Bearing the Joy-Light
Today’s post is by Kimberlee Conway Ireton. Kimberlee is the mother of four children, an avid reader, and the author of The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year and a recently released memoir, Cracking Up: A Postpartum Faith Crisis. She and her family worship at Bethany Presbyterian Church in Seattle.
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.”—Luke 1:46-49
The watchword for this third week of Advent is “rejoice,” and it is connected with Mary whose “soul doth magnify the Lord” (Luke 1:46 KJV). This week also has a different color than the other weeks of Advent: pink, for joy.
Mary’s words and the change in liturgical colors remind us that this time of waiting and preparation is a joyful time, that even in the midst of fasting and repentance we can know joy because, as Mary sang in the Magnificat, “God has done great things for [us].”
In my Protestant upbringing, Mary was simply a Jewish peasant girl who was the mother of Jesus. I’ve since learned that Catholic and Orthodox Christians have a much richer and more symbolic understanding of Mary. They call her theotokos, Mother of God, God-bearer. She is the symbol of humanity itself, fallen but willingly entering into a restored relationship with God through her “yes” to the angel’s proclamation that she would be the mother of the Messiah.
By bearing in her womb the Son of God, she makes possible the Incarnation and, thus, later, the crucifixion and Resurrection. In so doing, she turns the mourning of our fallenness into the rejoicing of our redemption. It is God who does these great things, to be sure, as Mary herself proclaims, but how great a God we serve, that he would allow us, invite us, long for us to participate in his redeeming work in the world.
For one friend of mine, the annual sending of a Christmas letter is a way she reflects on the past year, noticing with joy (and sometimes surprise) the ways God has been present and faithful in her life and also the ways she has been able to be part of God’s work in her corner of the world. Receiving this annual missive, I rejoice with my friend in the great things God is doing in her and through her.
During Advent, we are to be like my friend, joyfully aware of the presence of God in our lives. And like Mary, we are to wait actively, joyfully, and expectantly for the new life that has been, is being, and will be born into the world. Also like Mary, we are to be agents of this birthing.
We are to bear the Joy-Light of the world into the world.
—an edited excerpt from The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year
Bio
Today’s post is by Kimberlee Conway Ireton. Kimberlee is the mother of four children, an avid reader, and the author of The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year and a recently released memoir, Cracking Up: A Postpartum Faith Crisis. She and her family worship at Bethany Presbyterian Church in Seattle.
good samaritan – van gogh
Last week my Advent post revolved around the question Is There Room For Jesus to Find a Home in Our Hearts. This week I want us to think about how comfortable we might feel in the kingdom of God.
The final coming to which Advent points us is the coming of Christ and his kingdom of justice righteousness and abundance for all at the end of time. This is meant to be a deep longing that whets our souls for the coming in all its fullness of the eternal world of God for which we should strive with every breath.
But how comfortable will we be in the kingdom? N.T. Wright says that the language of the kingdom is love. I think it is not just the language, it is the culture. It permeates everything that happens in God’s eternal world. It is more than the words we speak. It is what fires our imagination. In the words of this prayer by Father Pedro Arrupe is determines what we do with our time what breaks our hearts and what gives us joy.
Jesus frequently tells his disciples to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbours as yourself.” Do this and we will accomplish all that the prophets and the law asks of us. James calls this the royal law.
I have spent many years travelling in countries not my own, feeling uncomfortable in the culture, unable to understand the language. It is hard. I suspect that for many of us the kingdom of God will be just as uncomfortable a home as these foreign lands have initially been for me.
Unfortunately I have never become proficient in any language other than English primarily because I was rarely in a country long enough to immerse myself in the language, learn the words and put them into practice.
So how do we learn the language and culture of God’s world? How do be learn to be comfortable in the kingdom for which we long with every breath?
