus is here.
Today’s post is written by Jeri Bidinger who spends her days in the Mediterranean village of Gokseki just outside of Kas, Turkey. She and her husband Curt have created a contemplative retreat center there called Spa for the Soul. Jeri is a retired attorney, former BSF teaching leader and spiritual director. She posts from time to time at cracked old pots.
Every year my good friend Mark Pierson in New Zealand sends me his Advent in Art cards which I await with great anticipation. They are written for the spiritual nurture of World Vision staff in NZ, but Mark has given me permission to use them. I plan to post one each week for your enjoyment or you can sign up and visit Advent in art each week to view them there. Enjoy
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God (Isaiah 40:1)
Alexandra Bircken’s site-specific installation Deflated Bodies in the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield, forms part of her Eskalation 2014 exhibition. As Curator Eleanor Clayton says: “Five ladders run up the gallery walls, spanning eight metres to reach the sunlight spilling down from an unseen source. On the ladders are multiple figures, male and female, made of cloth sewn to real-person specifications and covered in black latex. The work is theatrical, presenting a scene that longs for a narrative.”
For me, transfixed and awe-struck by the raw power of this extraordinary piece of art, Advent is that narrative. The deflated figures and the ladders which beguile them express so immediately, so vividly and so accessibly the whole panorama of human folly, frailty and failure which the Advent texts speak out of and into with such clarity and conviction.
Take the following image as a starting point and ponder all those points of connection with the texts at the heart of Advent. Reflect on the heartfelt truth that it portrays.
This is how Advent always begins. In the place where everything seems lost; where the human condition is experienced at its most starkly bleak. It is only within this manger of dread, desolation and despair that Christmas makes sense. Only there can we feel its new born warmth for ourselves and cradle its living truth in our arms. Nowhere else. God invites us to journey into our darkness on the strength of a promise, daring to believe that the incarnation of love will become real in the wombspace of our fragile faith.
This is always a collective endeavour. In Advent we travel for ourselves and we travel for the sake of others, always these two held together as one redefining purpose. The dread, desolation and despair may not be our own this time around, but it will be somebody’s truth, somewhere very close and somewhere far away. Advent is the great collectiviser of God’s economy: our imagined separation from the desperate plight of others is destroyed by the inclusive ardour of the divine will which places the manger where we would be least inclined to welcome it as gift.
To me Deflated Bodies provides an holistic visualisation of the narrative trajectories of human being along which Advent leads us and into which Christmas speaks. Here are the people of the prophets. Here is all the agony, angst and ennui out of which the Old Testament gives testimony to God’s alternative world view and the passionate single-minded creativity with which God pursues it through people of faith. Here is all the deflated misery of the human soul.
Here too are the ladder-like temptations, false promises, misguided schemes and malevolent strategies which lead us astray and set us against each other. Here also is the politics of the ladder constructors which promises the world to everyone, yet delivers misery to the many. The 1% who climb to the top do so at the cost of the 99% who lie strewn in their wake, deflated, empty, and abandoned to their fate.
In the face of such injustice and harm the Bible prophetically kicks away the ladders and gives the lie to seductions of ladder climbing and ladder making. Seen through a biblical lens Alexandra Bircken’s Deflated Bodies portrays the horrific cost and the appalling waste of the thinking which blighted our world then and which continues to do so now. It makes plain all that God desires us to subvert and overthrow.
Looking at these deflated figures pitifully draped across the ladders and hanging forlorn from the rungs one is brought face to face with everything that breaks the heart of God. Here are the ones that Jesus came to save.
Here are the lost, damaged and dispirited ones who gathered around the manger on the strength of a promise.
And to those who have made it to the top, who sit aloof from the carnage below them, Advent brings them down to earth and challenges them to repent of the cost of their privilege and power and to recognise that they too are in fact deflated as people and diminished by every empty life that lies behind them on their way up.
No more should women and men, our sisters and brothers, hang limp and lifeless in our midst from the rungs of oppression and exploitation which God is always doing so much to tear down. This is the narrative of hope and life which takes shape in the darkness and which calls us to the heart of Christmas again. For our own sake and for the sake of others it is a journey we simply have to make. When the ladder climbing stops we are ready to gather around the manger.
Today’s post is contributed by David Perry, a Methodist minister in East Yorkshire in the U.K. A passionate photographer, he is keen to use visual imagery as a way of brining faith alive. He has recently published two new books, Quandary and looking up looking around and looking closely. He blogs at Visual Theology
Last week I started work on my Come to the Manger Advent wreath – more a reflective exercise than an art project but one that I am finding is bearing amazing fruit of redemption and healing.
Last week I set my family round the manger, thinking about all those in my immediate and distant family I want to stand with. I spent a lot of time reflecting on my father whom I originally left out of my photos. I reflected too on those who unexpected deaths still leave gaps in our lives, like Tom’s son Clint and his niece Eileen. I thought about my ancestors and those whose genetics and life journeys shaped me into the person I am. Gratitude welled up and overflowed.
This week I added my friends, those who have journeyed with me some for over 40 years, others whom I have only known for a short time. Others I have never met, like the many that contribute to this blog regularly from around the world – from South Africa, Argentina, Britain, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Lebanon, Canada and the U.S. So many who have encouraged and strengthened me in my journey. In the words of Becca Stevens in her contribution to A Journey Toward Home, redemption frees us from the traps that prevent us from loving God and these are the people who have helped redeem me and whom I have helped redeem.
