A Radiant Birth E-Book
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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
"In Advent we prepare for the coming of all Love." —Madeleine L'Engle "At the birth of Jesus, an event of cosmic significance by which we humans still mark our calendars, the invisible and visible worlds come together." —Philip Yancey "Help us to realize, as those who love and believe in you that we, too, are pregnant with Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that day by day we are being enlarged." —Luci Shaw The first Christmas sermon preserved in church history was preached by St. John Chrysostom in AD 386, in which he declared, "Behold a new and wonderful mystery!" In this volume, the Christian literary writers of the Chrysostom Society reflect on Advent and Christmastide as a bright and meaningful season of anticipation and glory. Through forty-two readings from the first Sunday of Advent through Epiphany, contributors prepare us in watchful waiting for the coming of Jesus. We enter slowly so that the familiar can astonish us and become wondrous once again. Jesus is born in Bethlehem. But not only there. He is also born in us, that we might bear his presence and impart his goodness to the world.
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TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE IN THIS BOOKWHO HAVE GONE BEFORE USSt. John ChrysostomMadeleine L’EngleEugene H. PetersonRobert SiegelWalter Wangerin Jr.
A Radiant Birth takes us between two glorious events in the Christian liturgical calendar: Advent and Epiphany. Advent is the four weeks before Christmas Day, guiding us into an expectant, hopeful anticipation of the miraculous birth of the Christ child. Epiphany comes at the end of the twelve days of Christmas, providing us with generous space for celebrating the wondrous revelation of God incarnate in Jesus, the Christ. Both events—Advent (the waiting) and Epiphany (the celebrating)—have one grand focus, which is to lead us into the ever-living reality of “God with us” in and through the person of Jesus. Indeed, the name Immanuel, in Hebrew meaning “God is with us,” is the title given to the one and only Redeemer because it refers to God’s everlasting intent for human life—namely, that we should be in every aspect a dwelling place of God.
We might call this reality “The Immanuel Principle.” It simply and profoundly confesses that in and through Jesus Christ, God is always with us. It is a radiant with-God kind of life. Jesus lives among us as our Savior to forgive us, our Teacher to instruct us, our Lord to rule us, and our Friend to come alongside us.
One experience especially planted this reality deep into my heart and soul. I was approaching eight years old . . . young enough to be oblivious to the skeptic’s arguments against the Incarnation and old enough to enter into the greatness and wonder of the Christmas event. It was a Christmas Eve service led by Eugene and Jean Coffin, “my pastors,” functioning so completely as one that I never separated their roles. Indeed, Eugene and Jean liked to refer to themselves as “a pair of jeans.”
The Christmas Eve service itself was simple enough with Jean playing the organ and leading us in well-known Christmas carols. Then Eugene came forward, sat in a large rocking chair, and gathered us kids at his feet. He scooped up one small child and sat her on his lap.
In such settings children will often be nervous and fidgety. But not this night! This night a holy hush seemed to cover us all, children and adults alike. Eugene looked at us children, each one individually, lovingly, quietly. Then he opened his Bible and read us Luke’s rendition of the Christmas story.
As I said, the elements of the service were quite ordinary. No dimming lights. No flickering candles. None of the things that are supposed to create just the right mood. It wasn’t the outward, physical things at all. It was the holy hush that fell on us. It was “the Presence in the midst.” It was the breaking in of the Shekinah of God. It was the overwhelming, interior, experiential reality of the Immanuel Principle, God with us. Even today, many, many years later, I still vividly remember that silent night, that holy night.
A Radiant Birth contains poems, stories, and essays by twenty-six members of the Chrysostom Society, a small fellowship of writers that two other colleagues and I formed several decades ago now. Hence, I have personally known each of these writers, some of them for many years. While we come from many branches of the Christian family, each one has a deep commitment to Jesus Christ and a genuine passion for the craft of writing. May I speak for our entire fellowship in hoping that in our words you will discover life-giving tidings of great joy.
It’s Christmas morning, not yet light. I am ten years old, creeping down the stairs, and I am full of hope. My siblings and I were told there will be no Christmas. Our mother told us. She always tells the truth. But I believe in more than truth. Once our father surprised us on Easter with speckled chocolate eggs in the backyard. And once we had a special Thanksgiving with pies and everything and people were happy. I read fairy tales, too, and I’ve read The Secret Garden and The Wizard of Oz, so I know for a fact that the world can crack open at just the right time with a grand gift.
