Category: Holidays

Advent 4 – Let Us Find Our Rest in Thee

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Come, Thou long expected Jesus
Born to set Thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us,
Let us find our rest in Thee.

Advent is the breaking-in of the promises of God into the world. But it isn’t simply God as an attachment. Hope isn’t an option tacked on as an afterthought available for whoever feels like applying it to their lives. Advent is the ushering in of a new creation – a transformative reality that allows us not simply to have hope but to live in hope. It is the establishment of an utterly new way of being in the world that grants us the opportunity to become the very people we were created to be.

It is in accepting that vocation that we find our rest in God.

There are so many ways to think about resting in God. We take Sabbaths from work, we let go of the need to fix the world by ourselves, we stop placing systems of busyness, ritual, and performance between us and our worship of God – but I’m slowly coming to believe that all of those ways find their roots in our accepting who God made us to be. It is hard to live a façade, to pretend to be something we are not. Our frantic schedules, our pursuit of success, our masquerades of worship are all us trying to live up to expectations of our own creation. And it’s exhausting. But in this world transformed by hope, learning to be comfortable in our own skin and pursuing the passions God has placed on our hearts feeds our souls because we are doing the very things God intends for us to be doing. Replenishment is rest – it is the revitalization of who we are.

Resting in God doesn’t mean doing nothing. To do nothing means I have forgotten who I am, I have stopped living into the hope of the new creation. To do nothing is to say no to all expectations regarding who I am – even the very ones that will give me life to the full. Finding our rest in God means being exactly who we are at our core. It isn’t a rejection of all compulsions, merely those that divert us from our path of fulfillment. We stop trying to be something we are not, but we are still at work spreading the transformative way of hope by living into our callings. Rest is never static; it is rather the active pursuit of our God-given place in the world.

So during this season of Advent as we are encouraged to pause from the busyness of life in order to anticipate and hope, I wish the message we would hear would not be simply “do less” (although that is often needed) but a more revitalizing and hopeful “do what is fitting.” Stop pretending. Stop exhausting ourselves with the false expectations of life. But instead fit – perfectly and restfully – into our own lives as we accept the transformative advent of the new creation.

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Halfway Out of the Dark

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“On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact mid-point, everybody stops and turns and hugs. As if to say, “Well done. Well done, everyone! We’re halfway out of the dark.” Back on Earth we call this Christmas. Or the Winter Solstice.” – Doctor Who, A Christmas Carol

Christmas. Halfway out of the dark. This is my new favorite definition of Christmas. On one hand it connects the celebration of the birth of Christ to the natural patterns of the world – an affirmation of the physical that mind/body dualistic Christianity has attempted to hide in embarrassment. But it is also an affirmation of the paradoxical space that Advent calls us to live into.

The light shines in the darkness but the darkness does not understand it. In fact even those that claim to follow the light, keep the light at a safe distance as they wrap themselves in darkness. The coming of light into the world, the birth of the incarnate God, is for some simply a reminder of a far off promise. The light will eventually shine someday chasing away all shadows, but for now we must put up with the darkness as we dream about the light. The darkness doesn’t understand that the light has already broken into the world, not simply as a tantalizing glimpse of the future, but as an illuminating hope shining in the now.

I recently heard a women from Cuba share about how waiting for this light, this promised hope someday, is the only thing that people there have to help them make it through the day. Then she added how blessed she felt that the government is now not only allowing Bibles to be distributed and evangelical churches to gather so that people can have access to this comforting hope, but that the Cuban government is funding such things. The communist government knows the power of light. To allow it as an ever-receding hope in the future turns it into the subduing opium that they need. To allow light into the present would be dangerous, for light can’t help but chase away darkness. So of course they pour money into systems that convince people that liberating hope is only something for the sweet by-and-by. It allows the darkness to thrive.

The darkness always resists the light. If it can convince us that all we should do is perform half-hearted incantations to the idea of light while we ourselves shove the advent of light off into the future, then the darkness will have won. We distract ourselves with complaining about a so-called “war on Christmas” while it is our own theology that hides the light under a bushel. We shrug at the poverty, oppression, and injustice of the darkness as we mumble about God imposing his kingdom someday all the while hoping that the darkness continues to hide our involvement in those very injustices.