First we learn to speak the language of love and the place that we learn it is in the place of prayer. As I say in my book Return to Our Senses,
I imagine prayer as any process that draws us toward God and God’s new kingdom where we walk, talk and commune with our loving God in a place of abundance and peace and harmony for all. I imagine prayer as a new way of looking and listening and interacting with the world so that we are constantly uncovering the love of God which shines through every moment and enlivens every creature (p5)
Then we need to practice the language.
Paul begins his great discourse on love by saying “let me show you the way of life that is best of all (1 Cor 12:31). Learning to practice love both for God and for our neighbours in every moment of the day is the best life any of us can attain to. It is the only way to truly connect our hearts to the heart of God and discover that intimacy which all of us crave. (p44)
Probably the most wonderful example of someone who came to find his home in the kingdom and live in its culture while he was here on earth is the apostle John. He walked more closely with Jesus than anyone. He must have immersed himself in kingdom ways as he watched and talked to his beloved friend. He began life as a son of thunder which means he probably had a volatile temper. He became the apostle of love. His letters provide wonderful glimpses into what that culture looks like and he tells us:
We know what real love is because jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters. If someone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need but shows no compassion-how can God’s love be in that person? Dear children, let’s not merely say we love each other; let us show the truth by our actions. (1 John 3:16, 17).
And if you are looking for a more contemporary role model, Nelson Mandela is someone to emulate. Acting from love rather than hate he transformed his country.
We will not find a comfortable home in God’s kingdom unless we practice its ways now – learning to speak its language, learning to act according to its customs, becoming passionate about justice, healing and caring. Committing our lives to overcome oppression, share with those who are destitute, or hungry, caring for the creation that is God’s loving gift to us. The evidence is that this is why the early church grew so rapidly. Not just because it talked about love but because it practiced it in an outrageous, revolutionary way.
This is the life towards which the advent of Christ beckons and challenges us. Will you make God’s kingdom ways your ways? What new commitments could you make in the coming year to see the culture of God’s kingdom enter our world and touch the lives of those around you?
Story by Mary September- Music by Tracy Howe Wispelwey, In Mansions and Church of the Beloved
- Reflection by Rev. Karen Ward, All Souls Episcopal Church, Portland, OR
- Meditation by Christine Sine, Mustard Seed Associates
- Produced by Ryan Marsh, Church of the Beloved, Edmonds WA
Listen to Mary September reflect on the pain of separation from her family and home. Join Karen Ward in her reflections on Advent and Tracy Howe Wispelwey’s beautiful song. The closing meditation comes from Waiting for the Light: An Advent Devotional.
Or right click this link and save to your computer Advent Podcast Week Three
Join us each day this week as we continue to reflect on the theme Coming Home
Ponder with us: Where would you like to see Christ born in your neighbourhood and in your life this week?
This is the third of four Advent podcasts produced by Ryan Marsh of Church of the Beloved for the Godspace blog.
If you missed the first podcast you can listen to it here and you can find the second podcast here
You may also like to check out this Advent Mediation Video Coming Home to the Story of God
And if you would like to reflect on the daily posts from the first two weeks of Advent you can do so here:
- Stable, Inn or Welcoming Home, Where Was Jesus Born and Why Does it Matter?
- Peace Dancing by Esther Hizsa
- Mary and Mindfulness by Kristin Carroccino
- Advent is All About Light by Kate Kennington Steer
- A Summertime Advent by David Bayne
- Pancha Rathas by Amanda Geers
- Is there Room for Jesus to Find a Home in My Heart – Christine Sine
- Wait, Hope, See by Kimberlee Conway Ireton
- Tis the Season of Joy or is It – Christine Sine
- Coming Home by Alex Tang
- Finding Home and Homes by Lynne Baab
- What is the Future You Want to Come Home to by Tom Sine?
- Where’s Home by Andy Wade
Those who are just starting to follow this series may like to watch our Advent meditation video too.
And don’t forget our other Mustard Seed resources including these beautiful prayer cards that we have put together. Your purchase of these resources is one way to help support the Godspace blog and the ministry of Mustard Seed Associates.
We hope that you will join us next week and the following for our fourth and last podcast.
