I think a pivotal question for anyone who is even remotely interested in pursuing God is always some form of, "Does God show up?" It's a pivotal question because how we answer that question colors everything else. If we answer "no" to the question, then God isn't truly engaged with us. But if we answer "yes," it means that God is not only present, he is deeply engaged in his world and with his creatures. That changes everything.
The season Advent is about expectation. It's about hope. It's about a God who shows up. It's about a God who dares us to sit patiently in the darkness and wait for the light. It's also about a left-handed God that almost always comes from you-don't-know-where and shows up in ways that you least expect.
Two thousand years ago, the people of Israel expected God to act. They expected him to show up on their behalf as a savior. And he did...in the most backward way possible. He didn't even bring the salvation that they desired, which was political. He brought the salvation they needed.
Lost in all of the lights, wrapping paper, and saccharine Christmas moments of the month of December is the fact that God showed up in a cave in a backwater town as a drooling, pooping, spitting-up baby, surrounded by farm animals. We miss the fact that the only ones who recognized who he was, and who received God's angelic memo to the world, were a bunch of poor farmers who had nothing better to do. In our familiarity with the story we lose the revolutionary message of all of it: God shows up, but we have to have the eyes to see him.
We often like to pray, and then act as if we are the director of life's stage production. We pray for God to show up, and then we proceed to tell him in which way we would like him to go and at what time. We feel great about ourselves until this actor-God flips the script, takes the reins, and screws up the whole play. This God has the audacity to tell us, the masterful directors of our own lives, that he prefers to be in charge because we really have no idea what a good life-play even looks like. And in our protest of this hijacking, we close our eyes. God shows up and out of vanity, pride, or sheer ignorance of what God even looks like, we miss the moment that may just be the life-changer we so desperately seek.
So during Advent we reflect on the amazing claim that God has shown up and will continue to show up. We are reminded, or perhaps are told for the first time, that we are not in charge. And, scandalously so, we are reminded that if we are going to have the life we really seek, we must have new eyes to see him. The eyes of Advent are eyes that can pierce the darkness and gloom to see the glimmer of light in a previously unseen place. The eyes of Advent can see a baby in a feeding trough for what he really is, a left-handed God coming out of nowhere to give the world what it didn't even know it wanted.
