Through Stained Glass: Advent Word a Day 3 - Soul

 

"Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us."

― Maya Angelou

Despite cultural beliefs, rest is not a reward. 

Rest is a necessity. 

Our souls -- our entire being -- needs rest.

Rest comes first. It is not based on productivity.

Remember, we are not machines. Our worth is not determined by productivity. Neither should our time[s] to rest. 

I hope you take time today to rest. If you can't, then may this 60-second film of places where my soul found rest on sabbatical be a gift. 

Tend to your soul -- your personhood and your being. Say 'yes' to rest. Let the Holy One tend to you -- let your soul magnify Love.

Through Stained Glass: Advent Word a Day 2 - Strength

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu

 Strength

What does it mean to have strength? 

Strength can mean strong – physically. 

Think of The Rock, Dwayne Johnson. 

Strength can mean the capacity to withstand pressure – mentally / emotionally / spiritually.

Think of Mother Teresa. 

Yesterday I saw Tom Brady play in Indianapolis. Before the game, I admired the structure of the dome – a building big enough to play a football game in; beams strong enough to hold all the material needed to create a space big enough to play football games. The strength of those beams is impressive! 

Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time. Physically, he is not the strongest on the field. His strength is found in the way he cares for his body off the field, the countless hours spent going over the playbook, and the experiences he has gained over his 22-year career. His greatest weakness is that he can’t scramble [run around when he is about to be tackled by the most muscular man on the field] and is too slow. He has seven Super Bowls. 

Strength. 

Advent upends our definition of strength. Or at least it can. 

Advent upends our definition of strength. Or at least it can. For Christians, it is the season before Christmas – the holy days celebrating the birth of Jesus. We call this event the Incarnation – the day in history [it wasn’t 12/25] when the Holy One took on flesh and lived among us. 

The Holy One came not with a parade. There was no royal announcement about Their birth. There were no fighter jets or military marches. Instead, the birth of the child who would become Christ was ordinary -- like ours. As the stories go in two of the gospels, it happened unexpectedly – at an unexpected time – to an unexpectant mother. 

The strength of Advent – the strength of our faith – I believe – is found with Mary. 

The Holy One was born into the world like us, lived in skin like us, and had a mother who cared for Them. Mary carried the Love of the Universes in her womb. The historian Margaret Miles explains how “a human body’s best show of power, and the evidence of Christ’s fully human incarnation, was the Virgin’s presentation of Christ from her own body.” The Holy One – who exists as a community of Three – reveals themselves not in a royal, lofty theology, nor in a parade full of pomp and circumstance, but in the ordinariness, the messiness of life. 

Imagine the strength of Mary’s witness. Strong enough to bring down the mighty – and start a revolution that begins at the margins and places where we least expect it. 

Mary gives me strength by way of her humanity. She isn’t God, but she is – us! She is lowly, or so she claims – and is the one who hands the Christ to the rest of us. In an age when women were seen as less than, she said ‘yes’ to the Holy One – and things were never the same. I love what Richard Rohr says about Mary when he writes:

“In some ways, many humans can identify with Mary more than they can with Jesus precisely because she was not God! The Gospels attribute no miraculous works or heroic acts to her, simply trust and pure being more than doing. From her first yes to the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:38), to Jesus’ birth itself (Luke 2:7), to her yes at the foot of the cross (John 19:25), and her presence at fiery, windy Pentecost (see Acts 1:14, where she is the only woman named at the first outpouring of the Spirit), Mary appears on cue at key moments of the Gospel narratives. She is Everywoman and Everyman, and that is why I call her the feminine symbol for the universal incarnation.”

We are all meant to be Mary. Mary’s story bears witness to ours – and our strength to point towards the Christ in our lives with our work, being, and personhood.

Through Stained Glass: Advent Word a Day -- Promise

 

“Stop for one whole day every week, and you will remember what it means to be created in the image of God, who rested on the seventh day not from weariness but from complete freedom. The clear promise is that those who rest like God find themselves free like God, no longer slaves to the thousand compulsions that send others rushing toward their graves.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

Promise. 

Outside my house, once tress abundant with leaves are barren. 

Inside my house, there is a bloom on my hibiscus plant. 

I smiled and laughed when I came home and saw the orange-crème color petals. A sign of life in the season when creation in the Northern Hemisphere hibernates. 

In the little flower, I see the promise of the Holy One Jesus speaks of in Luke 21. When destruction begins, and begin it will, the One Who Loves Us is as near as our very prayers. 

How many times has our world seen the fall of an empire? How often do you think folx like you and me have determined the end was near? We are a people who want straight lines, to live in a cut and dry world, to exist in the binary: "X" is either that or that. 

Throughout scripture, we see that the Holy One is anything but straight … and linear. Especially when it comes to time. I love what professor Audrey West says about God's time when she writes:

"Jesus in Luke 21 reminds his followers that God is not constrained by the chronos time represented by calendar and clock, the sort of time that keeps everything from happening at once. In God's kairos time, past and future are woven together for the sake of today.

God's time is the now/not-yet that reshapes the world's present expectations—and our own."

What I hear in this, and what I read throughout scripture, is redemption is ours -- even while we wait.  I love how Jesus communicates this by pointing to nature, using imagery from creation to bring us back to the presence of the Holy One amid the end times. I find comfort in it because creation reveals the cyclical nature of life – the impermanence of life. I'm mindful of the Oak Tree in my neighbor's yard that knows both when to wear Her crown in the season of abundance; and when to let them go. 

In my sermon two weeks ago, I mentioned how the trees unveiled a new meaning of the word apocalypse. The parable of "the fig tree and all the trees" suggests the past can help make sense of the future. When buds begin to form on barren trees, we are confident that winter is ending and summer will arrive. Why? Because we have previously lived through a change of seasons or because others have told us of their own experience.

The trees, your story, and scripture – they point me back to the promise that the Holy One is and will forever be with us. 

Advent is a season of promise. It is a season that invites our attention. The stories guiding us this season point to the faithfulness of the Holy One – and the new thing They are doing. Where does it begin? Usually on the edges – in the unlikeliest of places. 

Like a blooming hibiscus plant…