Week Four of Coming Home
- Story by Mustard Seed House
- Music by Lacey Brown, In Mansions and Church of the Beloved
- Reflection by Tom Sine, Mustard Seed Associates
- Meditation by Christine Sine, Mustard Seed Associates
- Produced by Ryan Marsh, Church of the Beloved
Intense Training
The liturgy of Advent…helps us to understand the fullness of the value and meaning of the mystery of Christmas.
It is not just about commemorating the historical event, which occurred some 2,000 years ago in a little village of Judea. Instead, we must understand that our whole life should be an “advent,” in vigilant expectation of Christ’s final coming.
To prepare our hearts to welcome the Lord, who, as we say in the Creed, will come one day to judge the living and the dead, we must learn to recognize his presence in the events of daily life. Advent is then a period of intense training that directs us decisively to the One who has already come, who will come, and who continuously comes.
—Pope John Paul II
I encourage you to look for Jesus today, friends—and tell it on the mountain (or maybe just in the comments) when you see Him.
Photos by >Kimberlee Conway Ireton
– Andy Wade –
Where’s home? Our theme for this Advent is “Coming Home: Uncovering Our Roots in the Advent Story”, but what if you don’t know where home is? I was thinking about a family friend who recently wandered off from home. She has Alzheimers and, for whatever reason, decided to take a walk by herself. Unable to find her way home, she spent the night outside, cold, alone, afraid.
Search teams went door to door that night looking for her. They searched all night along the many local trails and paths until she was finally found the following morning. Fortunately it was summer and the nights were not too cool.
I’ve been thinking about this incident as I’ve reflected on our theme.
Christine speaks of three “comings” in Advent:
- Jesus’ first coming over 2000 years ago
- Jesus’ coming to us today as Emmanuel, God with us, and
- Jesus’ coming again, our anticipation of his return when all things will be made whole.
But here again I wondered, “What if we don’t know where ‘home’ is?”
Advent reminds us clearly of all three of these homecomings, but often we get distracted, disoriented, disconnected. In fact, it’s easy to focus solely on Jesus’ coming as a baby in a manger at Christmas and forget his very real presence with us today… and the future coming we ache for. Like my family friend, we end up wandering trails that seem familiar and yet, try as we might, we can’t seem to find home.
On a personal level, I’m challenged to ask myself:
- Which coming makes me most uncomfortable? Why?
- Which coming do I find most difficult to live into, to express in action and/or to share with others? Why?
These are all very important questions as they challenge me to explore my own assumptions about who Jesus is and why I choose to follow. They also expose my own prejudices about Jesus and might just cause me to re-read the “Christmas Story” with new eyes.
Coming home also has another side
As my friend huddled in the cool night air, she was not really alone. The whole community had mobilized to find her. And this is the other side of the Christmas Story: God became flesh to seek us out, and then called us to embody this love for others. Homecoming assumes community, and the community of Jesus is one that, compelled by love and grace, is ever-expanding:
Scripture reassures us, “No one who trusts God like this—heart and soul—will ever regret it.” It’s exactly the same no matter what a person’s religious background may be: the same God for all of us, acting in the same incredibly generous way to everyone who calls out for help. “Everyone who calls, ‘Help, God!’ gets help.” (Rom. 10:11-13 – Message)
But how can people call for help if they don’t know who to trust? And how can they know who to trust if they haven’t heard of the One who can be trusted? And how can they hear if nobody tells them? And how is anyone going to tell them, unless someone is sent to do it? That’s why Scripture exclaims, A sight to take your breath away! Grand processions of people telling all the good things of God! Romans 10:11-15 (The Message)
So as I consider what it means to come home this Advent season, to “rediscover my roots in the Advent story”, I’m reminded that those roots grow both deep and wide. In fact, I discover that I really cannot come home, not as Jesus calls me to, unless I’m traveling that path home with others, as sojourners both to, and with, Christ.
What do I long for as I “Come Home” through the Advent story?
