Celtic Advent - Day XXVIII - December 13

 

Celtic Advent - Day XXVIII - December 13

 

“Our capacity to know and understand, to decode and analyze bewitches us. We imagine that we can see our life whole and clear, and know how to act wisely. Such a capacity for clarity seduces us into being very sure. We end up knowing exactly who we are and who God is and what God wants. It makes us sure and often strident - frequently so sure as to be destructive...We act as though we know fully, too fully, the mind of Christ. Such a neat little morality does not allow for the largeness of God's hidden way, which is more generous and more merciful than we can imagine.” 

               ~ Walter Brueggemann 

 

 

Because I knew how to fit in, I fell away from the church in my late teens and early 20s. You know, the prerequisite years of “young adult rebellion from church,” poking my head in when the kids needed baptism or it was Christmas or Easter and guilt about going to church would overcome my need to wrap one more present or fix one more casserole.

 

I was young and the world was my oyster. I had a husband and children and a lovely home and my work. I didn’t need no stinkin’ church with all of its archaic, rigid rules and regulations which had absolutely no relevance in my life.

 

As a young child, Jesus was, for me, Superman. The small gold necklace with the cross I got when I made my First Holy Communion was my invisible decoder signal. All I had to do was hold onto the cross and say a Hail Mary and Our Father and Glory Be and, just like a secret decoder ring, Jesus would hear my prayer and he would be certain to swoop down and save me from all my sins.

 

Church was so much more meaningful when I was a child, with my grandmother to talk with before and during and after our walk to church. But then, I grew up and “Superman Jesus” was put away with my Superman Comics. I knew that Jesus was there, if I needed Him, but I didn’t need a childhood hero when I had a very grown up, adult life.

 

The day soon came, as it often does for so many of us, when my perfect little world all fell apart. Everything – everything - in my life seemed to be coming undone. The perfect little life I had woven for myself was unraveling.

 

I found myself down on my knees, crying out to Jesus, knowing he could hear me and wondering why he didn’t swoop in to save me like the “Superman Jesus” of my youth.

 

In one of my worst moments – one of those times when the clock ticks so loud you think your head is going to explode and, even though it’s Very Late and your mother told you nothing good ever happens after midnight, you just have to get out of the house.

 

Like that.

 

I thought my life would – probably should – come to an end. That I was unloved and unlovable , anyway, so how was I suppose to love? I was confused and hurt and afraid and alone. Very, very alone.

 

It was late fall in the New England town where I lived. I put on an old sweater and started walking. I had no idea where I was going. I just didn’t want to be wherever I had been.

 

Suddenly, I found myself at the local diner – Goodnow’s – the place where all the losers in town hung out – and just as suddenly, I realized that I was cold. That, in fact, it had been snowing and I had no boots and my sweater was woefully inadequate.

 

I decided that I needed warmth more than a salve for my pride, so I opened the door and went in, saying to myself, “See how low you’ve sunk. This is exactly the kind of place mother said you should never frequent. And, here you are. See?”

 

As mother always warned, ‘If you lay down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas’.”

 

I was already starting to itch.

 

I sat myself down at the counter and started reading the menu, waiting for the waitress to stop talking to that man at the end of the counter with the red plaid jacket, full beard and no teeth. Both of them laughed the way people who have smoked too many cigarettes laugh.

 

The place smelled of burnt coffee, cooking grease, body odor, wet clothing and old work boots.

 

The menu was old and worn, stained with a drip of spaghetti sauce here and bacon cheeseburger fat there, covering some of the letters of some of the words. But, on the back of the menu, the words at the top of the page jumped out and popped at me like hot grease on a skillet. “G_odnow’s Diner. Where everyone is a friend.”

 

It was ‘Goodnow’s’, but a plop of food covered one of the ‘o’s’.

 

God. Now. Diner.

 

I could feel a wave of the tears I hadn’t been able to cry start to well up in my chest. I fought to hold them back, but when I looked again at the menu, my eyes fell hard on the words, “Where everyone is a friend.”

 

And, right then and there, just as the waitress came and stood in front of me, coffee pot in hand, I started crying – big, fat, wet, silent tears that flowed down my cheeks, off my chin and plopped unceremoniously onto the counter.

 

She quietly took a cup from under the counter, poured some steaming, hot coffee into it, took my hand in hers, smiled and said, “It’s okay, honey. Here, you look like you need some strong coffee and a few good friends. You’ve got plenty of both here. Good coffee and good friends you just haven’t met.”

 

Ordinarily, I would have rushed to wipe the tears from my eyes, but this time, I didn’t. There wasn’t any need to hide my pain. She could see it. She had experienced it. As I looked up and down that counter, I realized most of the people in that diner had, as well.

 

They were friends – that’s what the menu said, at least. Suddenly, I believed it to be true. And this, well, this was as close to church as I was going to get for now. It would lead me, eventually, to a path that led me back to church.

 

Not right away, but eventually.

 

My gratitude for that moment was overwhelming – when a hot cup of coffee and a few good friends became the vehicle by which I could save myself from myself. It led me to seek – indeed, to insist and demand – that from church. To model it in any church where I was the ordained leader.

 

God and Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit surpass our human understanding.

 

I want to suggest to you that God’s hidden way of generosity and mercy can be discovered when we find ourselves, like the leper who returned to give thanks to Jesus, in a state of gratitude.

 

In my experience, gratitude is the deep, underground aquifer which feeds and nourishes the fertile ground of generosity and mercy. When we tap into the deep well of gratitude, all sorts of miraculous things can happen.

 

We find Jesus within us, who comes to heal us and inspire us to do things we never knew we could do. Like, go to church. Or, create church by being involved in the welfare of the community. And, in so doing, find the pathway to our own salvation.

 

Jesus is present to us in the broken bread and wine poured out. So too is Jesus present when our hearts are broken open and our lives have become as empty as a poor man’s pocket.

 

And, not just once, but every time we find ourselves on our knees, weeping like a child who is frightened and lost, Jesus comes to heal and mend, to restore and make whole, to feed and nourish us back to health and wholeness and holiness of life.

 

Jesus comes to us in community – in and through the service of others – just as He comes through me and you when we care for others. Sometimes, Jesus comes to us in a community not of our choosing, people who know and understand the truth of our pain and the struggle of our journey.

 

And, other times, Jesus comes when we put down our pride, pick up our gratitude, hold onto our faith, and simply ask for what we need – and, like the one leper of the ten – return to say, with a heart filled with gratitude, “Thank you.”

 

Advent Prayer

Walter Breuggemann

 

In our secret yearnings

we wait for your coming,

and in our grinding despair

we doubt that you will.

And in this privileged place

we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we

and by those who despair more deeply than do we.

Look upon your church and its pastors

in this season of hope

which runs so quickly to fatigue

and in this season of yearning

which becomes so easily quarrelsome.

Give us the grace and the impatience

to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,

to the edges of our fingertips.

We do not want our several worlds to end.

Come in your power

and come in your weakness

in any case

and make all things new.

Amen.”

― from “Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann”