advent journal: a forward God
As Jay and I were eating breakfast this morning, he began laughing at an email message he received, a Christmas letter from one of his co-workers. Her holiday letter of gratitude focused on forwarded email. Here’s part of what she had to say:
I am taken in by her wit and reasonably gentle sarcasm. I like it when someone can make fun of something with style. What I noticed during my day of cooking is the letter took me beyond the humor to somewhere more substantive. Once again, I’m taken by the verb, which I think of first as a direction rather than an action word: forward. We had our mail forwarded from Massachusetts – sent forward would be the fuller expression, which means it is catching up with us. Forward can mean prompt, presumptuous, progressive, and pertaining to the future. It can mean eager, advanced, and being ahead of current trends.
And it can mean radical or extreme. We belong to a forward God and, perhaps, a forwarding God, one who is out in front and catching up with us all at the same time. In the language of grace, forward is a word that means we’re surrounded, enveloped, challenged and comforted by the God who was and is and will be all at once.
The visceral reality of a birth in a feeding shed behind a tiny hotel in a land that knew little of wealth or health or hope, for that matter, means what is being forwarded to us is not an empty scheme or a devious trap. No, it’s the real deal: Love radical and extreme enough to awaken shepherds and sages, angels and animals; a Love so amazing, so divine that lays an unflinching and unyielding claim on our lives and calls us to forward that same love in the way we live with and touch those around us.
Jesus was born in the dirt and the straw two thousand years ago; move forward twenty-one centuries and we still follow the star and wait to hear the herald angels sing not so we can be thrown back into long ago, but that we might be forwarded into the lives of others who need to know a radical, extravagantly loving God who is also a little nuts and has a pretty good sense of humor.
I can picture God laughing at the email, if, of course, someone had forwarded it.
Peace,
Milton
