I’m sitting crosslegged on a big mattress in our living room after a very successful sleepover with Rafael and Rhema last night. The tea water is heating and all is calm, a rare commodity these days. Eric and Rafael are working at the apartment we are renovating this morning and I am seizing the morning to stare at my baby girl’s ever changing little face and take a deep exhale before Christmas week.
This advent season has been marked by the tenderness of postpartum and the challenges of ministry life in the city. Sorrow certainly doesn’t melt beneath the current of merriness during the Christmas season. My heart longs for the perfect Christmas some days when I catch the gaze of sadness on the streets outside our apartment or find myself weeping with fluctuating hormones on my nursery rocker. Last night I made a lovely meal and lit the candles and had a very unnecessary little spat with Eric and God gently nudged me again, “I did not come into perfection, I came into chaos.”
“I did not come to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance.”
Luke 5:32
I wonder how it might change our hearts this season if we understood how He came, and how He still comes to us still today. I’m practicing a simple acknowledgement of Him when all is not calm and bright in a not so silent night. It goes a little like this.
My frustration spills over into unkind words or I walk a street lined with brothels or my house is covered in toys and dishes and laundry or I have a tense conversation and I stop briefly, turn my heart posture towards God and welcome Him into my reality. Sometimes this results in repentance like it did this morning and sometimes it’s a simple welcome of His presence into my chaos.
He came for your lonely night. Your unvoiced pain. Your deepest regret. Your sin.
Our mantle nativity scenes appear clean and quiet. Mary always looks peaceful and Baby Jesus is happy in a bed of hay. I wonder how it really was for Mary to have no room to birth Jesus, succumbing to labour on prickly straw and unsanitary surfaces. Our postpartum baby photos always appear clean and quiet as we try to look peaceful and keep our babies happy on a bed of ribbons, but we all know the reality of the diaper change in the car and the night full of leaking milk and the brimming tears.
I stood on the square late the other night staring at the Christmas lights on the trees. I smile every year because they look like they simply fell out of the sky and plastered themselves onto the tree tops. We were practicing some Greek Christmas Carols for brothel outreach and our voices seemed so small against the tide of evil I always sense so deeply on a late night in Victoria. My voice was faltering with the Greek words of the songs. We were a small band on a dark night with a few cookies and a bit of cheer and as always I wondered if our efforts make a difference.
How can cookies and a little prayer stem the tide of prostitution and addiction on our streets?
“I came small like that,” Jesus reminded me.
Yesterday my ears perked with the audio bible playing as I cleaned my floors.
“He will not cry out or raise His voice, nor make His voice heard in the streets. A bruised reed He will not break and a smouldering wick He will not extinguish; He will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow weak or discouraged before He has established justice on the earth.”
Isaiah 42:2-4
Jesus came small and vulnerable through the body of a shamed woman from a humble town. He entered our world in the least powerful way imaginable into the dirt of a stable surrounded by animals instead of admirers.
Yet the devil trembled so much at His life he tried to kill Him at birth.
It is not only the presence of God in our joys that frightens the devil, but the slow pervasion of His presence into our deepest griefs, our darkest nightmares, and our most humble efforts. That’s why I opened my mouth to sing as loud as I could on a street lined with brothels this week. My Greek was broken, my voice was weak, our gifts were small; but that is how He comes.
He comes to you this advent season. Into your sin, brokenness, questions and pain.
What if our deepest celebration this week is the recognition of His transformation in our deepest painful realities? What if He comes powerfully into your small endeavours and the trembling voice you bring into the mad din of the devil? What if the way He brought heaven down is a lasting invitation to His church to come gently and humbly into the deepest devastations, bringing heaven to our bit of earth?
Jesus came gently, but His influence swept the world powerfully because He was God with us. The presence of God in the world through us inviting His Spirit into the darkest places of our hearts and communities usually comes gently and humbly but transforms powerfully because it is God with us. God with all of us.
He comes to you today. Into every question and fear and humble endeavor and if you let Him all of your life can change into a transformative story of love that pervades all you touch because He is God. You can go today, into every reality you are facing in communities of darkness and despair, cynicism and corruption and raise your voice to sing with me.
“Joy to the World, the Lord has come. Let earth receive her King!”
Maybe your voice is broken too.
Maybe you wonder if it makes a difference.
But that is how He comes.
Photo by: Jeroen van Nierop
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