Buechner: Counter Culture

Buechner: Counter Culture

“To pray for your enemies, to worry about the poor when you have worries enough of your own, to start becoming yourself fully by giving of yourself prodigally to whoever needs you, to love your neighbors when an intelligent 4th grader could tell you that the way to get ahead in the world is to beat your neighbors to the draw every chance you get—that was what this God asked, Paul wrote.” Frederick Buechner, Quote of the Day, first published in The Clown in the Belfry.

phtography by Joanna ES Campbell

Buechner reminds us how countercultural the Christian faith was from the get go as well as today. There is no better time to experience this than in the season of Advent in the church year. It is the four weeks before Christmas at the beginning of the church year. While during December our culture is hurrying, overloaded, frantic, caught up in a commercial craziness, the season of Advent calls us to a quiet preparedness, watching, waiting, pausing. In fact, the staff at our church has made “pause, breathe, wait, watching for the Christ child” as our theme for the season. “Pause, Breathe, Wait, Watching for the Christ Child.”

Advent is my favorite season, and this call to quietness makes it even more so. We put on pause the cacophony inside and outside of our heads, sit in a favorite chair, look or walk outside, light candles, feel something moving inside of our body as we move from our head to our body and become grounded to the present moment.

The air we breathe in and out is full of the anticipation of new birth in us and the world. The Christ child who is already within us wakes up and opens its eyes and smiles as the Christ within us sees the light of Christ across the room in someone we want to know better who seems quite different from us.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Anders: Tree of LIfe

Anders: The Tree of Life

Guest Writer: Isabel Anders

“The tree of life, in God’s plan, is more than a figure of speech. It is a description of the physical branching out of families, one way through which God’s Word and his ways may be passed on. In this context, parenthood is both the most natural of callings and the most humbling privilege. It is important to remember how much God cares about physical life. For all my abstract thinking about images and ideas, my greatest task at the moment is to eat and drink properly to become a fit branch for the flowering of a new life. “It is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual,” Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15:46. Isabel Anders, Awaiting the Child (Cowley, 1987, 2005).

As the foreshadowing of Jesus’ conception began with the first woman, and the promise was brought to fruition in Mary, so that tree, built through generations, out of the root of Jesse, is truly a Tree of Life, nurtured in the most human manner. Earthly lives and deaths are its tenuous branches, faithfulness and weakness are woven into its life, and God calls blessed those who choose to “abide” in him in order to bear the necessary fruit.

Human life, it seems, is never irrelevant to God’s plan. Instead, we are in the thick of it. We can enter into this design, this story, by accepting the joys and pains of our humanity and submitting them to the good of the kingdom. We can rejoice that participation in its growth is allowed, and cooperate by choosing those things that build and sustain life for our families, our communities, our world. As Moses urged his people Israel in the crucial early stages of the tree’s growth: “Therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live” (Deut. 30: 19).

The tree has been a symbol of life from the very beginning. But we cannot forget that in the sweep of the continuing story, life and death converged on a tree—the cross of wood that both took Christ’s earthly life and won our redemption into ongoing life. As the seed for the tree begins as a very small entity, yet carries in it all the potential for the flowering of the whole tree, so Advent carries in it the seed of the whole drama of our salvation. The planting, the watering, the tending can be conscious acts in our lives, as we wait for God to give the increase, to bring about his purposes in the world and in our lives—in this place, in this hour.

Isabel Anders, author of Awaiting the Child: An Advent Journal (Cowley, 1987, 2005). Managing Editor, Synthesis Publications, Synthesispub.com

Anders: Advent

Guest Writer Isabel Anders

Anders: Advent, Awaiting the Child

“Isabel Anders wrote these Advent meditations while waiting for her first baby to be born. I read them in my husband’s hospital room, watching him die. Now another Advent approaches, another time when birth and death draw close together and it is not always possible to tell which is which.

As we move into Advent we are called to listen, something we seldom take time to do in this frenetic world of over-activity. But waiting for birth, waiting for death—these are listening times, when the normal distractions of life have lost their power to take us away from God’s call to center in Christ.” —Madeleine L’Engle.

John the Baptist represents the call to radical preparation of one’s whole life for the coming of the kingdom. His is an extreme message, and his own story ends in an early death. Yet while he lived, he praised the Lord with his whole being, his habits, his reputation, his life—for all it was worth. He brought the messages of the Old Testament prophets, especially that of Isaiah, into focus, and validated the hope expressed so long ago. A way, a path to God, would be prepared. A voice cries, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a pathway for our God” (Is. 40: 3).

The call to repentance must always precede praise. Acknowledging sin clears the way for the truth of God’s deliverance, for the Messiah to come into his own. And praise naturally follows the revelation of truth. John was the last forerunner of the Lord, a close earthly relation of Jesus. As a baby he had leaped in his mother Elizabeth’s womb at the announcement that Christ would be born into the world, a foreshadowing of his prophetic mission to praise and acknowledge Messiah with his whole being.

The connection between repentance and praise that the Baptist exemplifies is a fitting one in Advent, helping us to hold the tension between joy-in-waiting and joy-set-loose. …

In Advent we talk of preparing, of waiting, and there­fore it would be almost impossible to avoid mentioning what it is we are waiting for, and why. Yet our emphasis on repentance, intermingled with praise, can sometimes give our songs a minor key. In these days we need to consider our own condition, and dare to think, “What if he had not come?” Our redemption hangs in the balance, and “all lies in a passion of patience” as we wait.

We pray that he will come to our hearts, as he did in the lives of those faithful believers: Mary, John, Anna, Simeon, Elizabeth. Acknowledgment of our own unworthiness, yet acceptance of the gift—two distinct actions—are as inseparable in us as they were in those saints. Our belief, like their hope, is part of the ongoing story of redemption. We are brought into line with the whole event through repentance and praise. —From Awaiting the Child: An Advent Journal by Isabel Anders (Cowley: 1987, 2005).

Isabel Anders