Someday, yes, the light will shine in its full brightness. The Kingdom will come in full and the darkness will be no more. But the paradox of Advent is that this light has already broken-in; the light might not be fully apparent yet but we are halfway there. The light is not just to come; it has arrived and is there to help us see. So to await the advent of the ultimate illumination means to live in the light in the now. It means having hope that the shadows of injustice and oppression can be chased away. It means not letting ourselves be subdued into reconciling ourselves with the darkness. It means not simply talking about the light or defending an impotent idea of light, but seeking it out, basking in it, and taking it to where illumination is needed. It means remembering that Christmas is situated at the turning of the seasons, at the time when light always returns and the darkness never ultimately triumphs.

Darkness abounds, but light is shining in and we are halfway out of the dark. That is the meaning of Christmas.

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Advent 3 – From Our Fears and Sins Release Us

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Come thou long expected Jesus, Born to set thy people free; From our fears and sins release us…

Living into the expectation of the incarnation is not a passive endeavor. Anticipating Advent is not about quietistic waiting but living into promised hope and freedom. It is letting the breaking in of Christ into our world release us from systems of fear that entrap us and patterns of sin that deny the very hope of the incarnation. Traditionally in the Western church Advent was a time of prayer, fasting, and acts of service (it still is in the Eastern Church). One did not wait simply to wait; one prepared oneself to meet the coming Christ by disciplining oneself in the very liberating ways of Christ. The advent of Christ in the past and the promised reconciling advent of Christ in the future are remembered and anticipated by living into the advent of Christ in the present through these acts of discipleship. Christ suffered so that we could have this freedom and hope, so we therefore accept this freedom from fear and sin by disciplining ourselves into becoming ever more Christ-like. It is not a tedious waiting around, but an embodied anticipation that consumes every moment of our lives.

So it is curious that during this time of year that instead of anticipating Christ by accepting our freedom from fear and sin by imitating Christ and doing likewise for others, we instead use our freedom to create systems of fear for others. Advent is less about preparation and discipline these days as it is forcing others to live in fear of Christians. For some their freedom in Christ has become justification for insisting that all people orient their lives around catering to them. A culture of fear is created where their freedom is upheld at all costs, even at the expense of the freedom of others. Freedom becomes for some less about Christ’s redeeming and reconciling work and more about ensuring their freedom by insisting that everyone else become exactly like them. Christ’s offer is therefore repeatedly cheapened each time they insist that their freedom isn’t real unless, for instance, atheists, Jews, Muslims, and commercial centers fearfully sacrifice their freedoms and acknowledge a certain interpretation of Jesus as the reason for the season.

Instead of accepting the freedom Christ offered through his suffering by accepting a life that embraces even suffering (or simply the mild inconvenience of exposure to the other) in order to do the same for others, Christians are insisting that others suffer for them. But insisting that others proclaim what should be the liberating and reconciling name of Christ by threatening to boycott their businesses or bringing lawsuits against them isn’t to live into the expectation of the incarnation. Can one truly have witnessed to hope and embraced release from fear and sin if one’s visible response to such is to in turn force others into a place of fear devoid of hope? As in the parable Jesus tells of the unforgiving servant, it does not represent the kingdom of God to accept ones freedom and forgiveness by then turning around and oppressing others.

The breaking in of Christ into the world changed everything. We actively await the advent of Christ by accepting the gift of Christ’s first advent. But what Christ offered was the gift of a new identity, of new creation. Living into that identity takes work; it takes discipline. New creations do not repeat the fearful patterns of this world by pushing them off onto others while hoarding the supposed blessings of freedom for themselves. To anticipate the gift of advent requires radical change of those that wait. As Jürgen Moltmann wrote of this promise of advent past, present, and future,

Every gift involves change. When unjust men and women are justified, the consequence is that they are sent out to work for more social justice. When peaceless men and women are reconciled, the consequence is that they are sent out to make peace in the conflicts of this society. There can be no other response for Christians to their experience of God.

