HOLY THREADS

Over on Prayer Threads, I am aware of how much I bring up my own discomfort with the world right now. It’s hard to process the terrible things that are happening in the world especially when it feels like we have done nothing to learn from our past. We are repeating our sins and nothing is getting any better.

It’s a feeling that I hope is shared this year if not every year that Advent rolls around and we wonder again how God might tear the heavens open and come down into this mess (Isaiah 64:1, paraphrased).

Advent always comes with this uncertainty. It raises our awareness to what is broken. It pushes us to want to fix it knowing full well that we don’t actually have the resources to do so on our own. It pokes at the questions we have been asking all year about call and vocation. It makes us wonder if we will just repeat this drama over and over again without any actual movement.

It is to this feeling that the scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann speaks to in his prayer In violence and travail from his book Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann. It was how I began today with my directee and what I’m sharing here with you so that it might speak to your impatient hope.

We give you thanks for the babe born in violence.

We give you thanks for the miracle of Bethlehem,
born into the Jerusalem heritage.

We do not understand why the innocents must be slaughtered;
we know that your kingdom comes in violence and travail.
Our time would be a good time for your kingdom to come,
because we have had enough of violence and travail.

So we wait with eager longing,
and with enormous fear,
because your promises
do not coincide with our favorite injustices.

We pray for the coming of your kingdom on earth
as it is around your heavenly throne.

We are people grown weary of waiting.

We dwell in the midst of cynical people,
and we have settled for what we can control.

We do know that you hold initiative for our lives,
that your love planned our salvation
before we saw the light of day.

And so we wait for your coming,
in your vulnerable baby
in whom all things are made new.

Amen.