“Lift up your heads, O you gates; be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O you gates; lift them up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is he, this King of glory? The Lord Almighty – he is the King of glory.”
Psalm 24:7-10
Advent, like life, is bittersweet. And this is as it should be. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus said.
Yet, he didn’t finish there. He continued: “But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
And that is the unadulterated sweetness of Christmas. He came to us. He overcame everything that troubles us.
This has been his song since the beginning. Unlike the ancients, we are privileged not to hope for it but to know it. We who live in the end times (and that is no prophetic prediction, only a reader’s observation that we are living neither in the beginning nor the middle of God’s great story), we are privileged to know how trustworthy his promises have always been. He promised us a Savior and an everlasting King, and he kept his promise.
And so we have no doubt that every promise he has made is a solid stone beneath our feet. We are unshaken. We have tasted, we have seen that the Lord is very good (Psalm 34:8).
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it. … with honey from the rock I [will] satisfy you.”
Psalm 81:10,16
Do not be afraid (Luke 2:10).
Those words still echo from the day of his birth. How is it that we forget? Why do we close our ears?
We busy ourselves with words, with rules, with judgements and controversies. We worry. And, yes, we continue to live lives rooted in fear.
Afraid we’re doing it wrong. Afraid we’ll lose it all. Afraid someone will find out. Afraid there’s nothing to look forward to.
Afraid, afraid, afraid.
We set up our fences. We wonder who’s in, who’s out. We criticize. We condemn.
Why?
When he had risen from the dead the command was the same: Do not be afraid (Matthew 10).
How would you live if you believed there was no need to ever be afraid?
In our family, we always celebrate Christmas with a birthday cake. Sometimes, birthday pie.
No, it isn’t in honor of Jesus. We don’t sing “happy birthday to Jesus,” appropriate as that may be. We sing to our own birthday boy. My husband. Born on Christmas Day … well, not too many years ago.
Three days after Christmas and birthday we celebrate fifteen years of marriage.
Once upon a time, we raided a Christmas tree lot the day after Christmas, collecting free decorations for our reception space. Once upon a time, we filled clear glass Christmas ornaments with birdseed. Once upon a time we ordered a few simple arrangements from the florist, grateful the church was already full of poinsettias. A Christmas wedding.
Fifteen years later, I know that marriage is no fairy tale. I know that it’s harder than we imagined it could be. I know that the children we count as blessings also make it very difficult for us to talk to each other at our own dinner table. Last night, with the kids distracted by a movie in the upstairs playroom, we actually sat down to eat without bothering to let them know that food was on the table. They figured it out eventually, but, in the meantime, oh joy! ten minutes of quiet conversation. Ten minutes to remember who we once were and who we will be again someday.
Perhaps, marriage is no fairy tale. Perhaps, there is no happily ever after. And yet … I don’t speak this truth out of disappointment but out of gratitude. Fifteen years ago it was romance. Today, it’s love.
It’s a husband who says he’s sorry. It’s a wife who cooks dinner even when she has a chest cold (though not, necessarily, with a good attitude). It’s a husband who wakes up every single night to soothe a baby who has long outgrown babyhood but still can’t quite manage a full night’s sleep.
It is love in the gritty details. Love that still puts twinkly lights on a Christmas tree and is grateful to accept a free poinsettia after the holiday concert. Love that dreams dreams about the future at a table sticky with maple-syrup fingerprints.
Love in the flesh.
God with us.
Who else but Hopkins to wake us up, to dazzle our eyes and ears, and to fill us with expectation? A poem for you on this final Monday of Advent:
from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
Now burn, new born to the world,
Doubled-natured name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered He in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins