The Advent Door

Nativity © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 4, Year A: Matthew 1.18-25

In a Book of Hours created in France in the Middle Ages, there is a depiction of the Nativity that I love. In the foreground, Joseph holds the newborn Jesus on his lap. They lean their heads close toward one another as the donkey and the ox—those animals of the manger who appear in every medieval depiction of Jesus’ arrival—look on. In the background, spent from her labor, Mary is in bed, happily reading a book.

The medieval artist who created this illuminated page has captured the essence of Joseph. His depiction of Joseph holding his chosen son is deeply grounded in this Sunday’s gospel lection, where Matthew tells us practically everything we know of this man who became the earthly father of God. In this passage from Matthew’s opening chapter, we observe Joseph as he receives his own Annunciation. In his dreaming, he hears from an angel some of the very words that Mary heard in her waking: “Do not be afraid,” the angel tells him, just before announcing the outlandish request that God is making of Joseph.

Last week we heard Mary’s Magnificat, the song she sings in response to Elizabeth’s blessing: the song of the God who does outlandish things in this world. This week we see how the spirit of Mary’s Magnificat echoes in Joseph’s own life.  Her song resounds in Joseph’s choice not to send away his pregnant fiancé but rather to cast his lot with her and with the child she will bear. Joseph’s choice mirrors Mary’s own. Each with their own response, Joseph and Mary alike bear witness to the God who reorders, disturbs, unsettles the world—the God who seeks to do this through God’s people. Through us.

The man whom I love has a son, and his son whom I love has changed how I read Joseph’s story. I am intrigued by this Joseph who claimed a child who was not his own, this man who drew a circle of family not only around Mary but also around her son, her Word-made-flesh. I think of Joseph sometimes when I am with Emile, this young man who is replete with words of his own, who, especially as a child, used them endlessly and intensely and who could alternately delight me with his love of words and wear out my contemplative soul with his abundance of them.

I love the love of word play that Emile inherited from his father, how the three of us connect through this, how he surprises me with his turns of phrase: “Have you ever taken a succulent ham on a picnic?” he once asked as a young boy. And then how he could turn words into daggers. As he moved through childhood, Emile dosed me regularly with the reality, with the earthiness, of a boy filled with words that sometimes came with lots of grit.

Emile has mellowed as a teenager, the abundance and intensity of his words settling into a different rhythm. And as he moves into his own life, his own choices, there are times I miss the sound of his voice and the presence of his words. I choose him still, and the message he bears. Ten years since first meeting this man and his child, I still choose this stretching into a vast, unknown terrain that the journey with this father and son calls me to.

Mary was not the only one who chose to leave the life she had thought would be hers. In choosing Mary and her child, in welcoming the Word into his life, Joseph had his own threshold to cross, his own radical yes to say to God. Perhaps on the night of Jesus’ birth, Joseph lifted up a father’s Magnificat in syllables lost to us; perhaps, in a shelter far from home, he wove them into a lullaby for his chosen child.

What are you choosing this day? In your waking, in your dreaming, how are you listening for and attending to the messages and the invitations that are waiting for you?

A Prayer for Choosing

What we choose
changes us.

Who we love
transforms us.

How we create
remakes us.

Where we live
reshapes us.

So in all our choosing,
O God, make us wise;

in all our loving,
O Christ, make us bold;

in all our creating,
O Spirit, give us courage;

in all our living
may we become whole.

An Advent bonus: Click this audio player to hear my husband’s song “Only Joseph,” from his wondrous Christmas CD, The Night of Heaven and Earth (© Garrison Doles):

[A portion of this reflection is adapted from my book The Luminous Word: Entering the Mysteries of Advent & Christmas. “A Prayer for Choosing” is from In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season © Jan L. Richardson.]

