First Monday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Learning to be Curious
by Jenn Burnett
As I approach Christmas this year it is with a certain resignation. I want to plan. I want to be scrolling through advent liturgies for the kids to read Sunday mornings as our tiny church family joins to light the candles on the advent wreathe. I want to be planning a tobogganing or carolling event or a potluck dinner with warm apple cider and a house filled with chaos. I ache for the hustling to Christmas concerts and parties for my children and myself. I want to wake Christmas morning exhausted after so much celebratory anticipation. But this season has taught me about the futility of planning. I am an extrovert and every cell of my being craves large groups of people just as my lungs crave air. So this season of distance and isolation seems like a cruel punishment as if God has put me in a time out, to think about what I’ve done. And there is a gnawing ache in my heart.
Even in typing this, I catch myself. ‘I want. I want. I want’. There is this picture in my mind of how it should go, of how it would look if God intervened powerfully and just gave it all back. I hear this longing in the Psalmist’s voice. In a rather graphic description of the realities of the day, which absolutely dwarfs any loss I’m experiencing, the Psalmist paints a picture of death and desolation. These people were being crushed. Their lives snuffed out and fear infiltrating the hearts of leaders and peasants alike. The cry from the lips of the defeated, that echoed in the palace halls, ‘God won’t you take this personally? It is your people who are falling. Your people who are being left unburied. Your people whose blood is pouring out on the ground. So God, won’t you crush them back? Won’t you defeat our enemies and show them just how powerful you are? I want my big, powerful, military God to take point in this battle and role over my enemy, snuffing out their lives even as they lead an assault on us. Then they will know you are God! I hear the Psalmist cry out ‘This is what I want. This is how I want it.’ But is that how God’s Kingdom comes about?
The prophet Micah paints a picture of a future kingdom where the nations are drawn to the God of Jacob. They are not conquered enemies; they are voluntary pilgrims seeking God’s ways and justice. In fact, there is no longer any need for battle and what was once used for violence and destruction is refashioned for nurture and sowing and harvesting. In this future Kingdom there is enough for everyone. Trees and vines bearing fruit for each one. And perhaps most attractive of all there is no more fear. Oh how I yearn for that day—no more fear, no more anxiety.
Six months before the current pandemic spread to B.C., where I make my home, I developed crippling anxiety. It seemed like a relatively quick turn from coping, to no longer coping. While it’s difficult to pinpoint the precise stressor that pushed me too far, the persistent trigger was climate change news. I became addicted to ‘doom scrolling’ through how the physical world is coming undone. I would look at my children and my heart would beat too fast and I would start sweating thinking about their doomed future. I would look out my window in the morning expecting the heat to be too excruciating for survival. My body would frequently and easily shift into overdrive as if death—for all—were imminent. Everyday activities were nearly impossible because in each one I felt responsible for pushing us closer to the brink. Each new day I would cry out to God: ‘How should I prepare for this approaching doom?’ ‘Surely today is the day that all the visions of Revelation will be made manifest on the earth!’
But then I started therapy with a beautiful Christian counsellor. And I started on some medication. I did the long, slow, hard work of healing. I wasn’t miraculously healed in the instantaneous sense—though I count the fact that I’m functioning again as a miracle. No, I feel like Jesus pulled up a chair next to me and invited me to walk through the discomfort. I did a lot of homework about mental health, algorithms, the climate and end times. Enough that by the time a global pandemic hit, along with many other global challenges, I had a few answers to offer people who were unfortunately becoming familiar with my anxious ways. Perhaps one of the most useful attitudes I learned to adopt was one of curiosity. Instead of fear, I am learning to be curious.
In the reading from Revelation there is a victory scene where a fiery enemy seems to be at the bottom of a glassy sea. There are plagues dispersed by angels on the earth (great—more talk of plagues!) as the penultimate display of God’s wrath. Such images would have sent me into meltdown not too long ago. But instead, now, I am curious. When the people of God were expecting a war hero, a baby was born to a peasant girl. When the people of God were looking for a political champion to break off the oppression of an occupying nation, they got a broken body on the cross. What was apparently insignificant on the earth, was transforming the eternal balance of power. So when I read about the wrath of God, I remind myself that God’s wrath is, and always has been directed at the sin that entangles the beloved creation. That God acts to reveal God’s self to the world—to reveal God’s love for those in the world. And that while the throne room of God may be filled with action, on earth, that Kingdom has a history of breaking through on the margins. In the least predictable of places.
So I wait with curiosity for how God will show up. I try to lay aside how I want things to look—for me, for my family, for the world and instead be open. It is there in that crack of openness nurtured by curiosity where hope is able to break in, like light slipping under a closed door. This Christmas can’t be planned, or controlled, but the Kingdom of God, peace and glory might just break in anyway.
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