A Circle in Time

The last three repair jobs I've paid for, the car, the washing machine and the garage door, each required a second effort by the same company. Worse, each second job required me to pay an additional charge. Didn't it used to be that things were repaired right the first time? Didn't it used to be that repairs were warranted and revisiting the same "fix-it" was a cost borne by the "fixer-upper?" Is it really the case that nobody seems to get it right the first time anymore? Have I just run into a string of bad luck, or is my imagination in over-drive? Whatever, it seems to be a hopeless, vicious circle!

Some days hopeless, vicious circles appear to be everywhere. During the very week we commemorate Rosa Parks' act of courage on a bus 51 years ago in Montgomery, Alabama, people in Elkhart, Indiana, bury a black teenager gunned down in still another act of cowardice, born of racial hatred.

As church, we mark the days of this season with a different circle; a circle of light we call the advent wreath. So little light amidst so much darkness.

As we light the candles of this circle that marks our time of preparation for Christmas, we pray that the Spirit of God would kindle within our hearts both the desire and the ability to become signs of God's near and present light. We've prayed that prayer before. Still, we know in our hearts it's time to circle back and pray it again, alone and together. Such a little prayer, amidst so much death-dealing.

Haven't we been here before? Does this seem like yet another repair job on the same old machinery – the machinery of our broken hearts, our sinking spirits, and dashed hopes? Shouldn't the sincere efforts of our past have brought us to a more delightful and enlightened present? Is it really the case that nobody, not even people of faith, seem to get it right the first time anymore?

Looking to our past, or clinging to the present, as a way toward our hoped for future is a blind alley. Our best hope, our only hope, our sure and certain hope is in the God whose light and life has already born, and borne, among us.

Jesus, Emmanuel, has both come among us and gone on ahead of us. From that time and place with God, Jesus beckons us into the dawn place of kingdom light. A light that's brightest amidst our own, and the world's, darkest moments.

In that light, we can see the darkness for what it really is. Not a circle of viciousness and hopelessness, but shadows amidst those "not yet" places of our own hearts, and all of creation, which await the new birth, the rebirth, of Jesus, God Emmanuel.

It was a wise spiritual director of our own day who said, "All those who claim to be born again know for certain that to be born again really means to be born again, and born again, and born again."

In faith, we people of faith come full circle, again. Trusting the God whom we know and who knows us, to encircle us again, alone and together, out of darkness and viciousness into kinship and belonging, into relatedness and rootedness.

The original repair job is indeed warranted. Moreover, it really was done right the first time. And it costs us nothing. The cost has been paid.

It is by our hearts broken open for others that Christ is born. It is with our spirits poured out to one another that God is Emmanuel. It is through dashing the false hopes offered by this world's viciousness that the Light of Christ conquers all darkness.

God, in Jesus, got it right the first time. And God, in Jesus, gives us the time, and the way, to stand in that rightness. It's not imaginations in over-drive. Neither is it luck. "What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."