There's not really a way around it. I am a liturgical nerd. I am a plaid jumper/Lisa Frank backpack/penny loafers complete with taped-up-1990's-plastic-rimmed-glasses-before-glasses-were-cool-wearing liturgical nerd. When my teaching pastor, Josh Carney, called out the liturgical nerds last week, he might have just said, Sharyl (and Craig Nash).

So it is with this caveat that you must take the weight of the next statement. Last week, was my favorite week in the liturgical calendar. The transition between Christ the King Sunday and the first week of Advent is something I anticipate every year as ordinary time drones on. No matter how hard I try to discipline myself in the ordinary, I cannot help but eagerly await Advent. I don't even get that excited about Christmas (though I'm working on it), just give me Advent!

Our floating Advent creation.

I love preaching on the themes of expectation and hope. I love studying 2nd Temple Judaism and all the sociopolitical madness that goes with it. I love to retell the story again and again, the grand meta-narrative, where no one can even begin to foresee what is coming, but the story is barreling ever so slowly towards to Messiah in an unexpected Jesus. Jesus is the climax of a great story.

And yet....

This year, the anxiety of waiting has been magnified by my own fears. After a year and a half of job searching  I have no idea where I am headed. The waiting has far surpassed a liturgical season, and  I know I am not alone.

I went to my parent's house in Abilene for Thanksgiving. The morning after I returned to Waco I received word that a 19 year old friend of my brother was killed in a car accident. They had played baseball together since they were little. This accident all to eerily mirrored the death of a girl in my youth group and high school, almost 10 years to the day, both coming home from Texas Tech for Thanksgiving.


How do tragedies such as this fit in our narrative? What hope is there for a world that still sees such chaos?
This is the moment that I want to hear theology coming from the developed world the least, unless it's the developed world in crisis. Enter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He writes to his parents from Hitler's Tegel prison camp Advent 1943:

As long as there are people. Christ will walk the earth as your neighbor, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you.That is the great seriousness and great blessedness of the Advent message. Christ is standing at the door; he lives in the form of a human being among us. Do you want to close the door or open it?

Christ is knocking. It's still not Christmas, but it's also still not the great last Advent, the last coming of Christ. Through all the Advents of our life that we celebrate runs the longing for the last Advent, when the word will be "see, I am making all things new" (Rev 21:5).

The Advent season is a season of waiting, but our whole life is an Advent season, that is, a season of waiting for the last Advent, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us...

This liturgical nerd can handle the already but not yet, if there is a last Advent, where my purple and pink is void of waiting.

Today was one of those deja vu Sundays where the rhythm of church life gifts me with a long forgotten memory. When I left Carrollton International Baptist Mission in the summer of 2007 to purse seminary the youth group was running 30-40 students. This is my last memory, thus the one that tends to stick, however, I think my brain selectively leaves out the many Sundays of the years prior where three of four youth leaders sat around starring at each other, wondering if anyone was ever going to come. Sometimes just got in our cars and started looking for students (young and zealous, yes). And then there were the Sundays, the even more awkward Sundays, where only one student showed up and the decision had to be made. Do we pretend like this is normal and move on as planned, or do we go get Mickey D's? To be honest, our decision varied week to week. I never found a "right" answer, but always tried to make a decision based on the student.

Flash forward five years, after a hiatus in local church youth ministry, to the beginning of another new youth ministry, and as is inevitable, a Sunday with only one student. So of course, the question was posed again. Do we walk to the taco truck, or crack open a Bible? Do I adjust my group activity or run on the fly? Do we attempt the opening lectio divina experience or skip it? Here's a brief account of what happened next (with permission).

Leader (jokingly): Hey, why don't you read something for us?

Student: Okay, okay, I'm going to open it randomly and just start reading and tell you what it means.

Leader: Ummm, could you read Luke 2:41-52?

Student: Awww, I was just going to read something random,  but ok. It's gonna be really wonky though because it's the Message.

Leader: It's ok, just read it.

Student: There aren't any numbers! Where are the numbers?

Leader: It must be an older version of the Message. Just read the part about Jesus going to the Temple.

Student begins to read. 

Every year Jesus' parents traveled to Jerusalem for the Feast of Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up as they always did for the Feast.When it was over and they left for home, the child Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents didn't know it. Thinking he was somewhere in the company of pilgrims, they journeyed for a whole day and then began looking for him among relatives and neighbors. When they didn't find him, they went back to Jerusalem looking for him.

The next day they found him in the Temple seated among the teachers, listening to them and asking questions. The teachers were all quite taken with him, impressed with the sharpness of his answers.  But his parents were not impressed; they were upset and hurt. His mother said, "Young man, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been half out of our minds looking for you."  

He said, "Why were you looking for me? Didn't you know that I had to be here, dealing with the things of my Father?" But they had no idea what he was talking about.  So he went back to Nazareth with them, and lived obediently with them. His mother held these things dearly, deep within herself. And Jesus matured, growing up in both body and spirit, blessed by both God and people.

I'd never been so struck by this passage. Listening to the young voice of a middle school boy read the account of middle school-aged Jesus, made me for the first time see this passage not as one where Jesus' divinity shown through in some Gospel of Thomas-esque precocious child as I had previously tried unsuccessfully to avoid. No, Jesus looks incredibly human, a lot like this student who often asks the tough questions that adults have been trained are impolite to ask.  As one who has a lot to offer the church even when his wisdom is shrouded in giggles.

Our college women's Bible study has been studying how to read Scripture this semester. One of the tenants we have discussed is reading in community. I could have read Luke 2 a hundred more times in seclusion and not for a second felt what I felt hearing it read by a student. The old stories that I am so sure I know, are living and breathing and coming to life again and again. This is why multi-generational church life is so important. This is why I think I'll continue to hang out with teenager even when they tell me Facebook is for old people.

Myers-Briggs doesn't know what to do with me. I can retake the test  back to back days, and have completely different results. There are just several of the "rational" and "irrational" traits as Carl Jung describes them that I seem to be quite prone to switching between depending on the situation and my general disposition at the time.It really doesn't take any major shift, I just tend to see several possibilities in the answer choices.The E/I, extrovert/introvert function, is no exception. I easily, to my blessing or curse, sit on the fence particularly when I am operating in wholeness, in my healthiest self (see the Birkman for that analysis). When this is not the case I tend to plummet to one extreme or the other,which lately for me has meant being more of an "I," fittingly because in this state "I" tend to be the only one that matters. 


Anyway all that to say this weekend, when someone innocently said " It is really late notice and I am sure you already have plans..." something instantly clicked inside of me before I had even heard what the offer was. I realized how very sad it was that I was on the brink of spending Easter in isolation and had somehow thought that would be OK. Last 4th of July I actively sought out something to do with people, but Easter, the pinnacle of the Christian calendar, and I wanted to spend it alone? Certainly many a Sabbath is necessarily spent quietly in one's home resting and relaxing, but Easter is a day for celebration WITH each other. I talk about community openly, but I also openly admit I don't always like practicing it. Sometimes it just doesn't come naturally. So thank you someone for saving my Easter, and may the Easter Bunny hide the Myers-Briggs somewhere no one will find it.

I would say I have always hated Lent, but let's be honest, I grew up baptist and knew nothing about it. Good Friday, however, is another story. I can remember being a kid and trying really hard to be sad on this day. It was my up most intent every year, but on a spring day with no school, and typically a 5 day weekend in my district, I usually failed. And I felt guilty. Could I not be sad for Jesus for just ONE day? Ironically, in my Southern Baptist context, feeling guilty was something I was good at, and thus, in some ways, I ended up "appropriately" sad, just for another reason. I was a failure.