[To use the “Nativity” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]

A Road Runs Through It © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 2, Year A: Matthew 3.1-12

Driving home from the Thanksgiving holiday, this gospel passage on my mind, I spent most of my time thinking about roads. I thought of roads I have traveled, the ones already laid down for me: pathways made of concrete, of asphalt, of dirt, of stone. Pathways made of traditions, of the habits of communities, of the patterns of institutions. I thought of roads I have made where, as a minister-artist-writer, there were none: ways I have made through imagination, through dreaming, through effort and intention. Roads made of words, paint, paper; roads fashioned of longing and of prayer.

I thought of what it takes to make a way, how it is that we create a passage from one place to another within the landscape of the world or of our own inner terrain. How we must discern the materials to use, and the tools; how crucial to learn to navigate, to reckon, to read the lay of the land. How we sometimes find a path as much by stumbling as by skill. How we may have to tear up a road, make it again in a different direction.

But I think the Advent road is perhaps not like this. That it is not one that we can fashion from our striving and our skill. That when John the Baptist comes over that wilderness horizon, smelling of camel’s hair, his lips dripping with honey and with fire, he is pointing toward a way that we can make only by what we give up, what we shed, what we let go of.

Looking and sounding so like the prophets who preceded him, John the Baptist is a man drenched in the desert. Although we know little about his life prior to now, the gospel writers viewed him as the one of whom Isaiah wrote, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” John has been schooling himself in divestment, shedding himself of everything that would obstruct the path he has been called to prepare.

As the Baptist strides into the Advent landscape, he reminds us that there is much that connects this season with the season of Lent, with its images of wilderness and its invitation to let go of what hinders us from God. John’s presence, so early in the Advent lectionary, calls us to see that beneath the twinkle lights and trimmings that permeate these pre-Christmas days, there is a terrain more spare and elemental: a landscape in which we learn to turn away from what distracts us so that we can welcome the one for whom we are waiting. This turning is at the heart of John’s message to his hearers: “Repent,” he calls out, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

John’s fiery words, especially those he addresses to the Pharisees and Sadducees, can overwhelm with their sheer force and disturbing forthrightness. Yet there is something that we—that I—need to hear within the fierceness of John’s message. It is difficult to make a way for the one who comes if I am not turned in the right direction. It is hard to perceive the kingdom of heaven if there are obstructions in my path—if I have not, to borrow one of John’s images, sorted out the chaff, to make a space for the one who will enter to do his own clearing away.

Although the Advent path leads us through the desert, deprivation is neither the focus nor the final word of the wilderness. As the honey-eating John knew, the desert offers its own delights. What the wilderness gives us is a path that helps us perceive where our true treasure lies. And does not merely give us a path: empties us enough so that a path is made within us. Through us. Of us. A road for the holy to enter the world. A way for the Christ who comes.

What’s in your way these days? If you were to imagine your life as a path, a road, what would it look like right now? Is there anything cluttering your way? Is there something you need to let go of in order to prepare the way for the Christ who enters the world in this and every season?

Blessings to you in these Advent days. May you find delights even in the desert spaces of this season.

[For a previous reflection on this text, visit Door 9: Making Way.]

P.S. My husband and I are hosting a party this week to celebrate the publication of my new book, In the Sanctuary of Women. If you’re in the Orlando vicinity—or are in need of a Florida getaway in December—please join us! The celebration will be this Friday, December 3, at 8 PM at First United Methodist Church of Winter Park. Visit Sanctuary Celebration for more info.

[To use the image “A Road Runs Through It,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]

Where Advent Begins © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 1, Year A: Matthew 24.36-44

Those who have been journeying with me for a while know that this has been my most intense year ever. “Wild and wondrous” is the way I have often described this year that has included getting married, moving, completing and launching a new book, and some major trips for work. The year has been so full that it’s only been just recently that my husband and I, who got married in April, have been home long enough and without major deadlines looming that we have begun to do things like buy furniture and unpack the rest of our boxes.

