Journey Toward Christmas, Part 2: ‘Good Tidings of Comfort and Joy’
In my last post, I shared a Christmas vision or musing with you in which I had the opportunity to go to the stable and take the hand of the infant Jesus. I shared with you how, in many ways, that is a metaphor for our opportunity to embrace eternal life and also for the way God takes our hand and promises to never let go. But what happens when we take our Savior’s hand and he, in turn, takes ours?
Journey of Humility
So long as I know that he has gripped me, I continue to be taken by him, even though it often feels blind, even though it makes no sense from time to time. It certainly defies logic. The path is circuitous. There is not a straight line between baptism and heaven, at least not in human experience.
It’s just the opposite. It winds this way, it goes that way, it goes up this way, it goes down that way in a place that often feels like, as the psalmist says, “the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps. 23:4b, NKJV).
And even when I think somehow I’ve gotten a grasp of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, a turn happens, but it’s not just a physical turn. It’s an emotional, mental turn that takes me in places that I just don’t expect: “Is this what you’re asking, God? Is this what you want me to become?”
There is both an adventure and also a kind of terror to it. It is not fun to live in a place where I am out of control. And there are plenty of people who call themselves believers in Jesus and yet want, with everything they are, to live their lives fully in control. Then they wonder why they’re stressed-out and exhausted all the time.
To live a life where I am, in fact, in control and do my best to stay in control sets me at odds with the work of God inside my soul. Because you see, his work in me is an invitation to stable-like humility, which is right where he’s leading me.
And so if God is trying to work in you and in me, we allow him to lead us to what are sometimes the most unlikely places. And yet what we’re looking for is predictability, reliability, the capacity to anticipate what our life will look like going forward. It just doesn’t work.
Path of Unpredictability
Why do you think it is – and this is as much for Christians as anyone – that we need a break from the stress level that such interior conflict creates? Even some of our religious practices can serve as mere self-medication. A little bit of meditation, a little bit of prayer, and I’m back out the door again. A little bit of Bible to say I’ve actually done it. A little bit of church service where I show up, I can walk through the liturgy adequately and hope that somehow, God gets past my defenses.
All of it can become a form of self-medication that enables us to relax just long enough not to question why we are so insanely frazzled in the first place. In fact, I think that’s the way some people deal with television. It’s a kind of drug that allows us to relax, put the mind in neutral, but not relax enough to reflect on the most important assumptions that actually drive our lives.
Because we don’t want that. We want just enough to keep going, to continue to just keep going.
And so to come here, to come to the stable, asks of us unpredictability. It asks us to just stop and allow the scene to wash over us.
Have you ever been to the Louvre in Paris, where 50 people stand in front of the famed painting by Leonardo da Vinci? They walk in, and they get close enough to hold up their phone, “click-click-click,” and they’re out the door. And then they can say, “I’ve seen the Mona Lisa.”
No, they haven’t seen the Mona Lisa. And that can be what it’s like to come to a service during this season. You look, you sing, but you don’t let it come down into your soul because of what that might ask of you. No doubt, it will challenge you and ask some pretty basic questions about the order of your life.
Place of Comfort and Joy
But you see, if Advent gets dark enough, if the questions become too big, if the tragedies and the difficulties, the unanticipated angst of life gets large enough, it will stop you. That’s the grace of God. So you can, in fact, ask deeper questions. So you can let the beauty of who God is and what God has done for us and wishes to work in us.
Let that seep into your soul.
Because that’s what Christmas is, in fact, meant to do: to seep into your soul. To begin to bring a new kind of calm into your life, and as a result, a new sense of peace: “Oh tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy.” That’s what Jesus has to offer us.
I don’t always believe that about God. In my mind’s eye, when I walk up and sit down and hold the hand of the baby, I don’t necessarily want to look into his eyes. I’m afraid of what he might see. Because there’s still something in me that doesn’t entirely believe in the depths of my heart that if I look at Jesus full face, I will experience comfort and joy. I’m like Peter, who, when all of the miraculous fish showed up, said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, oh Lord” (Luke 5:8b, NKJV).
That echoes within me even more deeply than the invitation to comfort, which means I actually need to stay longer, so that the voice of condemnation can be put aside, so that there can be more room for the Savior.
As we continue to move toward Christmas, I would ask that your pace inside slow down, and that you find new ways to say yes to this Savior. So that in fact, when you hear “Glory to God in the highest,” part of you perks up, because you too have been invited: to humility and to glory.
And in the end, to joy.
What does your path toward Christmas look like? Is it harried and hurried or filled with comfort and joy? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.
(This post is an adaptation of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on Dec. 24, 2019, at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida.)
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.