I float down the pine staircase, as light as a cloud, buoyed by all the happy endings I believe in. Just before I see the living room, I catch my breath and pause—maybe I even pray. There is likely a god out there somewhere, and maybe he is the kind of God who visits living rooms on Christmas. Finally I dare to look. There—the old Persian carpet, the wooden cupboard, the painting of the girl on the wall. And a deep echoing silence. I blink, deflate, fold to sit on the stairs. It is the Monday-Tuesday-always-everyday room without a tree, without tinsel, without the scatter of presents we had last year. Last year I got a blue bathrobe and a doll. My mother was right. Christmas is over.
And it was. But the loss grew lighter year by year. Our holidays had always been muted, sparse. There were no family gatherings to miss. There was never any money for presents. One year when we were young, my mother had a quarter to spend on each of us six kids. And we were not church people. What was there to celebrate then—our poverty? My father without a job and no prospects? This would be better, then. And there were compensations. Two of those Decembers my mother and the six of us loaded our tents and sleeping bags into our old Country Squire station wagon and drove to Florida to camp for two weeks in the sun. Who needed presents when we came back with a tan?
More than this, the Plain Truth magazines on our tables, my dour grandparents who were devoted Jehovah’s Witnesses, and my mother all informed us that Christmas was a pagan holiday. As were all of the religious holidays, we were told. This was a bonus contributing enough self-righteousness to carry me through the long, empty holidays each year. Not celebrating surely made me more spiritual.
When, as a teenager, I discovered that a Savior had been born even for me, everything changed—except Christmas. My homegrown asceticism wasn’t easily dislodged. I could not reconcile the unending holiday muzak and gaudy consumerism with God’s entrance into the world. Shouldn’t we be fasting instead of feasting? Shouldn’t we be holy instead of happy?
Then I married. Several decades, a husband, and six children later, I am the magic merry godmother of all things Advent: light the fireplace, cut down the tallest tree, hang every ornament, set the table with a dozen candles, invite the neighbors, write plays, host open houses, make cookies for the sick, send shoe boxes overseas, make presents with the kids, and do it all with ribbons, sprinkles, carols, a real Christmas goose, and homemade wrapping paper of course! Most of all, don’t collapse until after New Year’s and Epiphany. And above all, perform it all with a holy mien, a contagious cheer, and a gentle, quiet spirit inviting Christ anew into your weary heart.
And every year I fail. Every year, come December, I vow to do better and still end up hosting these same uninvited guests—exhaustion, guilt, inadequacy, perfectionism, anxiety, failure—who push through my doors and shadow my every move. Maybe my mother was right. Maybe we should just let the baubly hullabaloo pass by our doors entirely. How much simpler and maybe more spiritual the season would be!
Don’t we all do this? We all bring our complicated family histories to the season, which we live out in the midst of a noisy culture hawking its own version of celebration, and some of us add to that cacophony our local church culture, with its own peculiarities and traditions. Are the holy days supposed to be this hard?
No. Let’s make it easier. Paul Willis and I are here with twenty-four others, wise guides all who will help shepherd us through the mistletoe wickets of the season. Let us start right now by turning around and looking behind us for a moment. How did the ancients in the faith observe the Advent season? Consider the first Christmas sermon preserved and passed down through the centuries. It was preached in Antioch in AD 386 by St. John Chrysostom, a priest who later became the Bishop of Constantinople. Can you see him standing in a cathedral, the gathered sitting beneath him? How did he begin? “Behold a new and wondrous mystery!”
“Behold!” Were they missing it already so soon, the wonder that “He who is, is born”? The miracle that “He who is above, now for our redemption dwells here below”? With eloquence and beauty and likely a measure of thunder, St. John called his listeners to holy attention.
Are we listening? One thousand six hundred and thirty-seven years have passed since that first sermon. More than two millennia now since God split the night with angels and delivered a bloody mewling infant from the body of a teenager. We try not to forget. We’ve created an elaborate web of remembrance and celebration. We hope we’re doing enough. We wonder if we remember wonder. As the years go by, we behold through dimming eyes.
This is why we’re here. We are here in these pages to behold, together, anew. We are following our namesake. All of us in these pages belong or have belonged to the Chrysostom Society, an informal gathering of writers of faith. St. John spoke so eloquently, so passionately that he was named Chrysostom, meaning “golden-tongued.” We do not claim such eloquence, but we do as he did: twenty-six of us here use our pens to call ourselves and others to attention one more time. To behold—again. To hear the good news—again. To know hope—again. We offer up these poems, short stories, essays, and meditations as a choir of voices singing the “tidings of great joy” again.
