It Comes to Us All (Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama)

 "Beauty that
we left behind
how shall we
tomorrow find

Set aside
our weight in sin
so that we
can live again"  -Ben Harper

Hopeful. Tired. Expectant. Regretful. Anxious. Suffering. Celebrating. Sorrowing. We stand on the threshold. Whatever the journey of the last year entailed for us, however we come to it, tonight we will step across, out of the old year and into the new.

Some of us will mark this passing in the company of friends and family, some in huge celebratory crowds, life’s demands will cause others to mark the occasion while at work, or in hospitals and still others will pass the night in church. Regardless of where we are tonight, whether we limp, crawl, run or skip into it, the New Year will come to us all. We will together meet it at 12:00 AM.

As we do at the dawning of each new year, we turn toward possibility, we breathe deeply of hope and remember that the baby of the manger came to make all things new, that what is lost may be found again, what is broken may be repaired, that the world can be changed.

But most of all today, at AMP we want to remember that we walk into the New Year together. This is a great hope. For within one another lie innumerable possibilities-- for support, companionship, solidarity, tenacity, creativity to heal our hearts, hold us up, pull us forward, feed our hungers, and transform us and the world in which we live.  The divine gift of possibility, of hope, dwells richly in us when we are community.

full lyrics here. 

Today’s music selection sings through moments of struggle and fatigue, of wondering about the future, of hopefulness and rebirth;  all of them hemmed in by choruses that speak of reaching out in faith and that assert “I shall not walk alone.”  As we end this season of the Advent Music Project, this is the message that we hope carries us through in the New Year: we do not walk alone.

The New Year meets us all together, may we know in our selves the power of that together-ness as we walk into this next year.   

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. -Romans 15:13

Thank you for journeying with us through Advent and peace to you in the coming year.               

-Anna and Lindsey

We Really Must Insist (The Lumineers)

 

Remember, Lord, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old. 

-Psalm 25:6

I wish I was more stubborn. It runs in my family. I had a couple famously stubborn grandparents, and then there’s my stubborn mother/father (according to my father/mother), and certain other relatives bearing this particular resemblance.  But not me; I guess, because there had to be at least one compromiser in the family, or it's an unfortunate symptom of my need to people please. At any rate, stubbornness has been something I’ve had to cultivate.  

 But there are just some things upon which we must insist. I learned this lesson from my stubborn mother, who her kids along to union rallies and public protests at the capitol building: upon the rights and dignity of workers, we must insist. I learned this lesson from my stubborn father, whom I watched step into the middle of conflict, big or small, employing integrity and honesty to mediate: upon peace and reconciliation we must insist. I do not laud stubbornness for stubbornness sake, not for insisting on its own way or on frivolous preferences, but when it comes to the well-being of others, issues of justice, showing mercy and love to our neighbors, we must insist. Stubbornly insist.

Sometimes the right response to the needs that are uncovered, heard, spoken in the spirit of Advent, is to join our voices in saying the need, join our wills in the insistence that these needs (ours and others’) be addressed. Sometimes all our hope has to feed on is sheer stubbornness; a refusal to give up, a refusal to forget, a refusal to go to sleep.

Stubborn Love by The Lumineers

Do you ever wonder how God experiences waiting? What is waiting like for the God who first desired to wipe out violence among the first people populating the earth; the God who has longed for a family since the first promise of descendants as numerous as the stars? Traditionally, during advent we remember the waiting of the people of God, across centuries, their longing for a Messiah to come. But we also remember that they did not wait in a Divinity void. Generation after generation God dwelt, spoke, provided, called, delivered, and lead her people. Stubborn God so longed for us, that eventually God became the message of Love: breathing, walking, and giving Loveself to the world.

This Love echoes in our song today; a song about love that in spite of pain, and in opposition to indifference, remains; screaming out, refusing to leave, it can’t be told otherwise. This stubborn love is the path of the followers of God. As the birth of the babe in Bethlehem (and his life, death and resurrection) teach us, it is love above all, upon which we must insist.

What is the God of Stubborn Love calling you to insist upon today? On whose behalf is the God of Insistent Love inviting you to stubborn today?

Divine Love, make us stubborn in our concern for one another, empower us to insist on behalf of the vulnerable among us, and hold us all together with a love that refuses to let us go.



-Lindsey

**This week, we'll take YOUR suggestions for what songs help you Seed the Hope or Resist the Sleep. Post a YouTube link with your thoughts and we'll re-post them all on our Saturday post.**

Q & A (Raphael Saadiq)




photo courtesy David Pham

"Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you."  Matthew 7:7

We need good questions. Questions that help us name our needs and desires, questions that elicit our voice and create space for us to know ourselves better, questions that identify the dissonance and brokenness in life, questions that open us up to dream of something different.

In his book, Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes to a young man who is troubled by questions to which he cannot find the answers. Rilke says. “Love the questions themselves; as if they are locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language…live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live you way into the answers.”

In this Advent season one of our needs is time and space to question, and to sit with the questions; to be, to wait, to speak and to listen. There is some grace here, some breathing room to pause, some relief to be had in calling out the disjointed places in this season and in our lives.

                                     

Our song today reminds us, however, that we cannot stop there. As much as we need the space and the practice of questioning, we also need answers. We cannot stop pursuing, hoping for, demanding answers to some of our most important questions.  The catch of Advent is that we tell the truth, and name our needs and ask our questions and we wait and we dwell and we observe; but we do so with expectation, with hope - we need to.

