God, we are waiting.

Longing.

The world needs healing.
We need healing.

We can’t imagine
A wolf living with a lamb,
or a leopard lying down with a goat.

Lions and calves together with a child
is impossible to comprehend.
Lions touching them, children touching lions.
Not our infants near a cobra’s den
or our five-year old’s hand in a viper’s nest!
We can’t imagine.

And yet
We long.
for peace when our hands touch fear,
when our hearts race hearing
of more gun violence,
and see a graph of statistics on climate change,
when we hear the name of another life lost
too young.
We want the courage to reach out,
And hope the other wants to reach out, too
and share Your healing touch.
To trust that in this touch no more
harm or destruction will come.

So we wait.
We wait to feel the healing touch of your hand.
We imagine
Warriors ending wars with clasped hands,
Guns reshaped into tools of peace,
Our own hands healing,
Spreading hope as we wait.
in expectation
For leopards and goats, lions, and lambs
And the children who will walk with and lead them.

First of all, it was a gift from my mother.  It came with matching vinyl placemats.  And was accompanied by a vinyl Thanksgiving placemat.  Not exactly my style.  But I still have all of them.  And every year around this time of year, I pull this never-been-used folded vinyl tablecloth out of the Christmas storage bin, feel its fake-feeling tacky surface, and I think of Mom.

My mother died two years ago tomorrow.  Her birthday was yesterday.  She had her first stroke in July of 2020, during the height of the Covid shutdowns, and she spent the next several months in the hospital in intensive rehab.  She finally made it home just before Thanksgiving.  We decided not to travel that year – didn’t want to risk exposing mom.  A little over a week later, she had another stroke, and this time she didn’t come home from the hospital. 

I’m not over it.  Even though I think we made the right decision at the time, I still wish I had gone home for Thanksgiving that year for one last time at home with my mom.  And even though I have been pulling this nasty vinyl tablecloth out of Christmas storage each year for over 20 years now – ever since I have had a home of my own – it has had a had a special significance these past two years.  In truth, I have never much cared for the “Christmas season” – with its mandatory good cheer, obligatory gifts and get-togethers, and sappy holiday music and made-for-TV movies.  The way I feel about most of what happens during the month of December is much the same way I feel about vinyl tablecloths.  But over these last few years, both have become bearers of memory and meaning.

What I truly long for – during Advent and most any time of the year – are things that I can’t have.  I want to have done things differently in those last weeks that my mom was alive.  I want things to be like they were for me when I had a full time job as a pastor with an office and a pension and a group of people that looked as their spiritual shepherd.  I want to go back to college and tell my I-know-better-than-my-advisors 20 year old self that they make good points that I really ought to consider. I want to go back and not lose touch with all my friends and classmates from high school and college.  I want to go back and practice the piano and the guitar more.  I want things to be like they were before Covid.

But I can’t go back.  None of us can.

In seminary, we talked about Advent being a time of “Already, and Not Yet.”  We await and prepare for a Christ who has already been born, and is also not yet born among us; we anticipate the coming of the Kingdom of God which is already manifest, and also not yet realized.  But I think as humans we often forget the “not yet” part of Advent, and just cozy up with “already.”  And when we do that, we get stuck in the past.  And our longing, and our yearning, ends up looking an awful lot like nostalgia at its best, and a cocktail of regret and wishful thinking at its worst.

Which is why this vinyl tablecloth is an apt symbol of my current Advent experience.  Because now, when I take it out of the box at the beginning of the holiday season, and I feel that smooth and glossy texture which was so much a part of my formative years growing up, I remember what was.  And it is a bittersweet mixture of memories and regrets.  But since there is absolutely no chance that I will actually ever use this thing, it will be but a moment.  And when I have had that moment to ponder what already was and then put it back in the box for another year, I can symbolically open myself to what is not yet – to the life I am in the process of living now – and turn my longing in a new, more hopeful direction, where the one who came that we might have abundant life is waiting to be born anew, in hearts that are dreaming of a new and mended creation.

Who would have guessed you could get all that just from touching a vinyl tablecloth?

Prayer

God, everything we touch carries memory.  And everything we touch carries the potential for meeting you. 

In this season of Advent, as we remember and celebrate what already is, and wait and yearn for what is not yet, we pray that you would heighten our senses; so that with everything our fingers touch – even something as mundane as a tablecloth – we might find our hearts a bit more open, a bit more prepared, a bit more ready – for Christ to be born anew among us, and for the new creation which you will bring about in and through us…

 Amen.

We share Thanksgiving turkey, ham, 
cranberry relish, stuffing and pumpkin pie 
With friends.
Or relatives we can’t relate to, 
but still hug, sit close to, legs touching
around full dinner tables;
We fill the roads alongside other impatient 
Drivers getting in each other’s way. 
We fill our ears with the sounds of 
Christmas songs in stores, radio waves and 
on our Spotify playlists. 
And light  our houses and lawns and trees 
with plastic red-nosed reindeer and festive lights of green, red, blue 
and all the colors of the rainbow.

Is there room in all of this for waiting? 

We peek out from behind all the trimmings, 
In hope of getting a glimpse of what is coming.
Can we make more room to see, to hear, to feel and taste what’s coming?

God, you have invited us to sit with you in expectation. 
Bless us in our urges to empty ourselves of all the noise and sensory overload
So we can see, hear, touch, and taste 

What’s coming …