In this first week of Advent I think in particular of those who have given me hope when life seemed hopeless, those who have believed in me when I could not believe in myself, those who have shone with God’s light when I lived in darkness. I think too of those for whom I have been light, and life. Together we draw close to the manger and stand with the Holy One of God.
The theme for this first week of Advent is hope and it is those who stand round the manger with us who so often give us hope. Who stands with you?
Take some time to reflect on the word hope. Who has given you hope when you felt hopeless? Who has provided light when you lived in darkness? Pause to bring to mind those who have stood with you and given you hope throughout your life journey. Visualize them standing with you around the manger. Offer prayers of gratitude and thanksgiving for them.
Now think about those for whom you have brought hope. Who stands with you because you have held their hands or helped healed their bodies? Offer prayers of gratitude and thanksgiving for them.
Lord you wait for us,
To come and see you.
You wait
to shine light where there is darkness.
to show love where there is hate.
to share peace where there is conflict.
to give hope where there is despair.
Lord you wait for us
To come and see you.
Let us gather round the manger,
to shine your light,
to show your love,
to share your peace,
to give your hope.
Let us come,
and remember what has been fulfilled.
Let us prepare for what must yet be done.
Let us come
to the One who waits to show us love.
Advent has begun. Some of us have decorated our Christmas trees and assembled our nativity sets. This year I have found it rather challenging. Kenneth Bailey’s imagery in Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, of Jesus born in the middle of a family home rather than a stable has caught my attention and I want to begin by inviting you too into a very crowded manger scene and asking you the question we will explore throughout this season: Who is welcome at your manger?
Kenneth Bailey explains, that the Greek word (katalyma or kataluma) translated as inn in Luke 2:7 does not mean a commercial building with rooms for travelers. It’s a guest space, typically the upper room of a common village home.
“A simple village home in the time of King David, up until the Second World War, in the Holy Land, had two rooms—one for guests, one for the family. The family room had an area, usually about four feet lower, for the family donkey, the family cow, and two or three sheep. They are brought in last thing at night and taken out and tied up in the courtyard first thing in the morning.
“Out of the stone floor of the living room, close to family animals, you dig mangers or make a small one out of wood for sheep. Jesus is clearly welcomed into a family home,” See the entire article here
It was to this simple village home that the shepherds and wise men alike came. Shepherds despised and regarded as unclean by their society, are visited by angels and invited to join the great home coming celebration that marks the coming of the child who will become the Messiah. That they were welcomed and not turned away from this home is remarkable. This is good news indeed for the outcast and the despised.
Then the wise men come, according to Bailey, rich men on camels, probably from Arabia. And they come not to the city of Jerusalem where the Jews thought God’s glory would shine, but to the child born in a manager around whom there is already a great light. The wise men come to find a new home, a new place of belonging that has beckoned to them across the world. This too is remarkable and good news for people of all nations who long for a place to call home.
The question that stirs in my mind which I have been talking about for the last couple of months is: Who is welcome at the manger? Who else do we invite to this celebration that may otherwise be ignored or excluded. Are the people from Ferguson there – both white and black, are the ebola victims, the people of Syria and Iraq, those who have been forced into prostitution and those who have violated them there? What about those in prison, people of other sexual persuasions, those of other religions, the homeless who find more and more cities shut them out? What about those from whom we are estranged? Do we think there is a place for everyone at the manger? If so how do we extend that invitation so that these people feel welcome?
When I invited you, a couple of months ago, to journey through Advent with us I mentioned that one of the reflections in our new devotional A Journey Toward Home, is on the French custom of santons:
Santons are, literally, “little saints.” Part of a typical French Nöel crèche (Christmas Nativity scene), santons come in work clothes to visit the Holy Family. They bring the Christ Child presents they have made or grown, hunted or sold. They perform or offer simple gestures of thoughtfulness…..
The shepherds summon all Provençal villagers. They bring their unique gifts to honor the newborn child: the baker (or his son) with typical Provençal breads like la banette and le pain Calendal (a round country loaf marked with a cross and baked only at Christmastime), the vegetable merchant, the cheese vendor, the basket maker, the wine grower, the humble woman or man who brings only a bundle of sticks for a fire to keep the baby warm.
A poor old man, who thinks he has nothing to give the Baby, holds his lantern and offers to light the way for others. His gift of thoughtfulness and courtesy earns him a place in the scene.
I love this idea of all our neighbours, those we enjoy and those we don’t want to have anything to do with, clustered around the manger, invited into that place of intimate hospitality with God. In the birth of Jesus we are called towards a new family and a new home. There are family and friends and animals. And special invitations by angels for the despised and rejected, and a star to guide the strangers and those who seem far off. The new family and the home envisioned in the birth of Jesus is inclusive of all who accept God’s invitation.
I hope that you will journey through Advent and Christmas with us as we create our own “santons”, santons of words not figures of clay as we imagine together some of the people gathered around the very crowded manger with us. Lets help others to see the embracing love of God for all of humankind in the birth of the child Jesus.
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