Advent 3 DIVINE STORIES

An Advent Tale

Ask any “churched” person about the meaning of Advent, and they may respond with waking up or preparation or penitence or hope or light or birth or one of many other options.    

Individual words have their own energy of sound and meaning, but a whole new level of power blossoms when words come together to tell a story.  Jesus knew that.  That's why he taught in parables.  He was an absolutely divine story teller.

Last Sunday Rev. Max at St. Timothy's on the Hill shared a story from Barbara Brown Taylor's book Bread of Angels.   The story is about yet another Advent word:  WAITING.  It's about waiting till the bombs stop falling. 

Taylor has a friend who was eight years old when the Germans bombed London.  The little girl lived in the city with her grandparents, her cousin Bettine, and a big English sheepdog named--appropriately--Blitz.  Whenever the air raid sirens sounded, they all sheltered in a sandbagged garage they shared with a Swedish couple and their little girl, who was also around eight years of age.  And what Taylor's friend remembers most about those times in the bomb shelter is what tremendous fun the little girls had.

We saw things in those sandbags no one else saw.  We hunted for gold in them and we found it.  Then we hid it again.  Sometimes we found goblins and fairies, too.  There was a whole world down there that the adults couldn't see.  When we got too loud they'd say, 'Shhhh, we can't hear the bombs.' 

 Then we would listen too and if the explosions were nearby we would get scared, only the Swedish girl taught my cousin and me what to do.  'Lie on your back and cross your arms over your chest and God will protect you.'  After the bombs stopped, (we) sneaked outside and looked up at the sky--the beautiful sky where all that ugliness came from....I tell you, we had an awfully good time! 
(pp. 162-163.)

How do we choose to wait?

With dread, expecting the worst?  (Shhh, I'm listening for the bombs!)

Or with hope, with trust (cross your arms over your chest and God will protect you!), and above all with divine creativity--open and alert and responsive to all of life, the comfortable and the uncomfortable.

That's the kind of waiting that prospects for gold in sandbags, and celebrates the beautiful sky from which bombs can fall.

Sacred parables aren't only found in scripture.