Second Thursday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
The long, slow mercy of Christian hope
by Keith Dow
Slowly, hesitatingly, the bunny ears come together. With a look of intense concentration, one loop passes over the other and then under. We should have been out the door ten minutes ago, but in this moment only one thing matters – tying her own shoes. It has taken everything in me to keep from stepping in, quickly lacing the tiny sneakers, and whisking my youngest daughter out the door. Together, we have done it. I have restrained my impulse for efficiency, productivity, and speed; she has achieved what, in this instant, seems like the greatest accomplishment known to humankind. These shoes will come untied again in only a few moments, but victory has been shared for a brief time.
Perhaps you, too, are a parent who has experienced these moments of grace and practicing patience. Perhaps you have had to learn patience with your own body or memory or experience of embodied limitations. Perhaps, like me, you have accompanied a parent through the role-reversal of cognitive decline and caring for someone who spent so many years caring for you. Every one of these encounters and partnerships is infused with tensions, trepidation, and tiny triumphs along the way. Every one of these moments shares in the mysterious movement of mercy, finds its richness in the poised practice of grace. Hope and help share this in common: each waits for the moment when things are made right, and each trusts in Another for deliverance, unsure of when the fullness of time might come.
“But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:8-9, NIV)
Rewind several years from the days of shoe-tying and diaper-changing (now preserved as fond memories as my children enter their teen years). I find myself before a judge–of sorts. Across the table from me sits a professor-monk of the small Catholic university I attend as its resident Protestant. We have wrapped up a course on continental philosophy, and I’m here in its final moments, attempting to convey some semblance of understanding of Jacques Derrida’s opaque reasoning in this oral exam. With a final dramatic statement, my face flush as I deliver the resounding crescendo, I stop and wait. Nothing. Hesitatingly, after an awkward silence, I offer a different approach and see that I have,at last, hit upon what I should have said from the start. This professor has been clear: Whether after asking a question of us in class or in these fraught final moments of verbal confession, he waits so that we have time to climb out of whatever hole we have dug for ourselves. He blatantly ignores our rambling for the first minute or two of our response, for our benefit. This, too, is grace. This, too, is mercy.
While judgment is quick, Mercy is slow. So slow that in a world of injustice, climate disaster, hatred, and war, Mercy appears to be inept, incompetent, or invisible. Yet God’s grace simmers slowly while our arrogant wrath and quick judgment boil over into further injustice and injury. “How long, Oh Lord? How long will you wait?” too often echoes notes of “Save me now, all else be damned.”
“Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” (Ruth 1:16b-17, NIV)
As God waits, hoping, praying in the mirror that all might come to repentance, we too enter into the habit of this long faithfulness. Staying together. Praying together. Dying together. Amidst times of joy and celebration, times of grief and mourning, and times of mindless boredom and trivial pursuits, we hold space for each other’s faith and each other’s doubt. We suspend judgment even as the (insert name of latest social media app) timeline explodes in indignant outburst. We may not know where God is or where God is going, but we hold onto a shared hope that slowness is not surrender and silence is not absence. To “care” finds its origin in the German word for grief, and the two are seldom apart. Yet, in the care we hold for one another, we are swept up in a movement of Love so fierce that not even death can keep us apart.
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