I Heard the Bells

Talking with my parents last week, our conversation drifted to understanding what in the early church prompted their rapid growth.  Was it persecution? Was it their acts of sharing everything they had?  It certainly wasn’t targeted marketing strategies or “seeker-friendly” worship sets; and I don’t think they wrote three easy steps to an effective mission statement. An interesting point my dad brought up that I’ve been ruminating on since was that of patience.  The early church wrote about patience, not evangelism, and reflected on prayer, catechesis, and worship.  And the church grew, not by specific strategies, but because the virtue of patience was of central importance in the life and witness of the early Christians.  Now, we as the Church start to get antsy when the sermon is more than 20 minutes or we aren’t seeing our number of small groups growing every quarter or my prayer for a child doesn’t happen in six months, two years, any time frame I create.  Somehow, I don’t think it was a coincidence that Paul began his oft-quoted definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13 by stating that, “love is patient.”

And in case you haven’t noticed, it’s that time of year again. Advent. Preparing for Christmas. When the world tells us to speed up and do and plan all the holiday things.  But the crazy part is that this is when the Church has intentionally set aside four weeks to slow down, to patiently await the celebration of Jesus’ first coming and actively anticipate his coming again. In the introduction to the devotional that we are going through for the next few weeks, advent is spoken about in this way, “Advent forms a people who can be patient with God’s gracious redemption of all things…it might be wonderfully transformative and counter formative to spend four weeks every year intentionally seeking to be shaped by the patient endurance of God.  Advent invites the people of God to endure.” Scott Daniels

So this conversation about patience perhaps being what the modern church is missing juxtaposed with the season of advent shaping a people with patient endurance creates a reflection of our parenthood journey the past four years.  I know I’ve written about waiting and patience a lot, but God continues to reveal the importance of this virtue time and again.  After all, God took 33 years to bring about the redemption of creation after Jesus’ birth.  Which was after the people of Israel spent thousands of years waiting for the Messiah.  It keeps coming up that our timeline for how things should happen is much shorter than God’s, probably because my timeline is me focused, while God’s looks at the whole narrative of reconciling creation back to Godself.  God, being God, could have snapped his fingers when the Israelites were in Egypt for generations. Or wandering the desert for decades. Or sent Jesus as a fully grown man.  But God chose patient endurance.  And I don’t think that’s something we can brush aside so flippantly.

One of my favorite Christmas songs is “I Heard the Bells” which was adopted from a poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow during the Civil War.  If you can listen to this version by Jars of Clay (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odGJR33xElw), do.  I think it beautifully captures the tension of advent, the pain and hope of our waiting for a child.  Imagine if our story ended with verse three, “And in despair I bowed my head; ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said; ‘For hate is strong, and mocks the song of peace on earth, good-will to men!' ” 

But Jesus. Immanuel. God with us. This is not the end!

“Then rang the bells more loud and deep. God is not dead, nor does He sleep.  The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, good-will to men.”