Third Sunday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
The Joy of Tear-Soaked Soil
I am a neighbourhood pastor. Some days I am not sure what that means. Pastors who see their pulpit as their home base have a focus for their week. They know what to get on about. Other pastors who see their programs and leadership as their passion have their work before them. They know what to get on about. While I teach, preach, and plan, my touchpoint is my neighbourhood, and my neighbourhood is tentative - the mom with the stroller, the dad who is back from working up north for weeks at a time, the teens who gather around their smart phones waiting for the bus. These people make me a neighbourhood pastor. My work is not to nail them down and figure them out. My work is to attend to their stories.
Their pain, fears, and anxieties often make up the soil of their lives. This is the growing medium where they set to seed something in the hope that it will grow. They intend for something good, but too often are met with bitterness. One neighbour told me that he is just unlucky. Every red light that catches him solidly reinforces the fact that he was born to get the short end of every stick. He expects only bad will follow him around, it is his lot in life. Another neighbour told me about all the divorces in our community, a sign that COVID-19 is the year of relational loss. Divorce is the straw that broke the back of the frail hope that many had before the pandemic.
Several neighbours have said to me over the years that they simply cannot believe in God because the world is too hard, too sad, too evil and too broken. I agree with them. The world is not the Good Green Garden of peace and love that we deeply believe and hope it could be. Because I am a neighbourhood pastor, I do not offer a program, three step plan, or trite phrase to smooth over the pain of these neighbours. How could I? The pain is real and the sense of sorrow is deep. Deep hurt needs a deep presence and real nurture, it is the only way.
The unlucky neighbour, the jaded neighbour, and the neighbour that has witnessed too much pain still drive past and wave, they lean on my back fence and sit on my front step. Through the brokenness we connect, visit, laugh and joke. They are still trying to plant something, anything, hoping it will grow.
When I was young I thought faith was something I had to muster. I thought I had to work it up inside. I had little faith, and I wanted more. So I had to get better or stronger at something, but I just didn’t know what. I’ve since learned a bit more about faith; it is not something to muster, but to remember. Faith is a process of remembrance. Story is the formative soil of our lives. When we amend our life story to attend to God’s presence over time and in our place, we prepare a place for growth. Stories heal and orient us. You cannot fear someone whose story you know, and so the emerging story between two people begins to dispel fear. Faith grows when the Story is told, retold, reworked, and lived out. Faith is the discovery that there is a story at work in you, and that no matter the next chapter, the story continues and the Story Teller has not abandoned their goal. Rather, the Story Teller anticipates what is coming next, no matter the twists and turns. We find our faith in the Story Teller, and we know where the story has already been.
The formative story of those who follow the Jesus Way is the journey of faith of God’s people in the bible. It is the soil, the medium, in which their life, and now ours, grows. Psalm 126 sets one of these stories to an ancient song that families would sing on their way to Jerusalem. It reads, “When the Lord brought back his exiles to Jerusalem, it was like a dream! We were filled with laughter and we sang for joy. And the other nations said, ‘what amazing things the Lord has done for them.’” This song was perhaps hard to sing in light of real-life. 2500 years ago, like today, singing a song about being full of laughter and joy when invading forces, illness, poverty, and political strife raged on; it may have felt a little too simplistic, even naïve. This God who did great things - where was this God now? But the point of the song was not to instil some misplaced optimism, it was to remind. It was to amend the soil of their story with a reminder of God’s presence. The soil of faith was being prepared.
Canadian singer-songwriter Steve Bell used Psalm 126 as the basis for his song, “The Lord Has Done Great Things.” He honours this Psalm with a reminder of the joy that comes from God. But he, like the Psalm, does something special. The short Psalm offers a turn. The Psalm pivots from celebrating and says, “Restore our fortunes, Lord, as streams renew the desert. Those who plant in tears will harvest with shouts of joy.”
Steve Bell sings it like this,
“For those who go out weeping,
carrying heavy bags of seed,
there is a joy that harvest brings.
They will come back singing songs of joy.”
The sorrow and tears are not lost in the Story of God. Rather, tears are seeds that fall into the soil of the story of our lives. They have within them great potential, great life, and we can allow them to drop with well-placed anticipation that good things will grow where they land because they are tended by God.
My work as a neighbourhood pastor is not to pretend this season isn’t hard, or to offer a ready diversion to the pain we all face. My work is to tend to the soil by reminding us of the story. The story of those times that God was near, that God has been faithful and still is, that the King reigns, and that the Story Teller is not done with our stories, even now. It is into this soil that our tears may fall, and into this soil that we can invest our lives because the Lord has done great things, and here, in us now, we have faith that God will again.
This Advent is a time of waiting and of allowing the Story of God, incarnate in Jesus, to amend the story of our own lives. Mary, Elizabeth, Joseph, and the Shepherds had each, at some point, hummed along to the tune of Psalm 126. This story invited each of them to sow their tears, fears, and sorrow into the Story of God. That God would turn their tears into the gift and joy of God’s very presence in Jesus is in itself a culmination of the Psalm’s promise.
The Lord has done great things, and today he is born in the City of David.
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