The daily readings take us from the first Sunday of Advent through to Epiphany on January 6, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, celebrating the kings’ worship and recognition of Jesus as the Messiah King. There are readings, then, for forty-two days.
We’ll enter Advent, from the Latin adventus, meaning “coming” or “arrival,” through three avenues:
Part One: Jesus, Born in Bethlehem takes us to the astonishing events surrounding his birth. Enter slowly. Let the familiar become strange and wondrous again.
Part Two: Jesus, Born in Us illuminates the holy disruption caused by his entrance into our minds and hearts.
Part Three: Jesus in Us for the World reveals surprising ways and places Jesus shows up when we walk our faith out into the world.
St. John’s sermon ends, “To Him, then, Who out of confusion has wrought a clear path, to Christ, to the Father, and to the Holy Spirit, we offer all praise, now and forever. Amen.”
May our stories, essays, and poems in these pages create a clear path out of confusion to heart-filled praise, joy, and hope, now and forever. Amen.
In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to the Galilean village of Nazareth to a virgin engaged to be married to a man descended from David. His name was Joseph, and the virgin’s name, Mary. Upon entering, Gabriel greeted her:
Good morning!
You’re beautiful with God’s beauty,
Beautiful inside and out!
God be with you.
She was thoroughly shaken, wondering what was behind a greeting like that. But the angel assured her, “Mary, you have nothing to fear. God has a surprise for you: You will become pregnant and give birth to a son and call his name Jesus.
He will be great,
be called ‘Son of the Highest.’
The Lord God will give him
the throne of his father David;
He will rule Jacob’s house forever—
no end, ever, to his kingdom.”
Mary said to the angel, “But how? I’ve never slept with a man.”
The angel answered,
The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
the power of the Highest hover over you;
therefore, the child you bring to birth
will be called Holy, Son of God.
“And did you know that your cousin Elizabeth conceived a son, old as she is? Everyone called her barren, and here she is six months pregnant! Nothing, you see, is impossible with God.”
And Mary said,
Yes, I see it all now:
I’m the Lord’s maid, ready to serve.
Let it be with me
just as you say.
Then the angel left her.
Mary didn’t waste a minute. She got up and traveled to a town in Judah in the hill country, straight to Zachariah’s house, and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby in her womb leaped. She was filled with the Holy Spirit, and sang out exuberantly,
You’re so blessed among women,
and the babe in your womb, also blessed!
And why am I so blessed that
the mother of my Lord visits me?
The moment the sound of your
greeting entered my ears,
the babe in my womb
skipped like a lamb for sheer joy.
Blessed woman, who believed what God said,
believed every word would come true!
As we move into Advent we are called to listen, something we seldom take time to do in this frenetic world of overactivity. 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.
During Advent we are traditionally called to contemplate death, judgment, hell, and heaven. To give birth to a baby is also a kind of death—death to the incredible intimacy of carrying a child, death to old ways of life and birth into new—and it is as strange for the parents as for the baby. Judgment: John of the Cross says that in the evening of life we shall be judged on love, not on our accomplishments; not on our successes and failures in the worldly sense, but solely on love.
Once again, as has happened during the past nearly two thousand years, predictions are being made of the time of this Second Coming, which, Jesus emphasized, “even the angels in heaven do not know.” But we human creatures, who are “a little lower than the angels,” too frequently try to set ourselves above them with our predictions and our arrogant assumption of knowledge, which God hid even from the angels. Advent is not a time to declare but to listen to whatever God may want to tell us through the singing of the stars, the quickening of a baby, the gallantry of a dying man.
Listen. Quietly. Humbly. Without arrogance.
In the first verse of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” we sing, “Word of God, our flesh that fashioned with the fire of life impassioned,” and the marvelous mystery of incarnation shines. “Because in the mystery of the Word made flesh,” goes one of my favorite propers, for it is indeed the mystery by which we live, give birth, watch death.
When the Second Person of the Trinity entered the virgin’s womb and prepared to be born as a human baby (a particular baby, Jesus of Nazareth), his death was inevitable.
It is only after we have been enabled to say, “Be it unto me according to your Word,” that we can accept the paradoxes of Christianity. Christ comes to live with us, bringing an incredible promise of God’s love, but never are we promised that there will be no pain, no suffering, no death. Rather these very griefs are the road to love and eternal life.
