Advent

Perfect Peace [First Saturday of Advent]

December 10, 2017 by Edie Wadsworth 1 Comment

Isaiah 26: 3 You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you.

Mama gave birth to me in the January cold and bundled me up on a Friday night for my first homecoming.

Daddy was no where to be found.

That is, until he brought the honky tonk band home from the bar to finish out their set in the kitchen at 3am. Because surely homecomings need beer and old school country music.

The first time mama ever told me that story, I laughed until I cried and then begged her to tell me every hilarious detail. It’s almost too good to be true. Or too outrageous to believe, depending on how you look at it. It’s still my favorite thing to tell people about my Daddy.

In the incarnation, God does something even more scandalous. He comes to the world in diapers, in the helpless form of a baby nursing at his mother’s breast. He comes weak and lowly and plain, just like every other human. He empties Himself of strength and power in order to serve and this lowliness teaches us something profound about how we find what we are looking for in this world.

C.S. Lewis says it best,

“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.

Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

We find what we are looking for when we finally stop looking to find it in this world. Peace & joy come from outside us—from the babe in the manger, the Prince of Peace, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Our father gives us a homecoming beyond our wildest dreams—a home in His tender care, and a lifelong feast of forgiveness, love, joy, and peace.

True Light [First Friday of Advent]

December 8, 2017 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

I John 1: 7 Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling.

I stood among in a room full of mostly strangers ready to impart some wisdom on how to have deep, sacrificial, meaningful relationships. I had my power point ready and was wearing my favorite cowboy boots. I was ready and feeling confident with just a little side of nerves. It was a good hair day.

Someone caught me on the way to the restroom and to tell me she had just finished my book.

It felt like a gut punch, for some reason. Still after more than a year of releasing my memoir, my long confession, I still sometimes wish I could go back to the time before people really knew my story.

We cried together over similar childhood experiences, we hugged, but now I felt so exposed. I felt like I didn’t have anything wise to say, only more confession of how God is using relationships to humble me and sanctify me and show me my sin. I barely got through the talk. I went off script and it was raw and vulnerable and humbling. But I’m learning that to love people is to stop hiding from them, to let them hear your confession, to hear theirs and to forgive them, to bring to light what has laid in darkness for so long. Bonhoeffer says in Life Together:

“Confession in the presence of a brother is the profoundest kind of humiliation. It hurts, it cuts a man down, it is a dreadful blow to pride…In the deep mental and physical pain of humiliation before a brother – which means, before God – we experience the Cross of Jesus as our rescue and salvation. The old man dies, but it is God who has conquered him. Now we share in the resurrection of Christ and eternal life.”

This Advent, we beg our Lord to teach us what it means to walk in true light, to love our brother, to hear his confession, to forgive him, to be forgiven, to die to our pride and live in His glorious Light.

Nothing to Give [First Wednesday of Advent]

December 7, 2017 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

Isaiah 25: 8-10 The Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces; the reproach of his people he will remove from the whole earth; for the LORD has spoken. On that day it will be said: “Behold our God, to whom we looked to save us! This is the LORD for whom we looked; let us rejoice and be glad that he has saved us! For the hand of the LORD will rest on this mountain.”

I was just trying to buy a soup pot.

The ash pile where our house had burned down was still smoldering. But I needed a soup pot.

My sister kindly reminded me that I didn’t have a house, let alone a stove.

As I stood at the register wearing her borrrowed clothes, my eye still black from where I jumped out of the window to escape the flames, my face got red hot.

No, I didn’t have a stove. Or any clothes or a bed or anything that would make this awful day feel like Christmas.

What I had were unrelenting nightmares and kids who couldn’t sleep and a husband whose cough was a constant reminder of the miracle that any of us were still alive. I had nothing but heavy, unbearable grief.

So I needed to do something to stop feeling it and thinking about and I just wanted to do something normal, like make soup. Even if it was in a unfamiliar rental kitchen. So, she was patient and picked out the perfect soup pot and I cried in the car all the way home.

A few days later, I walked into church for the New Year’s Eve service and my pastor read this from Romans 8.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,^[k]neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We took communion together as a family and that meal felt like the only thing in my life that I could be sure of—Christ’s body and blood for me, the One who saves us and feeds us and wipes away all our tears. The meal that can never be taken away—the food that sustains us when every last thing is gone.

Advent’s message is not just that Christ came in a manger but that He comes to us now in His word and in Holy Communion. He is Emmanuel, God with us, no matter what burns down around us.

Bonhoeffer says in God in a Manger, “Not everyone can wait. The only ones who can wait are people who carry restlessness around with them…Thus Advent can be celebrated only by those whose souls give them no peace, who know that they are poor and incomplete, and who sense something of the greatness that is to come, before which they can only bow in humble timidity, waiting until he inclines himself toward us—the Holy One himself, God in the child in the manger. God is coming; The Lord Jesus is coming; Christmas is coming.”

We Wait [First Tuesday of Advent]

December 5, 2017 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

Isaiah 11:1-4 There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

Sometimes it feels like the waiting will break us.

We were invited into Thomas’s life when he was 2 and now he’s 5. (Read his story here.) The days that pass between one visit and the next feel like months. When we see him again, he’s taller and I study his face to notice every tiny change.

With every inch of my being, he feels like one of my children, but we continue to live in the now and not yet. We get by on old videos and memories. We laugh until we cry about something he said last weekend and then that laughter wants to turn to hot tears that we miss so many of his days, of his growing, of his deliciously funny antics.

