A Prayer for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

December 19, 2021

 

God of love, we huddle around these 4 candles not only for their kiss of winter warmth, but because of their flicker of light in the lengthening night.  The darkness is still in its ascendency, and on the evidence we might begin to believe that the night will eventually extinguish the day altogether. 

 

It seems that way in more ways than one.  Surely by now the virus should have burned itself out, but the numbers grow wearyingly higher, the variants smarter.  Surely by now we should have wearied of the public acrimony and found ways to work together again, but still our partisan flags fly higher than our shared one, our ideological rigidities poisoning our cultural coherence.  Surely by now we should have learned that our greed consumes rather than feeds, that our fascination with shiny objects doesn’t move us but merely distracts us, that our relentless drive for bigger/faster/cheaper/more is not sustainable.  But our bottom lines and closet capacities continue to define us. 

 

Still lengthening, these winter nights, “the darkness (as the old hymn observes it) deepens; Lord, with me abide.”

 

And then this steadily building bank of flames reminds us that you have not left us comfortless.  The light of hope still refuses to be extinguished; the flicker of peace yet pierces our warring ways; the flash of joy still interrupts the gloom; and incandescent love still conquers all.  The night may seem to be winning, but though yet getting longer for a little while to come, it does not grow stronger.  It, too, is subject to your light which, quite often just beyond our particular horizon, is building in intensity.  It is our faith in you, after all:  that whether we are aware of it or not, your light has come into the world, and shines in this darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

 

With every candle we light, O God, remind us of your presence.  With every hope expressed, every peace made, with every joy both experienced and occasioned, with every loving act, may we know your light.

 

We pray in the name of the light of the world, who lived his life in you, and in order that we might do the same, taught us to pray. 

(Prayed with the Disciples of Runnells Christian Church)

A Bare, But Fully Adorned Tree

 We love the ornaments. 

Some have been precious gifts from family and friends.  

Some are heirlooms from the past that have miraculously survived the years and the moves.  

Some are whimsical.  

Some are sentimental. 

Some bear names, anchoring them in identity,  or years, rooting them in time.

Some are the work of crafty hands.

Each one ignites a memory of a face, a place, an experience, a taste – the textures of life in the living.

We treasure them all. 

 

But this year we left them in their boxes, in the crates, in the barn.  The tree, itself, is what calls our name in this season of expectation, a rich green and black plaid skirt replacing the riotous red of previous Christmases.  The stark simplicity of the tree; the soulful invitation of it - the deep green bristles of the Vermont white spruce, unadorned save by the nestling lights, bespeaking the opacity of life while also the reassuring fecundity of it.  Life, and the hope woven throughout it.  It stands quietly, but influentially this year – a proclamation instead of a decoration; an evocation of earthier truths and celestial promises, of patient growth and quiescent beauty.  Unadorned, the tree towers over the room with a grounding soulfulness we needed this year.  

 

This year.  These years.

 

Last night’s storm roared through as a tumultuous representation of the world in our time – fast moving, unseasonable warmth, tempestuous winds, broken branches, miscellany in disarray, trucks rolled into ditches, power lost.  

 

Indeed.  The storm that is our natural world, our relationships, our politics, our spirituality, our discomfited psyches, our certainties disarrayed, our confidences dismembered.  Fast, hot, broken and scattered.  Life overturned and drained of any power to generate much of useful consequence.

 

We simply weren’t up for the frivolity of tinsel this year – even the celebratory sparkles of beloved ornaments. 

 

The tree, then – stately and centering, grounding and glimmering with quiet grace and gentle promise.  And, somehow, the miracle that into those simple branches and bulbs all the memories, all the names and faces and stories and milestones, all the blessings of those treasured balls and stars and miscellaneous shapes, the silver and paper and porcelain and wood…

 

…are mystically enfolded and adorned.  

 

They will hang there again in years to come, but this year they are even more fully present in their absence from this, our warmest, simplest and most beautiful tree ever.  

A Prayer for the Second Sunday of Advent

 

God of hope and peace – two precious lights that seem so fragile – we give you thanks for their flickering reminder of your intent among us.  As powerfully as our hearts savor the sanded and varnished memories of what was and who were, you nudge us not to live there; illuminating the path toward what might be, what you will to be, and here and now beckon us to embody it.  

O God of hope and peace, manifested in every baby born among us, draw us more fiercely into your work – the construction of your way on earth as it is in heaven – for their sake along with our own.  By your light may we...

• rebuff the evil, 
• resist the demeaning, 
• refuse the self-serving, 
• reclaim the forsaken, 
• re-member the fragmented, 
• revive the forlorn, 
• rekindle in us the passion for this world and its intrinsic loveliness that you demonstrated when Creation was, itself, an infant.

So let us hold each other as though we were soft and new.  

So let us feed each other as though we were crying and nuzzling for the milk of life.  

So let us shelter each other as though we were fragile and in need of the strong grace of another.  

Because though we are loathe to admit it out loud and to each other, we are all those things.

 

In every baby born among us, help us to see ourselves, our neighbor, and you.  And in the light of such holy recognition, teach again to pray...

 

Prayed with the disciples at Runnells Christian Church, December 5, 2021