In Advent we prepare for the coming of all love—that love which will redeem all the brokenness, wrongness, and hardnesses of heart that have afflicted us.
She didn’t notice at first the air had changed.
She didn’t, because she had no expectation
except the moment and what she was doing, absorbed
in it without the slightest reservation.
Things grew brighter, more distinct, themselves,
in a way beyond explaining. This was her home,
yet somehow things grew more homelike. Jars on the shelves
gleamed sharply: tomatoes, peaches, even the crumbs
on the table grew heavy with meaning and a sure repose
as if they were forever. When at last she saw
from the corner of her eye that gold fringe of his robe
she felt no fear, only a glad awe,
the Word already deep inside her as she replied
yes to that she’d chosen all her life.
Twice snow has fallen
and stilled the chirring squirrel.
Its increase will end
the song Salvation Brook
sings trickling to the river.
But not yet.
The sun has life enough
to reach the trees.
Soon I will close myself
behind the cabin door
and spider my words
across the page
in propane warmth.
But not yet.
The fire between my shelter
and the chilling wind prevails.
What loneliness that drives
me out from you
to wait in emptiness as cold
slowly claims the land
will be assuaged.
But not yet.
The time of cold is not
the time to turn aside.
The dark will descend.
The wood will be held
in the lock of ice,
and the Word, quiet
as a star, will come.
But not yet.
These words are my words.
Wait. Wait.
I delight in fishing. But fishing involves waiting. And waiting involves patience.
Unfortunately for the angler in me, lakes and even many rivers freeze over in the winter where I live. They turn from liquid to solid, at least on the surface. And this makes many types of fishing rather difficult. So November through January, the seasons of Advent and Christmas, usually mean only two types of fishing for me: fly fishing for steelhead and ice fishing for trout.
It’s true that fly fishing is usually an active sport. I can sometimes traverse three or four miles of river in a morning of fly fishing. Even when I’m not migrating up or down a riverbank in search of a fish or a likely spot for one, I’m constantly on my feet, moving my arms. Nonetheless, despite all that movement, fly fishing still involves a lot of waiting. Days when my arm gets sore catching one fish after another are exceedingly rare. Far more common are the days when for every minute I spend with a fish on my line, I spend fifteen (or twenty or thirty or forty) minutes waiting for a fish to strike my fly.
Winter fly fishing for steelhead trout stretches patience even further. It isn’t unusual for me to hook just two fish on a full day of steelhead fishing, and to land only one of them. I’ve had plenty of steelhead days without a single fish. A full day of waiting. I stand in ice water, making hundreds if not thousands of casts in almost the same place, drifting a heavy fly along the bottom of the river—where I can’t even see it—waiting and hoping for a strike.
Indeed, the waiting begins even before I start fishing. The river where I most often fish for steelhead draws anglers from all across the region. If I want to get a good spot on the river, I have to beat the crowds. The legal fishing day starts half an hour before dawn. I show up an hour or more before that to stake out my claim. Then I just sit down on the cold wet riverbank and wait. In the dark and cold. With my thermos of hot coffee.
Then there’s ice fishing, my other form of winter fishing. It may begin with a brief flurry of activity, but—even more than with steelhead fishing—it soon becomes an exercise in waiting. On the eighth day of Christmas, the traditional start of the ice fishing season in Maine, I head out onto the ice about an hour before dawn and drill five to ten holes through several inches of ice with a hand auger, all the while watching the eastern sky, waiting for the first hints of dawn. When the legal fishing day begins thirty minutes before dawn, I have the one flurry of activity as I rush to get all my rigs in the water: baiting each hook with a live shiner minnow, dropping them down to varying depths, placing my tip-up down in the hole I just drilled, and then setting the spring-loaded flags to alert me if a fish takes the bait.
Once all those tip-ups are placed, then I wait. I don’t even hold them. I just wait. And wait. And wait some more.
Okay, some years I don’t have to wait long. One year, the sun hadn’t even risen, and I was just baiting my third tip-up when a four-and-a-half-pound landlocked salmon sprang the flag on the first tip-up. Dinner for the family appeared almost like manna from heaven. There have been occasional years when I’ve caught my limit of fresh trout by mid-morning. Most years, however, my flags are out all day just to bring in two or three fish. Some years, I don’t see a flag up for hours. One year I didn’t catch a single fish until the third day of the season.
