in advent an exile

Waiting in a line of traffic on a cloudy and late november afternoon when the air outside is crisp and damp,
listening to the din of public radio talk or the crooning of Nat or Bing singing "Chestnuts roasting..." or "I'm dreaming...", I find myself dreaming, but not of  a white Christmas.  For what do I dream?  The car creeps forward and stops, and creeps, stops, creeps...the short distance lengthened by the slow motion of my leaders.  For what do I dream as I wait in the car alone among so many others who drive alone toward a familiar or unfamiliar place?  About whom do I dream?  What longings are within me now?  What promised land do I strive to enter?  What holy place to I hope to inhabit? 

In the various comings and goings of anxious, active, constant public life I wonder as I wander if any of it matters.  As I receive criticism for visiting men in prison or caring about non-christians living broken, hopeless, and impoverished lives I wonder if it is worth it.  How do I count the costs?  As a congregation realizes the impact of this crisis of faith and life at the end of the age of modernity, how do we negotiate a way forward in peace?  In this wilderness, there will be tragic casualties.  I am beginning to wonder if I am such a one.  Am I going to lose everything I once believed in?  Have I already lost more than I bargained for? What has been stripped away, reduced, diminished, laid waste in this ruins called Christendom?  Our Jerusalems, our temples have been torn down.  So little remains of what once confirmed our privileged place, our security, our shelter.  I still remember it.  But we can't go back there.  Its gone.  Where are we going?  What dream confronts us and compels us onward? What hope mobilizes us against the forces that oppose the movement? Where are we going? Where is the exit sign and the off ramp? We have left and entered this desert where negotiations are taking place at every level with respect to the situation we are in and the appropriate response to it.   It is not helpful to be a prophet in this age of mass confusion.  To see and to hear and to understand and to be rejected because other voices have been authorized and other words have been accepted.   Jeremiah's laments as Jerusalem falls are becoming like music to me. 

"O Lord you deceived me and I was deceived; ou overpowered me and prevailed.  I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me.  Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction.  So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long.  But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak anymore in his name, his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones.  I am weary of holding it in, in fact I cannot." Advent waiting is more poignant when it does not end on december 25th.  we wait because we are not yet where we are going, nor are we with whom we long to be with.  We wait because He has not come again and we need Him to come again and again and again.  Get us out of here, Jesus.  Get us out of here.