Liberator God,
Why did your exiled people look backwards so much?
Did it make them feel safer, and give them courage,
these stories of the path you made through the sea
for their ancestors to escape captivity?……….
Take us out of our backward-facing seat.
Turn us round to see what you will do.
Show us today’s exiles and captives,
chains to be broken, pathways to open up.
New things, liberator God –
things that have never been written,
things we would never have thought of,
things for a New Age dawning!
~Brian Woodcock & Jan Sutch Pickard, Advent Readings from Iona

It is easy to forget that Advent is a now and not-yet time. That it is not just the really soft-sell that leads us to the splash of Christmas. It is a time of anticipation for how Emmanuel, God-with-Us, is being born in our day. It is also a time of honoring the birthing moments of God that have taken place over the life of Creation. As humans, one of our challenges, one of many, is to not take the moments of God’s in-breaking and freeze them in time, make them static.. build up little altars to them. This is what we often refer to as ‘putting God in a box’ so we can be the ones in control. In the church, this often gets articulated with words like: ‘ But we have always done it that way.’ or “This is how we(with a capial ‘W’) do it.’.

One of the great gifts of Advent is that we have never done it this way before! Each year we have the opportunity to be attentive to the many ways the Holy breaks into our lives each and every day. Just like that first Christmas when the Christ Child came in the unexpected way of entering the world as a little baby, we don’t really get to decide how God shows up.  Our real work is to keep our eyes and hearts open to the reality that it is happening…..again and again and again. Advent provides the intentional time of seeing  it, of choosing to be present.

This prayer by Iona community members Brian Woodcock and Jan Sutch Pickard reminds us of how often we are looking…..even facing….in the wrong direction. This happens sometimes by chance but most often, I believe, out of choice. To be awake to God’s movement in our lives carries a certain risk, a risk of being called to places and people who make us uncomfortable. Like the shepherds in the Christmas story, we’d like to just mind our own business watching over the sheep we know, in fields that are familiar. We don’t want to look up and see any stars that might cause us to have to go in a direction ‘we’ve never gone before’. We don’t really want to hear angels singing because we might have to sing along, or even become one of these messengers-of-God, and who knows where that could lead? We don’t want to chance having to pack up our family and all our belongings and head across the desert on camels, carrying a really precious gift headed to some far off, unknown destination.

And yet, if we allow ourselves we can remember at least one time when something caused us to take a step out of ‘ the way we’ve always done’ our lives, and something new and wonderful happened. Like falling in love….or finding a new friendship….or discovering a solution to a plaguing problem…..or fulfilling a life-long dream…….or landing a new job…..or opening a treasure that had been hidden in plain sight.  Something surprising entered the path of our day and everything changed.

This is the work…..the liberation….of Advent. Are you up for it?