 So we look for answers. We expect answers for questions like Saadiq’s, who will “help that child whose only 4 years old?” We demand answers when we confront injustices in our communities and brokenness in our institutions. We work toward answers for questions that echo across the nations, “How can peace become a reality on our streets and in our world?” And we hope for answers to the questions whispering within us: “Can I be transformed?”

So we come, needy, to this Advent season. We bring the questions that we must ask and the answers that we already have, in the hope that they will talk to each other, sparking among us better questions and deeper answers, for these, we need in every season.

As we enter this Advent season, may we hear, in community, the voices around us and the voice within. May we listen for the deepening questions, and seek together the strength to press on for their answers.

                                                                                                                                              -Lindsey

Wed Dec. 21 - Coming Home (Alexi Murdoch)

For I am convinced that neither life nor death,
neither angels nor demons,
neither the present nor the future,
nor any powers,
neither height nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

                 - Romans 8:38-39



Sometimes less words are better; in the case of talking about dwelling in to God's love made manifest at Christmas, maybe too many words just flatten the mystery.  So just a handful:

It's possible that Alexi Murdoch's Orange Sky is a song about romantic love or love for a parent, but the language is almost confessional in tone -- 'in your love, my salvation lies, in your love.'  No matter the subject, this is not an individualistic, self-interested love - but rather a love that wraps into an entire system, a community.  It is salvation that includes the brother and sister standing by, that allows the speaker to find hope and strength and recognize a home place.

Alexi Murdoch, Home

It's 'a long road we've been walking on,' and sometimes it's easier to let our 'strong minds' carry on in the belief that we are alone, that our broken hearts are fractured too completely... but we know better.

Here is what I know now:

The Love that comes at Christmas comes something like in this song, both intensely personal and yet wholly communal.  The love of Christ's birth isn't inward-facing, but saves us to be with others and the world.  This love saves us not just by some feat of "substitutionary atonement" or sacrificial suffering, but also simply by being what it is: the love of God made so real and immediate that it needed to take on flesh in order to look us truly and fully in the eyes.  

This is what I know now: we are loved beyond our imaging, beyond height and depth and all powers, and that this is love that has power and force to free and save us - even from ourselves.  In this end, this love is where I live; this love is my home that doesn't save me or take me from the earth, but roots me more fully in the here and the now of things, alongside my sisters and brothers, creatively, openly, communally loving and being loved into the world that is sill being born this season.

May we dwell in the knowledge that our salvation lies in the love God which is so elemental, so radical, that it became human and dwelt among us.

                      - Anna

Thurs Dec. 15 - Carrying our Songs (Lauryn Hill and Ziggy Marley)

Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
   incline your ears to the words of my mouth. 
I will open my mouth in a parable;
   I will utter dark sayings from of old, 
things that we have heard and known,
   that our ancestors have told us. 
We will not hide them from their children;
   we will tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the Lord, and the LORD's might,
   and the wonders that God has done. 
                          - Psalm 78:1-4

Anna: I love Bob Marley's Redemption Song, but what makes it an Advent song for me is the idea of carrying our histories that I hear in the line 'they're all I ever had...redemption songs.'  It reminds me of the preciousness of redemptive stories, especially for displaced or struggling peoples.  Bob Marley speaks from the experience of the African diaspora, and the prophets (and likely the psalmist of psalm 78) spoke for a scattered Jewish population.  It is amazing to recognize that the promises of God have represented 'all some people have ever felt they had' to carry with them through their difficult journeys.  As people who can frequently fool ourselves into forgetting our need and hunger for stories, how can we name the value of stories that name and claim us, that wrestle with us and change us, that bless us and set us free?
 

Lindsey: For me, there is something striking about the part of that same verse that says ‘Won't you help me sing / these songs of freedom?’   This request for joining voices in freedom songs speaks to me of a need for the community  to sing the song together, to tell the story together. It reminds me that we are all keepers of those communal stories.  We have a responsibility to remember the story of our community and to let it live through our voice as we pass it on. There is a collective ownership as we help each other to remember the  songs and as each singer’s place in the song adds a new dimension to it.  It's my experience, that when it comes to the stories of our communities, there's a way in which we hold the story and the story holds us…

Redemption Song (Bob Marley) sung by Lauryn Hill and Ziggy Marley

Anna: As you talk about everyone's contribution to the song, it sort of reminds me of a quilt, or the act of quilting.  I actually don't have any idea how to quilt, but from what I understand, people often used pieces of their own lives - old discarded clothes worm for a special event, etc. - so the quilt became a pieced-together history of where they'd been.  At times, the quilts would be worked on in groups, or would be heirlooms handed down to the next generation, so they were also communal.  These gathered scraps of quilting cloth often became story-telling vehicles for a family, a community… How is this also true for our Bible, which is actually a beautiful patchwork of stories, histories, poems, prophecies and letters compiled over at least a thousand years of history and movement and change?

Lindsey: I think there is a way in which each of our stories inform and reform each other; shaped, combined, set apart, by the stories to which they are 'quilted.' This is true for the interplay of our own life stories and the stories of our ancestors - those handed down orally and those given in the Bible. The story gets handed down and then retold in different and creative ways.  Connecting us to the stories, a place of identity and communal belonging, and connecting the story to us, singing wisdom or comfort or challenge into our lives: these redemption songs.

May we carry with us our redemption songs into these late Advent days; our hopes stitched, sung and scribed across cultures and times, trusting that they are answered by God's promises in Christ.

                                 - Lindsey and Anna