Poem: How It Ends by Ana Lisa de Jong

At the middle of the first week of Advent, it's time for an Advent poem! One of the primary reasons I began this blog so many years ago was to share the Advent/Christmas poetry of one of my favorite authors, Madeleine L'Engle. My sharing of poems has waned, but I always on the look out for a meaningful poem that can speak the words my heart feels.

So here is today's poem:

How It Ends 

by Ana Lisa de Jong 

We are stories within a story.
Narratives within the larger Word.
Even while we question meaning or reason,
we have comfort in knowing how it ends.

More than players on a stage,
we have our own self-determination.
We are safe to make decisions and choices,
within the provision of an all-encompassing plan.

Advent reminds us of the eternal story,
in which life and death take turns,
in entering from the wings.
And nothing in this world is ever final

while the Word has the enduring say.

We are stories within a story.
Narratives within the larger Word.
Even while we wonder at the purpose of our griefs,
with relief we keep our trust in joy’s return.

For Advent teaches us the story within the story.
The larger volume and the smallest detail contained.
Held together in a great unfolding scroll
by hands that reach from beginning to end.

Advent recalls to us the gift of waiting.
The treasure held close to Mary’s breast.
The heart already leaps for what isn’t yet,
this comfort is knowing how it ends.

The hope in which we, waiting,
place our faith.
The trust in what we know
has been conceived.

 

 

Creator and Created

This week I began a new job at a new library branch, and it’s been hard. I don’t do well with change, and this new location is all sorts of different.

There are a lot of semi-religious platitudes that could be spoken into my experience. But instead, I am trying to think of something in the Nativity story that could speak to into this struggle. We are in the middle of Advent, after all.

I could write about Mary and how radically different her life became after the angel Gabriel appeared to her. Or Zechariah, having to completely shift the way he communicated for nine months, not knowing if and when he would be delivered from his muteness. I might even think on Jesus, experiencing a new identity as a human baby after inhabiting the expanse of the heavens.

But I think what I want to focus on is the life-giving thing that I’ve found in the midst of feeling unsettled.

The first day at my new branch I unintentionally began working on a holiday display about an hour and a half before closing. It was a simple and cute sign with a reindeer in the middle. It turns out, I really needed those minutes of designing and arranging, cutting and pasting. I left feeling like things could be okay. All because I allowed my brain to engage in something creative. To build and shape and imagine.

Today when that hour and a half time rolled around, I intentionally began working on a new bulletin board. Taping and stapling, cutting, and arranging. One of the after-school kids even came over and asked if I needed help. So I put him to work taping up the winter trees I had just made.

How does this connect to the Advent narrative?

I think it’s the whole point. God began work on an intricate and highly creative story when He decided (long ago back in the Garden) to send a Redeemer to save His people. Every step of the way was something completely new that God had never done before. From Abraham to David, from Solomon to Josiah, from Jechoniah to Joseph. Unheard of promises, unique leading characters, strange means and methods, the rise and fall of empires, circumstances no one could have imagined, the miraculous and the mundane. All so that the Son would arrive in a manger in Bethlehem.

I don’t think it was an accident that Jesus’ earthly father was a carpenter. Jesus spent the first 30-ish years of his life on Earth learning and creating, working with his hands. And when His ministry began, He plied that same sense of creativity, originality, and joy in everything He said and did. The Word made flesh, Creator, Teacher, Mediator, the Bright and Morning Star, the image of the invisible God, the Way, the Truth and the Life, Immanuel.

To say we serve a creative God is an understatement. How much can we learn from Creator in the flesh?

In her book, Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren quotes from English author and teacher, Francis Spufford and then goes on to say:

“’We don't have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story.’ This is why, no matter what we claim to believe or disbelieve, what rises to the surface in our most vulnerable moments is inevitably the story on which we build our lives” (p. 88).

We are weak and vulnerable every day, some moments worse than others. But we are also creative beings, formed by a Creator God, saved by the Firstborn of all Creation. That is our story.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
- Colossians 1:15-17

 

 

The Door Called Bethlehem

Waiting. Holy discontent. Longing. These are gifts from God. They draw us away from ourselves, towards the open hands of a good and patient God. Like Narnia’s Aslan, our God is not “tame,” to be controlled at our will. But he is good. A goodness that seeps deeper into human hearts and minds than we will ever know.

Writer and theologian Frederick Buechner writes,

“For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning—not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.”
(from The Magnificent Defeat)

Everything about the Christmas story has been leading up to Bethlehem:

Prophets foretold.

Zechariah silenced.

Joseph proposed.

Mary agreed.

Angels announced.

Mary traveled.

Baby leaped.

Elizabeth exclaimed.