If we expect God we have to respond to God as God calls us to respond. Releasing us from our fears and sins is never a call for us to bind others with the same. Waiting for the breaking in of Christ in this world is not a sanctioning of actions that oppose the very way of Christ. Maybe it would therefore be helpful to return to Advent as a disciplined period of prayer, fasting, and good works. Perhaps then we could anticipate the incarnation by actually incarnating Christ in the world.

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Advent 2 – Born to Set Thy People Free

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Come thou long expected Jesus, Born to set Thy people free.

Advent heralds the arrival of a new way of being in the world. The Divine has broken into our world, shattering the boundaries of the limits we assumed defined our existence. Hope was incarnate in the most unexpected of guises – giving testimony in its very form to the freedom it delivered. Freedom from the fear that this is all there is – that the patterns of this world hold the only answers available to the questions of our souls. Freedom from the oppressive lie that in a world of scarcity all we can do is secure whatever we can for ourselves by whatever means necessary. Freedom to have hope that there is a light shining in the darkness.

This Advent of hope ushers in a life-affirming freedom that is ours to live into. And yet we continue to act as if we are afraid to claim that freedom – or more precisely to allow others to claim access to this limitless way of life. Even the very proclamation and remembrance of the incarnation of hope gets subjected to our fearful limits, forcefully sheltered from being transformed by the very boundary-breaking hope that it is. We await the precious birth and then promptly place Jesus in prisons of our own making – ostensibly to serve him, but in truth to ensure that we can control his message and dictate who is allowed access to it. Therefore it becomes hard to think of Advent without also recalling to mind the words of Frances Croake Frank’s poem “Did the Woman Say?” –

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
“This is my body, this is my blood”?

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hilltop,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
“This is my body, this is my blood”?

Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
Brocaded robes belying barrenness
Ordain that she not say it for him now.

It is far easier to turn the woman into a spiritual metaphor of ideal submission than to let her be free to physically participate in the life of Christ (then and now). The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness refuses to open its eyes and let it chase the shadows away. But Jesus came to set his people free.

Paul Ricoeur defines freedom as “the capacity to live according to the paradoxical law of superabundance,” or in other words, to embrace the surplus of meaning in the already and not yet of the eschatological event of the new creation. Hope broke into the world and redefined everything. We are no longer bound by the limits of scarcity which persuade us that to share our food or power with another is to deprive ourselves in some way. Hope opens up the possibility of living into the Kingdom of God, of letting go of limits in order to embrace abundant life. It is the living hopefully into the much more promise of Romans 5:15 – “For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.”

Advent is about abounding grace at work setting people free to live into this limitless hope. It is about agreeing with Mary that already in the past, present, and future I AM that I AM has “brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” It is about recognizing the upside-down sense of a King being born in a stable. It is about letting go of the fearful power-plays we have imposed upon the breaking of bread. It is about realizing that it is only once we share what we have (be that our resources or even the space where our voice gets heard) that we find there is a surplus leftover even after we have all had our fill.

Advent is about expectantly anticipating the freedom Christ promises by living into that very freedom now. It is about shattering the constraints we have shored up around ourselves in order to let the light in.

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Advent 1 – Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

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Today starts the season of Advent – a time of expectation, anticipation and hope. As I reflect on the season this year, I keep returning to the question of what it means to live into the expectation of the incarnation. So much of the rhetoric I hear about what this time of expectation means though is limited to the trappings of the rituals of the season. Instead of embodying anticipatory waiting, what I hear most often are complaints that others aren’t waiting properly. From rants about churches singing Christmas Carols instead of Advent hymns or about those that deck their halls with pagan reds and greens instead of the proper liturgical hues, to the yearly condemnation of consumerism, Santa, and people who say “holiday” instead of “Christmas,” Advent isn’t so much about embracing an alternative reality as it is about delineating superficial difference.

We somehow seem to have forgotten the earth-shattering reality of that which we await. Advent is more than just a coming; it is the breaking in of the divine into the everyday patterns of this world. It is the hope of the future incarnate in the present making all things new. To live expectantly into the incarnation is to affirm the eschatological hope of the future while at the same time be transformed by that very hope already at work in the present. To observe Advent isn’t simply to reenact a memory of the past or look towards a second coming someday, for both would implicitly assume a present absence of the divine. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, forever transforming possible modes of being in this world. To anticipate the fulfillment of this hope is to accept the new way of being that broke into our world with the incarnation of the long expected Jesus.

