One of Scripture’s many blessings comes its invitation to see ourselves in its story.
With the insight of the Holy Spirit, you see yourself in a character, living in a community, having a conversation with another. Maybe even with the Lord himself! The poetry of ancient psalms lifts your heart to God in praise and thanksgiving, cries out from the depths of your fear and doubt, and seeks the redemption of body, mind, soul, and spirit.
You sympathize with Old Testament pain and suffering; you empathize with Gospel confusion and betrayal; you recognize the familiar voice of the Lord whispering in your ear through apostolic letters from Paul, Peter, and John.
As another season of Advent begins, Scripture invites us to see ourselves in two particular biblical stories.
From the New Testament comes Luke’s unique and “orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us” in the birth of Jesus (Luke 1:1). As we experienced earlier in the service, those events begin their unfolding in an angel’s delivery of stunning word to Zechariah that his wife, Elizabeth, will bear a son.
From the Old Testament comes the story of the exodus, the epic tale of God’s people fleeing slavery in Egypt. A handful of Advent lessons will bring us to the shore of the Red Sea and through its parted waters. God’s people are walking freedom’s path in both joy and thanksgiving, in both fear and confusion. That much feels like the times in which we are living today.
To better understand our snippet of Advent lessons from the Old Testament book of Exodus, here’s some helpful background.
Ancient, ever-true words now invite you to see yourself in the story of the exodus, in the story of Emmanuel, God with Us. Listen to the Word that God has spoken.
When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was nearer; for God thought, “If the people face war, they may change their minds and return to Egypt.”
So God led the people by the roundabout way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea. The Israelites went up out of the land of Egypt prepared for battle. And Moses took with him the bones of Joseph who had required a solemn oath of the Israelites, saying, “God will surely take notice of you, and then you must carry my bones with you from here.”
They set out from Succoth, and camped at Etham, on the edge of the wilderness. The LORD went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so that they might travel by day and by night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people. (Exodus 13:17-22 NRSV)
In the race for president, my gal lost, and the other guy won.
It is what it is: A ball of disappointment, wrapped in a layer of anger, tied together with strings of fear. And the social media cry out: “Pray for our nation. Pray for our leaders.” But I just can’t. I know how to pray, but I simply don’t know what to pray.
In 2005, the day after a tsunami inundated south Asia, a TV reporter interviewed waterlogged survivors. In the background, a call to prayer rang out from the minaret of a Muslim mosque. The reporter asked the group, “Are you going?” Some nodded yes and rose to their feet. But one man, who’d lost his entire family in the deluge, shook his head. “No,” he said, “not now. Now I do not have it in me to pray.” A fellow preacher, Mary Luti, offers a bracing assessment of the moment –
“His ‘no’ struck me as a theological necessity, a moment of accountability. To keep God out of it, at least for now, was to lay bare a truth that piety often papers over: that there are times when the very thought of God is unbearable, when there’s no moment but this awful moment, when nothing exists outside this monstrous loss, when nothing is real but pain.”
In such moments, beliefs about God – God didn’t cause this, God is with us in suffering, all will be well – take a back seat to one’s capacity to be nakedly truthful and brutally honest, even if it means that what once passed for faith is lost, and what replaces it is a permanent open-ended question: What now, what next?
“Pray for our nation, prayer for our leaders?” But what, but how?
With understandable intent, we Christians tend to blanket the great emptiness of our wilderness times with hopeful assurances. We are, after all, a Christmas and Easter people! But sometimes human suffering demands that we respect its despair and not hurry it to hope. Our haste to get Jesus into the manger, on and off the Cross, and into his glory may be a reason so many doubt the Good News.
Someday that man may pray again. But, as Pastor Luti suggests, “the mystery of his suffering forbids us even to wonder. Not now. Now the silence, now the stripped and vacant heart.” As for me, my groans are with the psalmist: “For my life is spent with sorrow, my years with sighing. I am an object of dread to my friends; I have passed out of mind like one who is dead.”
So save me, Lord, please, from the fake piety that disallows my neighbor’s despair, the hasty faith that makes Christmas and Easter easier to doubt and too quickly packed away. In your mercy, be my “pillar of fire shining forth in the night.” And if not pillar or cloud, as my “gal” suggested in concession, then “fill the [night] sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars.”
I heard something of the Lord’s response in a text my daughter, Mary, shared in our family group chat last Wednesday morning: “Thinking of you all today – I know our hearts are in the same place.” For now, in this our exodus place of transition and uncertainty, that’ll have to do. For even a fragment of grace is sufficient.
And the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard.” (Luke 1:13)
Amen, and amen!
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on the First Sunday of Advent, November 10, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. The national elections were held the previous Tuesday.