But the alternative is that we would never have known the joy of him. That he might never have been baptized or taken to church, that he never would have his own bedroom at our house, despite the fact that the room is still and quiet most days.

So, we wait. And while we wait we give thanks for what has been, for what will be, and for how we have been allowed to love someone so very precious.

You’re probably waiting for something too. Your waiting may even be much worse. You may be waiting on a child that is never coming home, or waiting on a marriage that may never be healed. You may be waiting for answer to what the doctor found last week or waiting to see if there’ll be enough money for Christmas.

The Israelites of Isaiah’s day were waiting too. Waiting for a real king, for the Messiah. Waiting for their kingdom to be restored.

Here’s what I know. God is a God who loves us and is for us and who knows the secret aches of this long wait. Bonhoeffer says, “For the greatest, most profound, tenderest things in the world, we must wait…And just when everything is bearing down on us, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark and really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, and relief in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God is who secretly revealed as love and rules the world.”

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Bearing Together [First Monday of Advent]

December 4, 2017 by Edie Wadsworth 2 Comments

Psalm 145—The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that He has made.

I like bringing people food. Namely soup.

If you know me, that doesn’t surprise you. I like to cook and I love to cook soup and I like to be helpful so making soup for people when they need a little encouragement is exactly my jam. It’s my preferred way of “bearing of my brother’s burden.”

But I read these words from Bonhoeffer this morning and it reminded me of the underside of bearing my brother’s burdens, the side that’s less sexy and less fun and less creative—the side of burden bearing that no else can see or give me credit for.

“The Christian, however, must bear the burden of a brother. He must suffer and endure the brother. It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated. The burden of men was so heavy for God Himself that He had to endure the Cross. God verily bore the burden of men in the body of Jesus Christ. But He bore them as a mother carries her child, as a shepherd enfolds the lost lamb that has been found. God took men upon Himself and they weighted Him to the ground, but God remained with them and they with God.

The passion of Christ strengthens him to overcome the sins of others by FORGIVING them. Christ bears our burdens, so ought we to bear the burdens of our fellow men, which is quite literally his sin. And the only way to bear that sin is by forgiving it in the power of the cross of Christ in which I now share.”

As we anticipate Christ’s coming to us, we remember that He comes forgiving us our sin, saving us from ourselves. Seeing the worst of us, knowing our secret sins and addictions and grudges and yet, forgiving it all freely—that is why the Christ child comes.

Lord, help us to bear each other’s burdens today, help us to be slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving one another just as you have forgiven us.

And bless the soup, too.

Amen.

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Let It Be, [First Sunday of Advent]

December 3, 2017 by Edie Wadsworth 2 Comments

Psalm 119: I call with all my heart; Lord, hear me. I will keep your commands. I call upon you, save me and I will do your will. I rise before dawn and cry for help. I hope in your word. My eyes watch through the night to ponder your promise.

When the angel spoke on behalf of the Lord to Mary, there had been a long period of silence from God. The time between the Old and New Testaments, from Matthew to Malachi, was about four hundred years, without any known proclamation from God.

Just a long deafening silence.

It probably seemed to the Israelites like the world has been left to fend for itself. All hope is lost.

So, when He finally speaks, He does something that only He would do.

He speaks to a scared, ordinary, teenage girl.

And when He tells her that He will place a seed, a gift, inside her, for her to nurture and love and share with the world, she gives a remarkable answer, though we know she must have been afraid that she was unworthy to bear this alone.

But first, notice what she doesn’t say.
She doesn’t say, “But Lord, I’m just 13.”
She doesn’t say, “I haven’t been very faithful and I’m not very smart.”
She doesn’t say, “I’m just an ordinary girl from an ordinary family.”
She doesn’t give all the excuses that you and I give.

She says, “I am the handmaiden of the Lord. Let it be to me as you have said.”

Let it be to me as you have said.

That probably wouldn’t have been my response.

Those words ring out through the ages as Mary’s song, her Magnificat.

The sin of Adam, which ushered in our suffering and death would be answered by Christ, the suffering Savior, whose kingdom is born in you, through the obedience and the quiet yes of a young girl from Nazareth.

It must have seemed like no time to her that the linens she wrapped her baby in became his grave clothes.

And just like Mary, the shroud that covered you in your dying with Him will become the swaddling clothes with which you offer your love incarnate to the world.

The yes cry of the mother of God would break her heart into a thousand pieces.

And your yes will likely cost you, too.

But the gifts He brings to us as HE remakes us into who we are meant to be can only be had through submitting ourselves to Him in faith.

May we submit like Mary to the gifts of the incarnate Christ—gifts which often come disguised as loss and suffering and the pain of birth.

Mary, who gave birth in agony, who nursed Christ at her breast and followed His path until it lead Him to the cross, where she saw him beaten beyond recognition, the one who cared for His crucified body when He died, then suffered the unthinkable loss of her son so that the kingdom of God might be born in us all.

Mary’s fiat, her “Let it be to me as you have said,” becomes our anthem too, our broken hallelujah poured out on a world dying for redemption.

This gift, this Christ child, growing in you will break you and yet, it will be the means of your healing. It will wreck you and then be the very path to your of your salvation. His body broken will become the bread at His table, where He, Himself will be the pascal Lamb. There, He will join His flesh to your flesh and you will enter into the mysteries of true communion with your Father. There, He nourishes you so that you may rise up from the table, and feed His sheep.

You, my sisters and brothers, are the handmaidens of the Lord.

Advent will usher in the incarnation and CHRIST WITH US will change everything.

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Mary, by Patty Griffin