- I long to come home to a God who loves me, loves us, love the whole creation, so much that God would lay it all aside, become Emmanuel, and embrace us where we are, as we are.
- I long to come home to a God who does not abandon us, but is Emmanuel right here, right now, and calls us, as God’s holy community, to become emmanuel to our neighbors.
- And I long to come home to God’s future; all things reconciled to Christ (Col. 1:19-20), made whole, at peace, cradled in the grace and love of God.
How about you?
Ready for Advent II feast
What is the future you want to come home to?
Tom Sine
During the season of Advent I suspect most of us can call up some of our very best memories of coming home to a place of festivity and welcome by those who love us. Unfortunately that is not true for everyone.
I just came back from the bank on a beautiful brisk sunny day. For the first time I sensed that the teller, I will call Tamara, was troubled. She told me today that she is from Syria. Tamara, with evident concern, admitted that she is not sure if her parents are safe or not. I left the bank with a sinking feeling that she has no idea if she will ever come home again or if her parents will survive the ongoing violence.
As we celebrate Advent 2013 there are over 2 million Syrians who are not only refugees but many of them are at risk because of the ongoing war. At least 600,000 Filipinos are homeless this Christmas and countries all over the world are rushing to their aid. 172.000 Haitians are still in temporary shelters after the earthquake that destroyed their homes some time ago. Finally, there are still around 1.5 million Palestinians living in 58 refugee camps on the West Bank, Gaza, Jordon, Lebanon and other countries in the region for decades that have little hope of coming home.
As followers of Jesus how we respond to the urgent needs of our many homeless neighbors will be determined in part by notions of the future we believe Jesus invites us to come home to.
I was not raised in the church. I was converted into an evangelical faith. I was taught that coming home to God’s eternal world was all about my disembodied spirit going up to a non-material world in the clouds. Many people nurtured in this faith are still singing a song that I believe has more to do with the writings of Plato than the teachings of Jesus….”This world is not my home… I am just a passing through.”
Doesn’t popular eschatological literature of escape invite us to imagine going up at the rapture… leaving our clothes behind on airplane seats and leaving all the suffering behind? My first concern with this view of God’s purposes for the human future is that I am convinced it isn’t biblical. My second concern is that people who hold this view often seem to have very little concern for those that are left behind or even for the urgent needs that fill our world today.
Don’t most of the songs that Christians sing about coming home seem to be about us going up instead of Jesus coming down? We urgently need song writers to help us find some new images about coming home to this good world being restored and not destroyed.
In Surprised by Hope NT Wright invites us to re-discover a biblical vision of coming home that is not to a disembodied existence in the clouds. Instead he reminds us that the scripture teaches that that Jesus is coming down, the New Jerusalem is coming down…we are not going up. He argues convincingly from 1st Corinthians 15 that we will come home to a restored creation as a great bodily resurrected intercultural community…real bodies but different bodies just like our risen Leader.
One cannot read the Gospels or the prophets without realizing that God’s loving purposes are not just about changing us spiritually… as important as that is. God in Christ intends to make all things new. I am looking forward to coming home to a future in which the blind see, the deaf hear and lame run. I am looking forward to coming home to a future in which the broken are healed and all the refugees find their way home. I look forward to a future in which justice finally comes for the poor and oppressed and peace comes to the nations. I look forward to coming home to a future in which God’s good creation isn’t destroyed but restored with great celebration.
So Advent for me is always a great celebration of our best memories of coming home. But it is also an anticipatory celebration of the return of Christ when all things are finally made new.
Can I suggest this is not only a season of anticipation and celebration but a season of calling. Aren’t we called during this season of Advent to follow Jesus by making God’s purposes our purposes? Aren’t we called not to seek life but to lose life in service to God and others? Shouldn’t we as followers of Jesus to recommit our lives to God’s loving purposes for a people and a world?
I come to this season looking forward to Christine and I cooking and celebrating with friends old and new. It is my favorite season of the year. I am already planning the meals I plan to prepare.
