“The Advent Miracle—was that this unknowable, un-nameable, utterly holy Lord chose out of his own free will and out of love to become known: to bear a name and meet us where we are.”
Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word, pg. 71
We are nearing the end of our Advent journey. If you have been meditating over the words of Advent with me this season, I hope that God has been meeting you in very tangible ways. Guite says that God meets a particular people in particular places and from these small encounters he changes everything. My prayer has been that you have had these small encounters and that through them your world is changing from the inside out.
Final Advent Reflection
The nearer we approach the coming of Christ we recognize his swaddling as our former sackcloths of mourning and darkness shed to warm his new earthly form. We exchange our burdens and anticipation for ‘Great Joy’. He falls from glory to shine light into our bleak and hopeless reality.
This Advent I am struck by the ‘Immensity, cloister’d in a womb‘ (Donne), the ‘audacious mystery‘ of a ‘tribal God who dared to be so, dared to come out of the invulnerable realm of ideas and into the bloody theatre of history, that he might change and redeem it from within.’ (Guite)
I write this post to hasten you toward one final week of reflecting on the nature of God dwelling among us and the propensity of what this means for us created beings before rushing into Christmas cheer and festivity.
Rooted into Flesh
From the stump of Jesse, a shoot will emerge. Out of wood, rot, and decay life burst forth. From the line of Israel, a rebellious and stiff-necked people, a savior will be born within their disobedient genes. Rooted and grounded in historical myth, a rather outrageous story to our small and earth-bound minds, a rather unproportionate miracle happens within our time and space, our present reality. The I Am, the everything, the omniscient one becomes blood, cells, and genetic material inside a womb. We can not fully fathom the magnitude of this act of love, sacrifice, or humility, yet I urge to sit with this notion. The Creator becoming the created, sized-down, made small, made flesh, made fragile, made to nurse, to fall, to misstep, to lose, to hurt, to suffer, to serve, to feel. There is no greater love than this.
For Love’s Sake
How and why would Adonai, Lord, whose name could once not be spoken, whose holiness could not be seen, whose face hidden, whose ground too holy to walk upon, come to be with us, to live among our denial, self-loathing, control, injustice, folly and hate if not for Love, Divine Love?
And that is precisely what Love did. God embedded himself into the very fabric of what it means to be human; limited, bound, and finite. Redemption happens from within, which is why he had to be born by grafting himself into our core framework, the flesh of our flesh. By dwelling among us, becoming like us, in death he would be able to indwell us in order to transform us from the inside out.
As I have been reflecting on this ardent love over Advent, I find myself grieved that in-spite of this unprecedented act of Love, we remain a despondent people choosing lesser loves, lesser acts of justice, and lesser paths of life. For some reason, we still mourn and grieve and long for change even though Emmanuel has come as boldly as possible to our turf, in our time, in our bodily form, and made those things attainable. Yet we refuse to see, hear, or approach the One that has made our way out of suffering. Though he’s come down to our level, instead of running to him shouting, ‘you are the one who I have been longing,’ we deny Him what he desires most– the reception of his humble, sacrificial, love-driven reign and ability as Lord of Lord and King of Kings to fulfill all our desires and reconcile all that has gone amiss past, present, and forever. I am grieved at how broken Adonai must feel knowing he gave all to be with us and we are a people who laugh, spit, mock and shun him from our lives because we rather love ourselves and our way more than surrender to this glory-abandoning Divine Love. It is hard to determine the greater absurdity.
Love that Loves to Wait
Yet…God would do it again and again without fear of rejected affection because he offers a Divine Love that never ceases, never gives up, and suffers through all torment of waiting just for you and for those who cease or refuse to acknowledge the immensity of his Love. Who else could ever offer this type of Love to anyone? At the end of our Advent journey, we enter the manger and come face-to-face with Divine, absurd, and unreserved Love who dwells inside flesh for our sake and is reaching out his tiny hand to you, to touch you. No other God, no other way is better than this. He will continue to wait for all of those he loves, he’s in no rush, and until then we too will wait because he won’t return until his children take his hand and melt into his Great Love.
This last week of Advent, I pray you will know the deep love God has for you and the world as you recall the story of Christ’s birth. I hope you will see yourself before him in the manger and feel the magnitude of having the God of everything reaching out his fingers to touch you in the flesh, to be with you, to know you and be known by you. There truly is no greater gift and I hope this will compel you to live fully into this great love story and invite others to experience it too.
This Advent I have been reading, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, so many of my reflections have come from the Advent Words Journaling and this book. Click on the image to learn about Malcolm Guite, this book, and his soul-searching poetry.