It is safe to in remembrance await the coming of a powerless child or to simply tinker with the language and rituals that comfort us with the promise that the liberating hope of Christ is something we can only await. What is seemingly far more difficult is to actually live into the alternate reality that the advent of Christ ushered into the present. To anticipate hope by actively going out to meet it. To await the coming of the Kingdom of God by living in it right now. To declare that the status quos of injustice, oppression, and suffering have no place in the transformed new creation of Christ.

We are not the ones creating hope, but neither are we the ones simply awaiting a future hope. Advent reminds us that hope in the form of Jesus has already broken into our world. To live in expectation of that hope is to live into it – to embody the alternate reality Jesus made possible. The world and even the church may resist this subversion of the status quo even as they incant the very refrain “Come thou long expected Jesus,” for they have safely bracketed off hope in the past and future. Expecting to encounter the transforming and liberating hope of Jesus in the present is the far more difficult aspect of the incarnation to await.

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The Call to Mourn on Thanksgiving

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For the 1970 annual reenactment of the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock – a festive tourist attraction complete with costumes, prayers, and parade – the organizers wanted to highlight the relations between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe since it was the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival. To do so, the organizers invited the current leader of the Wampanoag, Frank James, to deliver a speech for the occasion. James wrote his speech based on the Pilgrims’ account of their first year in the area which included how they had opened Native graves in search of treasure, forcefully took food from Native tribes, and then captured and sold Native Americans as slaves. Although his speech’s theme was on reconciliation it was rejected for being too inflammatory. Rejected from the official Thanksgiving celebration, James instead delivered his speech on a nearby hill, establishing the first National Day of Mourning. Every year since a group has gathered there for a National Day of Mourning – committing to gather as long as there are injustices in our nation that need to be mourned. At times the gathering has been met with armed police, state troopers, and pepper spray, but since 1998 the gathering has been permitted to assemble as long as it doesn’t interfere with the official Thanksgiving celebration.

Not just in November, but every week, Christians around the world gather for official Thanksgiving celebrations. Eucharist, which means thanksgiving, is a celebration of praise and thankfulness to God situated in the memory of a death. When we gather, we hear the story of what happened on the night Jesus was betrayed and partake in the broken body and shed blood, for we believe that “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” Our process of giving thanks involves the retelling of a sacrifice – a confession of acts done on our behalf. To do so in remembrance implies that the past, however painful and uncomfortable, cannot be forgotten. We gather not only to give thanks and praise, but to remember the events of the story that we find ourselves in.

Participating in this ritual of thanksgiving and remembrance shapes us. We in the church not only partake symbolically of the body of Christ, we are the body of Christ which believes that sharing the bread and the cup represents the communion we have as a body. We are not individuals who happen to gather once a week, but integral parts of a body that depend on each other in order to function. We remember the sacrifice of Jesus by caring for each other’s needs – living sacrificially for one another as part of that act of remembrance and thanksgiving. Within that communion many of us pray as part of our very act of thanksgiving words of confession and repentance for what we have done and what we have left undone, including our failure to love our neighbors as ourselves. Those aren’t (or shouldn’t be) just perfunctory words; for to enter into thanksgiving involves placing ourselves in community and not only confessing the ways we have failed to remember the sacrifice of Christ as part of that community, but repenting of those ways by seeking reconciliation instead.

Thanking God for all God has done for us without acknowledging the parts of our body that are in pain or even the ways we have caused harm to that very body is to fail to remember Christ’s sacrifice. The first Thanksgiving is not just a tale of blessing (if it is even that at all), it is also a tale of the failure to love our neighbors – a failure that gets perpetuated every year mourning and reconciliation are avoided in the name of a celebration. Participating in Eucharist, in thanksgiving, involves acknowledging that because of Christ our lives are intricately bound up in each others’. We rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn because we are all one body. There should not have to be a separate National Day of Mourning to call us to repentance for the injustices caused by things done and left undone. Pleas for the confession of our failure to love our neighbor should not be silenced for being too inflammatory or met with armed police for getting in the way of official celebration. Thanksgiving for the body of Christ should by its very nature involve mourning as well as celebration and confession as well as praise.