But this year I feel nudged to find an intentional way to be a bit of God’s good news in my community every week. I made a call before I wrote this blog post to find a place I can make a little difference locally.
How is God inviting you during this season of Advent to not only celebrate the great homecoming but also to give expression to it in your neighborhood or God’s larger world?
Let us hear how you plan to both celebrate God’s great homecoming and seek to more actively advance it where you live.
Have a great celebration of Advent as homecoming with those you love.
Tom Sine is research guy at Mustard Seed Associates and hospitality guy at the Mustard Seed house. He has worked for many years as a consultant in futures research and planning for both Christian and secular organizations. His latest book is The New Conspirators
Today’s post is written by Lynne M Baab. Lynne is the author of numerous books on Christian spiritual practices, including Sabbath Keeping,Fasting, and Joy Together: Spiritual Practices for Your Congregation. She teaches pastoral theology in New Zealand. Her website has numerous articles she’s written about spiritual practices, as well as information about her books.
“Home” has been a hugely contested, even painful, term for me. My father was an air force pilot and we moved 12 times in my first 15 years. We spent five of those years in Europe. I’ve never felt at home in the U.S., and I have never really felt at home anywhere. The word “home” has often made me feel uneasy and sad. My husband, who lived in one small town from birth until high school graduation, would often say to me, “Our true home is in heaven.” I can give cognitive assent to that truth, but somehow it never helped me.
All this began to change in early 2011 when I read Crossings and Dwellings: A Theory of Religion. In it, Thomas A. Tweed argues that religion helps us create homes in four arenas: our bodies, the house we live in, our country, and the cosmos. He also says that religion helps us move between these homes.
My first personal response to Tweed’s theory was focused on my body. I’ve struggled with weight all my life and have often felt as if my body betrays me by wanting foods that are not good for me. In recent years my weight has been more stable and closer to normal, and I have become more “at home” in my body. While reading Crossings and Dwellings, I began to see that the first “home” I need to nurture is my own body. And I could see ways I’d done that in recent years, without using that language to describe it.
Advent is a great time to think about feeling at home in our bodies. Of course we know that God made our bodies, but that can feel a bit distant. God, way off in heaven, made this earth and each of us. The coming of Christ tells us that God is not far off in heaven but right here with us. In fact, God is right here with us in Jesus, who lived in a physical body just as we do. The New Testament gives us no hint that Jesus felt estranged from his body in any way. Instead, he seems to have felt at home in his body and this physical world, just as he felt at home in heaven and longed to return there.
The second personal application of Tweed’s theory came later in 2011 when I had a six-month sabbatical from my teaching position in New Zealand. I split that time between Seattle, where I spent 30 years of my adult life, and Europe, where I had spent time in childhood. In those months of moving between past places where I’d lived, I realized that I have several homes, and that’s okay. Seattle will always feel like home in one sense because I lived there longest. But my current hometown Dunedin, New Zealand, is wonderful, and I love many things about my house, my town and my adopted country. Dunedin feels like home now, in a way it didn’t before 2011. And a part of my sense of earthly home will always be in Europe because of my childhood there.
For the first time in my life, in 2011 I felt at home in all these places, rather than feeling at home in none of them. My faith in God, who became flesh and lived on this earth, enables me to move between homes because Jesus through the Holy Spirit is present in all my homes. Because the Holy Spirit dwells inside me, and because my body is the home that I take with me wherever I go, God is present with me in every place creating a home for me. But actually, God is present in those places before I get there and after I leave. I can watch for his fingerprints everywhere I go, and he will enable me to feel at home there.
Immanuel, God with us, who we anticipate throughout Advent and celebrate at Christmas, has changed my life in the past three years by helping me begin to feel at home in my body and by enabling me to experience various places as homes. My husband is right that our true home is in heaven, but in Advent we remember that Jesus brought that true home to earth in his flesh, and we are invited to dwell with him and let him dwell with us, truly at home in him, in our bodies, and in our houses and homelands.
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