Mary sang.

John arrived.

Zechariah prophesized.

Caesar decreed.

Donkey trotted.

Star shone.

Wise men saw.

King angered.

Mary delivered.

Jesus swaddled.

Angels sang.

Shepherds heard.

Wise Men gave.

Shepherds told.

And that’s pretty much what happened in and around Bethlehem when Christ was born. How many centuries had Israel been waiting for such a thing to come true? What did the nativity scene look like the next morning? And the morning after that?

What happens when what we’ve been waiting for finally arrives?

I’m grateful for Buechner’s thoughts because I find myself wondering these very things. Everything changed. But was anything really different?

As we receive God’s promises, both large and small, Bethlehem is the door through which we walk. It appears like the end goal, but it is just the beginning. The beginning of a new chapter with our God at the helm.

For the people of Israel, it was an open door to what would become the New Covenant. And those who faithfully walked through it had a front-row seat to the greatest story ever told. Like all of us sinners, many in Jesus’ inner circle  had times of doubt; times of fear. Many wondered if they had chosen the right door.

Without letting this metaphor run too long, the story of Christ’s birth cannot and should never be the end of Christ’s impact on our lives. With all its depth and joy, it will never be enough to satisfy eternal yearning God has placed in our hearts. It can only whet our desire for more. It re-ignites in us a longing for the completion of God’s story. 

So this Christmas, let the manger scene in Bethlehem be our door, leading to a path filled with holy longing for our eternal home. For, as C.S. Lewis once said,

"If I find in myself desires which nothing in this word can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world."
(from Mere Christianity).

Waiting in Bethlehem

 I think Bethlehem was full of waiters that star-bright night. It is not clear from Scripture if Caesar’s great census had already begun, was on-going, or yet to come. Maybe the travelers had to establish residency before they could be counted. Maybe the Bethlehemites had finished registering and were waiting for all the crowds to disperse. Maybe everyone was standing around, waiting in line. Mary was certainly waiting for the pangs of labor to begin, and her child to be born.

I read two blogs this week that spoke a lot about waiting. I want to share an excerpt from both of them here. Waiting is a topic I yearn to understand more. It fills my thoughts and prayers. But the waiting of Advent is a little different, it allows me to take a step back from my own preoccupations and consider how God has used waiting to form the Greatest Story, a story both relevant-to and bigger-than any of us.

In reflecting about this season of Advent, Kari Bauman, from Through a Glass, Darkly, says:

“I have wrestled with my misfit tendencies and begun to carve out a place for myself. I have wrestled with the Bible and discovered a new love for the story it tells. I have wrestled with God and found a new peace in my faith. This is my favorite story, the Incarnation. Every year, over and over, again and one more time we return to it.”

http://throughaglass.net/archives/2012/12/22/advent-iv-change-again-and-one-more-time/

Prior to this, she says

“We talk about the expectant kind of waiting during Advent, but it also seems like a fitting time to acknowledge that a lot of times we don’t know what we are waiting for or how long it might take to come to pass. One of those ways we pass the time is to tell our stories, to remind ourselves of where we have been even as we cannot know where the path ahead is taking us.”

http://throughaglass.net/archives/2012/12/12/advent-ii-waiting/

Advent helps us practice the discipline of setting up pillars to remind us of what has come before. But it also provides a sacred time to point us to Jesus’ return. Betsy Childs Howard, author of Seasons of Waiting, describes it this way:

“Advent is about more than waiting for Christmas. The word “advent” means “coming.” During Advent, we not only remember that Jesus came to earth as a man; we prepare our hearts for his second coming. When we sing, “O come, O come, Emmanuel,” we are not role-playing what the ancient Israelites must have prayed before the coming of the Messiah. No, we are praying that Emmanuel would return and make right all that is wrong with the world. When we sing, “Let every heart prepare him room,” we are not retroactively chastising the innkeepers of Bethlehem; we are preaching to all of the souls within earshot to be ready to meet their Judge and Maker unafraid.

If your heart is heavier than you’d like this Advent season, take hope that the joys of Christmas aren’t ultimately what you wait for. The very best Christmas—one in which every family member sits around the table, speaks sweetly to everyone else, and prefers giving to receiving—is a pale shadow of the rejoicing to come. Let the fact that your heart aches point you beyond Christmas to the better celebration still to come. Join with the voices of Christians around the world, who together pray, ‘O come, O come, Emmanuel.’”

https://www.crossway.org/blog/2016/11/how-advent-teaches-us-to-wait-well/  

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel is one of my favorite Christmas hymns. It is rich in theology, deeply meaningful for Advent, and best of all, it is a prayer. A prayer to guide us, through whatever season of waiting we are in.