God Prepares Room Through the Events We Didn’t Choose
POST BY MATT MCCOY
7 minute read
What happens when God prepares the room during advent?
That’s a question I’ve never thought about before. I love advent, which is Latin for “coming” or “arrival,” and we’re celebrating the coming of baby Jesus as well as hoping for the return of King Jesus. There’s a tension between celebrating and hoping that I dearly love, and that tension is cultivated when we celebrate what has already happened while hoping for what has not yet happened. And so we wait.
Waiting is a major theme of advent. While we wait for Christmas to arrive, we have so many different ways to prepare room in our hearts as we celebrate baby Jesus and hope for King Jesus.
We have advent candles, advent wreaths, advent calendars, advent prayers, advent songs, advent services, advent missions, the list goes on and on. Every year we have another opportunity to find ways to prepare room, to actively wait, to lean into the celebration and hope of Christmas with the people God has put in our lives. In advent, we prepare room for Jesus, as the song Joy To The World reminds us: “Let every heart, prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing…”.
But 2020 causes me to approach advent differently. It’s that whole pandemic thing. Early on in the pandemic I was reading in the book of Amos, and noticed how God has always been active during pandemics, pestilences, and plagues. God uses these events to bring to the light what we would rather hide in darkness, to bring to the forefront things we would rather overlook, and to help us become friends with people we would rather ignore. Perhaps you’ve noticed the racial upheaval, political fracturing, social unrest, and everything else. Throughout history, God has used these events to prepare room in our hearts for himself. God is preparing room in 2020 through events that happened to us, that we didn’t choose, and that we cannot opt out of.
Every other advent, I’ve focused my attention on how I prepare room in my heart for God through the active waiting of all our advent traditions. But advent 2020? For the first time in my life, I’ve been focusing on how God prepares the room through the events that we didn’t choose.
Mary and Joseph didn’t choose to have a baby in Bethlehem, they had the arduous task of traveling during pregnancy due to a mandatory census (But, hey, since they weren’t yet married, it may have been easier on them to give birth to the baby outside of their hometown). And the place where God prepared the room wasn't the place we would expect a new King of a new Kingdom to be born.
The new King is born in a barn and sleeps in a feeding trough. I read the story, and I think Mary and Joseph would’ve chosen for their baby to be born in the Inn, but instead they’re in a barn. Not something they would’ve chosen, but they entered the barn God had prepared for them and participated with God in the birth of our King.
There’s another biblical image I’d like to set alongside this image of being in the barn, rather than the inn. When life becomes hard, when life goes wrong, when life breaks, an image that appears frequently in the Bible is the desert. Being “in a desert place” is an old way of describing the suffering we experience, and how God meets us there in those places. The Israelites wandered in the desert, and met God in the desert, for 40 years. Jesus picks up on this theme and spends 40 days in the desert at the start of his ministry.
Our scripture for Advent also takes place in a desert. We’re told to prepare the way for God, and then given the hope that God will move heaven and earth and every obstacle to get to us.
Isaiah 40:1-5
“Take comfort, and comfort one another,” says God. “Speak to the heart of Jerusalem and cry out to her that her conscription has ended, her guilt has been cleared, she has taken from the Lord’s hand double for all her offenses.”
A voice cries out, “In the wilderness, prepare a road for the Lord, and in the desert smooth out a highway fit for our God. Every valley will be lifted high, and every mountain brought low, and the worn down ruts will be smoothed out, and the blocked-up places will become passable again. And the Lord’s glory will be revealed and everyone will see that the Lord’s mouth has spoken.”
In a lot of ways, life broke in 2020. This was a year that was full of things none of us would’ve chosen. This was a desert year, this was a year in the barn. The coronavirus, quarantine, the enormous death toll. Racial upheaval and riots. A very divisive election. Brokenness, tension, distrust, and hurt. These events break our hearts. These events break God’s heart, too. I’m not saying God caused these things, that God enjoys these things, or that God wants these things to happen. I’m also not saying that the events of 2020 are God’s fault. What I am saying is that God knows how to use these things. God knows how to take the broken places in people’s lives and bring us to a better relationship with God, with each other, with ourselves, and with creation. Hey, what else would you expect from a religion that highlights the death of its founder? Jesus himself was broken, and through that death and resurrection this new life is available to all of us.
Which brings me back to the question at the beginning of this blog: What happens when God prepares the room during Advent?
What if these broken spaces and places in our lives are the desert places where we’re called to participate with what God is doing? Even if we’d rather be in the Inn, instead of stuck in the barn that 2020 felt like, did this create room in our hearts for Jesus to fill? What if we looked for God to be at work and at play in the things we’re disappointed in, and participated with God in those spaces?
If you want to try entering into these spaces with other people, it’s not too late to join one of our Advent Small Groups. These communities of practice give us time, space, and friendship to try to learn how to do this very thing.