The Thanksgiving table is also the Eucharist table where we can partake only in lived remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice.

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So this is Easter…

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I’m one of those lazy people who doesn’t bother to do things like change the playlists on my iPod very often. So therefore as I was jogging the other night, John Lennon’s “So This is Christmas” started playing with the opening lines “so this is Christmas and what have you done? Another year over and another just begun.” The question stopped me up short as here we are in Holy Week at the end of Lent. It forced me to reflect on my experience of Lent this year.

And in all truth, it’s been a strange season for me. Holy Week as well. I am immersed in the Christian world and yet I think Lady Gaga’s new controversial single “Judas” has prompted more spiritual reflection in me than anything else this week. It’s been amusing to follow the controversy and to read the outrage of those who are incensed that anyone would dare admit to being tempted to love Judas over Jesus. Because, of course, none of the rest of us ever betray Jesus in any way. None of the rest of us lives in the real world full of its tensions and murky conflicts. We all must preserve the façade of who we declare Jesus to be without admitting to the reality of the world we inhabit. Or something like that.

So while Lady Gaga’s song was a well-timed publicity stunt, it is brilliantly proving its own social commentary in how it is being received. A world that hypocritically denies its own hypocrisy is throwing a fit at having that hypocrisy pointed out in such an outrageous manner. The Jesus they claim to follow doesn’t match the lives they live and it is a divided life that they are fine with until someone like Lady Gaga forcefully pulls down the dividing curtain. But as I thought about it, I realized that it is that crazy divided life and disconnect from reality in the church that has defined my experience this Lent.

During this season of spiritual reflection and sacrifice as Christians theoretically prepare ourselves to respond to the sacrifice of Christ by becoming living sacrifices ourselves, the church as I’ve experienced it this year has been hell-bent on defending tooth and claw its own personal construction of Jesus apart from the reality of the world. On one hand there have been the vicious attacks on any who would dare suggest that maybe, just maybe, God’s love is stronger than death and will win in the end. For some, their conception of a limited God must be defended above relationships or the even the communion of saints. Then on the other hand this season has been defined by large sections of the church campaigning to ensure that our government doesn’t waste our hard-earned tax dollars on programs for the poor and disadvantaged in our nation. ‘Jesus’ must be defended at all costs, but never to the point that he actually crosses that dividing line into our real lives (and budgets). This is how we have been preparing to celebrate the Resurrection this year.

Instead of letting the sacrifice of Christ prompt us to live eucharistically as the body of Christ that shares the abundant blessing and gifts of God with each other, this Lent has been defined by selfish hoardings of God’s love. We limit God’s love to only those who intellectually assent to the same cognitive propositions as we do, and we then hoard God’s freely given blessings as if we’ve done something to deserve them or something. We love Judas and the pieces of silver too much to actually follow the Christ we proclaim – but unlike Lady Gaga, we refuse to admit it.

So this is Easter and what have we done? It hurts my soul to see how the church has spent Lent this year. We are the Body of Christ, why can’t we live like it?

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Fourth Sunday of Advent 2010

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I was listening to Christmas carols the other day and one of them was asking Jesus for forgiveness for letting him be born in a manger and for being crucified. The song’s excuse was, “we didn’t know who you were.” The implication there is if we had known it was God we were doing those things to we wouldn’t have done them. I had to laugh out loud at how utterly the message of that song ignores not just the revolutionary message of Jesus, but also the unexpected subversive nature of his birth.

Jesus was not born to the elite or the powerful. He was born to an oppressed people suffering under the taxation of empire. His family was lower class. He was born in the muck and mire of a stable and laid to sleep in a feeding trough. A hero might have humble origins, but not this humble. God showed up unexpectedly (for some at least) amongst the poor. While the words Mary uttered rejoicing in the social reversal that the birth of her son inaugurates, there are still those who struggle with God showing preference to the poor.

And so they write songs saying that if they would have know it was God being born in that manger then they wouldn’t have let it happen. That sort of thing is okay for some backwater girl with a suspicious pregnancy, but apparently not for God.