It has been a year of upheaval: leaving the cozy apartment that I had lived in for a dozen years, moving out of the single life I had always known, settling into a new home, learning to navigate the rhythms of this community of two that Gary and I are making. The year has, at times, been unsettling as it has brought deep and welcome changes but also a schedule that has sometimes made it challenging to absorb and live into those changes. And the year has held, too, the sorts of disruptions and upheavals that always lie beyond our control. Gary and I have just returned from the funeral of one of my aunts. The rituals and gatherings that followed her death, with their bittersweet mix of sorrow and celebration, offered a powerful reminder of how this life that we share is so unpredictable and fragile, yet so persistently resilient.

And it is in the midst of all this that Advent begins. Each time that I enter this season, I carry fond desires and imaginings about how this will be the year that I find time to cultivate a space of calm as we travel toward Christmas; perhaps this will be the year that I won’t sit in the worship service on Christmas Eve night and think, Now I’m ready for Advent to begin.

Yet, especially in this wild and wondrous year, I suspect that Advent will unfold in much the same way that it has previously: it will be intense (that word, again) and pass more quickly than I would like, leaving me wishing, on Christmas Eve, that I had somehow managed to find a more contemplative pace. I find myself thinking, though, that perhaps this wish points toward the deeper invitation of Advent. Perhaps the preparation and expectation to which Advent calls us are not to be found solely in the spaces we set aside during this season. Although it’s important to keep working at finding those contemplative openings in these days, I suspect that Advent is what happens in the midst of all this. We find the heart of the season, the invitation of these weeks, amid the life that is unfolding around us, with its wildness and wonders and upheavals and intensities.

We see this in the lectionary, where the season of Advent begins on what seems a profoundly unsettling note. The gospel lection for the first Sunday of Advent is always a passage that, whether taken from Matthew, Mark, or Luke, is known as “the little apocalypse.” Each year the first gospel lection of Advent challenges us to remember that this season is a time not only of remembering the Christ who has already come to us but who, the gospels tell us, will come again, with attendant signs and wonders. Jesus calls his hearers—calls us—in these passages to keep awake, to stay alert, to be ready, for we do not know at what hour he will come.

As with the other little apocalypses, Matthew’s version disturbs and challenges us with its images of the loss and lack of security that come with Christ’s return: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left,” Jesus says in this gospel. “Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.” Matthew’s version is distinctive and dramatic for the way that Jesus introduces the language of thievery to describe how he will come: “But understand this,” Jesus says as he exhorts his listeners to keep awake; “if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.”

It can be tempting to recoil from the imagery that this opening lection gives us: Christ as burglar, coworkers and companions left bereft, the anxiety of not knowing when or how the Word who became flesh for us will come again. Yet the season of Advent challenges us to resist recoiling and instead to press into the insecurity and unsettledness of this passage—and of our lives. Advent beckons us beyond the certainties that may not serve us—those sureties we have relied on that may have no substance to them after all. Advent is a season to look at what we have fashioned our lives around—beliefs, habits, convictions, prejudices—and to see whether these leave any room for the Christ who is so fond of slipping into our lives in guises we may not readily recognize.

In her book The Vigil: Keeping Watch in the Season of Christ’s Coming—a beautiful reflection on Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany—Wendy M. Wright relates words given to her by a Trappist retreat master, who said, “To be a Christian does not mean knowing all the answers; to be a Christian means being willing to live in the part of the self where the question is born.” With this opening lection, Advent reminds us of this in a fashion that may seem painfully direct but can also be tremendously freeing: it tells us that we do not know everything, cannot know everything, are not responsible for knowing everything. It tells us that, ultimately, we live in mystery.

But it also tells us this: if we stay awake; if we open our eyes in the midst of our life, with all of its wildness and wonders, then we will see: something is coming. Drawing closer. Stealing home.

How will you stay awake in this season? What do you long for the weeks ahead to look like? How might you find God’s response to those longings in the rhythm of your life, in the midst of your days?

Whatever the pace of your life in this season, may wonders attend you.

[To use the image “Where Advent Begins,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]