As our climate has warmed over the past fifty years, the season for ice—and thus also the season for ice fishing—has noticeably shortened. On the lake in Maine where my family has spent lots of time, we wait longer each winter for the ice to form. Several years ago, we did two previously unheard-of things: we all dove into the unfrozen lake on Christmas morning for a quick “swim”; a year later we actually took the canoe out on New Year’s Day. That year, I couldn’t even ice fish until about the twelfth day of Christmas!
All that waiting recently had me thinking about Advent. In the Christian tradition, it’s an important season that starts four Sundays before Christmas and ends on Christmas morning. The word advent comes to us from Latin, from a word meaning “arrival” or “coming.” Despite the name, however, the season is not so much about arrival as it is about waiting. The arrival doesn’t happen until the end of Advent. Christmas is the morning of arrival. Advent is the time of waiting for that arrival—perhaps patiently, or perhaps not so.
On the first Christmas roughly two millennia ago, the long-awaited arrival was a big deal. It was none other than the eternal God himself, the one who created the world, entering into his own creation in order to save it, taking on the form of a helpless infant baby born to a poor refugee family living in a captive nation. Jesus in the world. God in the world.
That period of waiting—the first Advent, we might call it—was a time of great suffering for many. The suffering had gone on for centuries, from when the prophets first foretold of a coming savior to the arrival of a baby in a manger.
On a really cold morning of ice fishing or winter steelhead fishing, I sometimes experience a small bit of suffering, which in the moment can feel like a great bit of suffering. I can do some preparation wearing my gloves, but at some point I need to take the gloves off and tie on a fly or grab live bait out of a bucket of ice water. I fumble around with cold fingers long enough to do the task, with an icy wind blowing needless pain into the exposed flesh of my fingers, down my spine, across my cheeks and into my eyes, making the task that much harder and slower. The truth is, though, that I choose this momentary agony myself.
And here is the real confession. Our cozy, heated family cottage with a pellet stove and a coffee pot sits right on the edge of the lake with windows looking out over the ice. That means that most of my ice-fishing mornings, once all my tip-ups are set on the frozen lake, I can head back inside for a cup of hot coffee. If I’m lucky, there’s even a piece of leftover Christmas apple pie I can warm up in the microwave. And that’s where I do my waiting: in a warm room with a hot drink, watching my tip-ups through the window. I only have to go outside if one of those orange flags actually pops up, and even then I only stay out long enough to pull in a fish and rebait my hook.
But two thousand years ago, those who were waiting for the long-promised Savior of the world had no choice about their suffering. And for most of them, their waiting was far more unpleasant than anything I’ve had to endure. I think especially of the suffering of Mary and Joseph, the chosen parents of the Savior, who had been driven out of their homes by an oppressive government and forced to live as a refugee family that couldn’t find a home to take them in. After living for a time in another city in their own nation of Israel, they eventually fled all the way to Egypt to escape political persecution. What do I know of this?
There is, however, one way that my experience fishing is at least a bit like the waiting of Advent for a special arrival. Though waiting may require patience and even stillness, it is not passive. Rather, like many modern-day celebrations of Christmas, it is supposed to entail preparation. The Savior entered into the world to bring peace, and also justice for the oppressed, the poor, the stranger, and the refugee (which may be why he chose to be born to a family living in oppression). If we want to welcome that arrival, a good place to start our preparation is by practicing the same sort of peace, hospitality, and compassion. In these ways, as we are out in the world, we find Jesus—the very one we are waiting for—already present.
Oh, God, I am heavy
with glory. My head thunders
from singing in the hills.
This night will come once.
Enough bright lights.
Enough shouting
at the shepherds in the fields.
Let me slip into the stable
and crouch among
the rooting swine.
Let me close my eyes
and feel the child’s breath,
this wind that blows
through the mountains and stars,
lifting my weary wings.
Of any birth, I thought this
would be a clean one,
like pulling white linen
from a loom.
But when I return to the cave,
Mary throws her cloak
over the bloody straw and cries.
I know she wants me to leave.
There he lies, stomach rising
and falling, a shriveled pod
that does nothing but stare
at the edge of the feeding trough
with dark, unsteady eyes.
Is he God enough
to know that I am poor,
that we had no time
for a midwife, that swine
ate from his bed this morning?
If the angel was right, he knows.
He knows that Mary’s swell
embarrassed me, that I was jealous
of her secret skyward smiles,
that now I want to run into these hills
and never come back.
Peace, peace, I’ve heard in my dreams.
This child will make you right.
But I can only stand here,
not a husband, not a father,
my hands hanging dumbly
at my sides. Do I touch him,
this child who is mine
and not mine? Do I enter
