Week One: The Waiting (1.1)
One of the best moments in the world, one feeling that I am deeply missing and I am sure I will continue to miss, is the moment when you have prepared a lovely gathering- we will make it a Christmas party, as this is advent. Snow is drifting down softly outside, a fire is crackling in the fireplace, an expanse of intentionally made gifts are just waiting to be opened, and snacks and treats cover the countertops, cookies and bowls of guacamole and brownies and candy canes. The doorbell rings, and you swing the door open to discover the people you love most in the world bundled up and beaming at you, and you gleefully shout out into the wintery night: “You came!”
That’s how I feel right this minute! You came! You came to the party! I cannot wait to walk through advent with you, and I am so incredibly honored that you wanted to come. Welcome to week one! So please, dear friends, get settled in, maybe grab a blanket and some hot cocoa if it’s cold where you are, and definitely grab some snacks. And, without further ado, let’s begin!
If we are going to start anywhere when we talk about advent and when we talk about wilderness, we must start with the two women I love the most in the Bible: Mary Mother of God, and Hagar.
In college, I was part of a theater ensemble that, over the course of a semester, created a devised theater piece (which is basically creating an original theater performance, often featuring music, movement, and text.) Our theater piece, entitled KJV, used text from- you guessed it- the King James Version of the Bible, and was centered around the themes of wilderness and exile. The piece of text that I chose to speak was my favorite story in the entire Bible, my favorite since my toddler years: the Annunciation, a fancy title for the story where the angel appears to Mary and tells her that she is going to be the mother of the long awaited Messiah, Jesus (Luke 1:26-38). The first time I worked on the KJV translation of my selected text, I sat on the couch in my little college apartment and wept. I was so struck by the beauty of it. The part that really got me was the angel’s response to Mary’s iconic question: “How can this be?” The angel says,“the Holy Ghost will come upon thee, and the power of the Highest will overshadow thee. And therefore, also, that Holy Thing that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God… for with God, nothing is impossible.” Think about those images! Goodness gracious. But, despite loving the beauty of these ideas, and the deeply poetic nature of what was happening in Mary’s body, I didn’t get it.
As we worked on the text, our director encouraged us all to think about and emphasize where the wilderness was in our pieces of text. And I couldn’t find it in Mary’s story, and honestly struggled with that. At first glance (and the fourth glance, and the tenth), I really thought the story was about God saving us from the wilderness, not about us going into it. That is, until recently, almost four years later, when I read past where the Bible translators and pastors alike end Mary’s segment of the story in Luke 1. The verse after the angel leaves Mary (vs. 39) is: “and Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah.” (emphasis mine)
Do you know why she went with haste? Because this girl, who was probably somewhere between 10 and 12 years old, who hadn’t even started her period yet, was going to be stoned-publicly-if anyone found out she was pregnant before she was married. So she had to flee. Who would believe it when this little girl said an angel impregnated her? Right. Hold that thought.
This brings us to Hagar, a tragically lesser known story I realize, so I’ll summarize until you read it later this week. Way way back at the beginning of the Bible, God makes a promise to this couple- Abraham and Sarah- that they will be the parents of God’s people, and will procreate to produce many and many generations. Think of the Sunday school song- Father Abraham had many sons- but the problem was that at first, Father Abraham couldn’t make any sons. So his wife, Sarah, has this extremely bad idea that she would send in Hagar, her maidservant, to Abraham and they would have the babies, and therefore fulfill the prophecy that way. God is not pleased about this situation. (Clearly.) Hagar becomes pregnant and Sarah becomes jealous and abusive. Hagar flees into the wilderness for her own safety, and stays there until she is found by the angel of the Lord. I won’t tell you any more as to not spoil the story, but you get the gist.
So we have these two women hundreds of years apart, pregnant, alone, afraid, running into the wilderness, both involving an encounter with the Angel of the Lord. And then the real hardship comes for both of them, something I only recently realized: they must return to that from which they fled. The Lord tells them to go back to what will be, in their culture, a life of shame and dishonor. Mary returns, pregnant and definitely showing. Although she is not stoned (because her betrothed is generous and kind), her supposed illegitimate child (Jesus) in her growing stomach is like a glowing scarlet letter upon her chest, a mark that she will never be able to erase. By accepting the assignment of mothering the son of God, she also agrees to the erasure of the ordinary life she might have had. Hagar returns, and has her baby boy, the two now slaves in a home where they are despised. How could God find them in the wilderness and ask them to go back? Will God find them again?
I’ve been pondering this for almost nine months, the question like a child of the wilderness growing in me, too. And the only answer I have is: God found them and God saw them. And the God I know wasn’t going to leave them alone. In the same way, God won’t leave me alone, either. In 2020, I have fled into the wilderness. My own private darkness, my own private valley of the shadow of death. My own ways of coping with the chaos that has not- and doesn’t look like it is- going away. Maybe you have too. And truthfully, often it feels like God hasn’t found us yet. That oppressive darkness weighs heavy on our heads, like freezing rain dripping off our eyebrows and the tip of our noses. We feel desperately alone. And I just want to say, this is not shameful. This is the way many of us feel. All I know is that someday, God will find us by the well, and see us in our distress, just as Hagar was found and seen.
And someday, someday soon, maybe God will ask us to go back from where we’ve fled, to complete the journey through the valley, promising to accompany us, because we are needed in that space, whether or not we realize it. (1) God will ask us to go back because we are ready. Because God has prepared us, strengthened our heart in the face of the darkness. The Holy Ghost will come upon us, and the Power of the Highest will overshadow us. The same spirit that knit Jesus together in his mother’s womb, the same that raised him up from the grave thirty years later, dwells inside our bodies, just as it did in Mary’s.
But right now, we are waiting in the wilderness, trying to find a spring of water. A flicker of light. A song. A glimpse.
This week, the meditations center around this idea. Glimpses of the promise to come in the midst of the darkness of the valley, in the dry land, in the wilderness. As you walk through the week, I invite you to lament. Be honest with God about how you feel. If you feel alone, tell God so. Open your heart, your hands, your eyes. Look for the one who promises to see you, even in the dark.
We are waiting for the promise to be fulfilled, the promise that one day, everything will be made new again, and there will no longer be any more pain. The promise that this season of advent cries to our weary hearts: Emmanuel- God With Us- has come, and pitched his tent with ours, side by side.
(1) Not that I mean returning to a situation where you or your loved ones are in danger. Just to clarify that. God doesn’t want you hurt.
