from The Almond Tree
December 15, 2012

The Carol of the Season: “I Am with You”

By DANIEL J. MILLER, Ph.D.

~ Headline ~
“20 Children Among 26 Dead in Connecticut School Shooting” ~

The spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor,
to heal the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and release to the prisoners,
to announce a year of favor from the Lord
and a day of vindication by our God. (Isaiah 61)

Lest we allow the jingles and jangles piped through shopping malls and grocery stores to dupe us completely, the horrific event that took place yesterday in Newtown, Connecticut calls us back to the graphic and gritty context of the season of Advent. Perhaps we know the Christmas story too well or have been numbed to the world’s winter by our own good fortune to know the whole story any longer. Advent reminds us that the song we sing for glad tidings, healing, and freedom is no lovely carol but an earthy blues song, a gut-wrenching plaintive cry that spurts forth from the vulnerable places in the world and in the human heart where we are the poorest, most broken, and imprisoned.

From the days of old until now, the most genuine Advent carol is the prayer that pours forth like the incoherent cry of the mother or father running from a hastily parked car toward the Sandy Hook fire station pleading words God alone can translate, to hear of their child’s safety. Will that glad tiding be enough Christmas for one year or ten or twenty?

And what of those whose children will not be home for Christmas, those families who today received bad tidings, sad tidings, unspeakable tidings? And what of all the families in the world with whom these families now share a special bond, the ridiculously plentiful number of brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and grandparents and orphans and spouses and neighbors whose cracking voices and shattered lives, on the best days, cry out from their particular wildernesses “make straight the way of the Lord” and, on their worst days, cry out “where the bleep were you God?” What does this hinged season of Advent-Christmas offer them?

I love Advent with its expectant waiting and serum blue hope, its yearning and wonder and restrained joy. I love the beautiful carols and customs. But I wonder, have I, have we, so dressed up the world’s agony and our own anguish like children in cotton beards and tin-foil haloes and oversized-bathrobes that we no longer recognize “the bleak mid-winter” of the world? Is to suggest such pain, to sing such excruciating longing even permissible in the church today where the Incarnation has been reduced to Baby-Jesus’ birthday complete with kneeling Santa paying his predictable adoring respects as if to assure each other we know the reason for the season?

The central revelation and conviction for Christians is that GOD IS WITH US (“us” here meaning not only each of us personally but all of creation). In and through the divine comedy whereby God became human, GRACE WINS THE DAY (“day” here meaning now and forever). Pardon my lack of sophistication, but all the theology books, treatises, papal documents, dictionaries, and catechisms with their omniscient explanations and erudite distinctions between Catholic, Orthodox, Liberal, Neo-Liberal, or Evangelical Protestant understandings of soteriology and atonement, leave me rather cold. My eyes get tired from all the rolling.

I confess. This is it for me: Jesus came not so much to communicate a message as to become the message God desires to communicate: I AM WITH YOU.

The method of communication is the mystery of salvation and the means of giving life, namely, embodiment. The embodiment of God in Jesus reveals the integral dimension of the message God most wants to impart and most hopes humankind receives: I AM WITH YOU. In this place and in this time, in the soil and the soul, in not-so-random-acts-of-kindness and in senseless acts of violence, I AM WITH YOU. In season and out, this is our faith (some call it wishful thinking, others a fog-inducing opiate, still others say it is offensive). Admittedly, it is not for the faint of heart, and honestly, many nights my heart faints, and it is all I can do to lean into the audacity that whispers “In the wood of the crib and on the wood of the cross, I AM WITH YOU.” And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth (Jn. 1:14).

Much as we’d like to think the incarnation we celebrate this season brings a salvation that prevents bad things from happening to good people, or magically wipes away with a divine swipe of the wand all personal tragedies and cosmic boo boos, it’s not that way. For some reason and in some imperceivable way, God saves BY BEING WITH US. Whether in the inglorious birth in a cattle feeding-box or in the ignominious death on a rough-hewn cross, ours is a soteriology by way of solidarity. God cannot be God without being FOR and WITH us. In Jesus, the ineffable first name of God — the I AM before whom Moses stood and hid his face in awe — is joined to the inexpressible divine surname, WITH YOU. The closest we come to the unpronounceable moniker of God is WITHNESS. The nearest we draw to the unsayable divine designation is EMMANUEL. “God” means we are not alone and Jesus is a living reminder when we are inclined to forget

One day, when we can forgive God for not being where we want God to be, when we want God to be there, doing what we want God to do, in the way we want God to do it, our hope might be awakened by the tears of God who comforts and saves and weeps and heals and loves us by being with us, and makes all things new — even the earth, even life, even death, whomever we’ve lost, and whatever the world has broken. In the meantime, be the proxy of divine presence to someone who is hurting or to somewhere the earth is suffering.

~djm