Maybe we need to get past the sweet baby Jesus and listen to the words of the adult Jesus telling us that whatever we do to the least of these we do to him. It is true – a manger isn’t good enough for God. But therefore then it isn’t good enough for any of God’s children. The poor shouldn’t be left to suffer or merely survive on the leftovers and stable corners the world generally allows them to have. If we are angry about Jesus having to be born in the dingy conditions of a stable – unwanted and rejected by society, then we have better be just as upset by the fact that babies all over the world are born in similar (or worse) conditions every day. Some 20,000 women get sick from childbirth everyday – mostly from unsanitary birthing conditions and lack of access to clean water and medicine. They too are Jesus. How we treat them is how we treat Jesus.

It was unexpected when God showed up amongst the poor in that stable in Bethlehem. But what is really unexpected for most Christians today is that God continually shows up amongst the poorest of the poor all over the world today. Responding to the advent of our Lord shouldn’t end with playing with plastic nativity sets as if the unsettling reality of the event has been thoroughly domesticated. Hearing about the unexpected breaking in of God into humble conditions should not numb our souls but instead open our eyes to seeing all the places God shows up – even the unsettling and the horrifying – for God is already there.

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The wrong kind of pluralism

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The American Family Association has published this year’s
“Naughty or Nice?” list. It measures which businesses
support, marginalize or censor Christmas by how often they use the word
“Christmas” in their advertising. Concerned Christians then know which
businesses to support and which to avoid.

The so-called Christmas wars have been keeping the love
of Christ out of Christmas for years now, with people on both sides neglecting to consider others’ feelings. This hit home when my daughter came
home from kindergarten and asked for permission to attend her public school’s
holiday party. It’s a highly generic winter/Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa mash-up,
yet students must have parents’ permission to attend.

My daughter was seriously worried that I might not let
her go and relieved when I told her she could. But seeing her anxiety made me
feel bad for the many Muslim mothers in the class who may have had to explain to
disappointed children that they couldn’t attend the party because of their
faith. What does it do to a five-year-old’s perception of his faith to be
forced to avoid a class party because of it?

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Despising Advent

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Continuing my exploration of the unexpected this Advent, this is a post I contributed to Christine Sine’s Advent series this year.

It can be easy to despise Advent. I don’t mean the period of waiting in hopeful expectation itself, but the actual trappings of the season. It is easy to despise the commercialism – to condemn the frenzy and the greed and see it as an obstacle to entering into a meaningful discipline if waiting. It can be easy to despise those that jump straight into Christmas – those that deck the halls in red and green and blast Christmas carols during what should be a time of building expectation. It is easy to despise those that leave Christ out of Christmas (or to despise those that get offended when Christ gets left out of Christmas). From tacky decorations, to pushy sales clerks, to religious wars – the hustle and bustle and the secular trappings of the season often stand in the way of our hopeful anticipation of the Christ child. And so we despise it all, letting Advent become a time of spite and condemnation.

I’m one of the first to question the all consuming ways of empire and consumerism, but I’ve had to humbly realize that all too often I let my animosity towards such things turn my experience of Advent into a twisted period of judgment instead of hope. And in standing in that judgment I prevented myself from encountering Jesus in the very things I despised. I found myself hoping to draw near to a Jesus of my own creation – a Jesus that liked the things I like and ran in the same circles as I did. This was the Jesus I lit the candles for in hopeful expectation during Advent.

But of course, my image of Jesus was a poor reflection of the real Jesus. Jesus was the one who was out there in the world, hanging out with the uncouth and common members of society. He was accused of being a drunkard and glutton because he enjoyed being with and feasting with people. Sure, he delivered challenges to his culture and found moments for retreat, but he didn’t shun it because he despised it for getting in the way of his contemplative spiritual journey.

The Messiah showed up where no one expected him to. Born to a poor family in the unexpected dinginess of a stable, he subverted all cultural expectations. I’ve had to learn that my narrow expectations about Jesus do not give me the right to define the modern American secular Christmas as God-forsaken. Even there – subverting expectations – Jesus is at work. If I desire to draw near to Christ this Advent, I need to let go of my judgment and condemnation of such places and be willing to see how Jesus appears unexpectedly even there. My narrow conception of Advent should not lead me to a place of bitterness and hate, but instead allow me to find hope in the redemption of all things wherever it may be occurring.

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