Neighbourhood Table 3

Breakfast for Lunch!

Who says breakfast can only be eaten as the first meal of the day?  Check out Breakfast for Lunch on Susan's blog.  Another amazing, fun and filling Neighbourhood Table!

Neighbourhood Table 2

Week 2:  Under the Mediterranean Sun

Read about another amazing week at our Neighbourhood Table on Susan's blog.  It's about healthy eating, living in community and teaching kids how to cook!

Neighbourhood Table 1

Week 1:  Fresh Herbs

Read about our Neighbourhood Table on Susan's blog.  It's about healthy eating, living in community and teaching kids how to cook!

Advent Love

In a remote outpost of the empire, an area called Judea, a small town called Nazareth, a man and woman begin a long journey. She is almost nine months pregnant. They head south, toward Bethlehem, his hometown, to be counted in a census. It is a hard journey. He walks mostly. She rides on their donkey. Some nights they sleep out under the stars. Finally, they arrive in Bethlehem, a small village. The only inn is already full. The innkeeper, seeing the woman’s condition, offers the stable out back. That night, her labor begins and the baby comes. Together they wrap their infant son in the bands of clean cloth they have brought along for that purpose. 

  

Each Christmas the world stops to listen to the story because of the possibility that it contains truth: truth about God, truth about us, truth about who we are and who we are meant to be.

Scottish poet George MacDonald wrote,

They all were looking for a king

To slay their foes and lift them high:

Thou cam’st, a little baby thing

That made a woman cry.

  

The story says that the very essence of God is not what we expect—power and majesty—but vulnerable love, love born among us in an infant. “God so loved the world, that God gave his only Son,” the Bible says (John 3:16). “God is love . . ., and those who abide in love, abide in God and God abides in them.”

  

That is what the story wants from us—that we abide in love, that we love one another, that we love those no one else loves, that we love life and this beautiful world, that we love God.

  

Dr. Henry Betts, founder and former CEO of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago is an advocate for people with disabilities. He tells a story about a young man in the Rehab Institute, a paraplegic teenager, who became terribly depressed, stopped communicating with anyone, was virtually speechless, wouldn’t get out of bed, assumed a fetal position all day long, and went into what Dr. Betts called total withdrawal.

  

The staff put another patient in the room with him, a three-year-old boy who had been severely burned. The teenager turned his back and ignored the little boy at first, then began to notice and watch him and listen to what nurses and doctors were saying. And a miracle happened: the teenager started to care about his little roommate. Before long he was pressing the call button, telling the nurses to bring pain medicine, nagging—maybe he needed some water, some more food, he wasn’t eating enough; he started to tell the nurses and doctors what he observed and advised them as to treatment and therapy. The teenager started to care, to have compassion, to love—and to live.

  

The world stops at the conclusion of Advent, at Christmas, when everything is quiet, and listens to a story about God, about love, about life, about what it means to be alive; a story that invites us to open our hearts and to love one another.

  

The world stops and in some way all of us: old, young, believers and non-believers

“come to Bethlehem to see

him whose birth the angels sing;

Come, adore, on bended knee

Christ, the Lord, the newborn King”.

Advent Joy

Have you ever listened to an a cappella group sing?  It is music created using only the voices of singers; while we think we hear sounds of bells and drums, those sounds are being made…by voices.  The group works to create harmonies using their voices - each voice singing a different part, the whole sound an amazing creation of harmony.

 

We have been listening for the sounds of Advent for three weeks now and we realize that the “sound” of Advent is very often not a harmony.  We hear and sing some of the most beautiful music of the entire year during Advent.  But we sing it to call forth hope, peace, joy, love: things for which we long, in a world full of harsh notes and competing sounds.

 

Instead of soft, sweet harmonies, many times the reality of living hurts our ears: desperation competes with hope; broken relationships and conflict compete with peace; sorrow and grief compete with joy; hatred tries to drown out love.  Our lives are often full of discordant sounds that make us want to cover our ears and run away.

 

The third Sunday of Advent is the Sunday of joy. We read the words of a song attributed to Mary. It is called The Magnificat, Mary’s essay about the state of the world and her insistence that it doesn’t have to stay that way.

 

Young Mary is pregnant and she travels to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is also expecting a child.  They greet each other and Mary sings these words: “…the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name…he has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty….”

 

Mary’s life is filled with notes of fear, desperation, and uncertainty. And still, she sings a song of liberation and freedom, of righting old wrongs, of bringing life and healing and hope into a situation—into a world—where these are not apparent.

 

That is joy.  Speaking promise into pain.  Not sugary, smiley, everything-is-just-great giddiness, but an assurance in the middle of the desperation, that this is not the final word for us. It takes naming the horror and pain and brokenness in which we find ourselves and declaring that God has already fixed it; that there is a reality for which we long already in place, and that we will choose to live into that reality.  

 

That’s joy: the insistence that God has already done what we cannot manage to do on our own, and we will celebrate that.  We sing of the God who shows up and creates life out of death. We sing with Mary, “For the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name!”

 

During Advent we listen for songs of joy, speaking of a reality in which we must, and will believe.  

And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,

     whose forms are bending low,

     who toil along the climbing way

     with painful steps and slow,

     look now! for glad and golden hours

     come swiftly on the wing.

     O rest beside the weary road,

     and hear the angels sing!