Advent a reminder that out of pain, God offers new life

Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Yes, Christmas arrives in 21 days. You may be taking advantage of pre-holiday sales.

But also remember to take advantage of Advent. It is my favorite church season, mostly because it is a chronic reminder of God’s decision to live among us, as one of us.

Advent is a season of provocative imagination. So let your imagination provoke you today into exploring a “new sense of God.”

Try this exercise, based on an old “Faith at Work” magazine cover: Use your imagination to see an old, dead tree stump. Near its base you also see a single shoot of green plant life reaching up to the sky.

Now, floating in the air beside the green shoot are these uplifting words: “Our hope is that out of the deadwood of past fears and failures, God can bring forth new life.”

In “A House for Hope,” a very moving book co-authored by Rebecca Parker and John Buehrens, Parker shares a dream with readers. It is a dream of hope mixed with dread – not unlike our lives sometimes.

As the dream ends, she is terrified. But then she sees a man holding a sign whose letters are backlit by a green light. The message reads: “God is so tender; sometimes she is called ‘Green.’ ”

Far too many people cannot relate to this sense of God as tender and green. For them, life is portrayed in their religious experiences as harsh.

For them, suffering – both dramatic and disguised – is a prime ingredient of daily living. So God may wear the costume of a fickle, judgmental, uncaring power-broker.

I know a young woman, living in poverty with her husband and two sons, who is pregnant with her third child. She just discovered that her husband is leaving her. What do you say to her about God that doesn’t sound hollow?

Parker co-authored another challenging book with Rita Nakashima Brock, “Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us.”

They tell stories of personal struggles – their own and other people’s – through “oppressive theologies before coming to a new sense of God.”

Their stories tell both of the need to face human suffering and of how that suffering is healed within communities of justice and compassion.

A common phrase I hear from Christian folks is “that’s a cross we must bear” when referring to a burden someone is carrying.

But what if there is another way to see that? In this mysterious season of Advent, let’s change the question: “What if God is our baby to bear”?

Annie Dillard asks this mildly irreverent and stimulating question in her classic book, “Holy the Firm.” Parker comments on it in “A House for Hope.”

She asks, “What if the new life, the tender existence of the divine, enters the world through places where life is at risk and people must come together to create ways to tend life with care so it will survive?”

A world of survival is the very world Jesus was born into, wasn’t it? And it still is today.

I don’t know what sense of God my young expectant friend has. But from what I know of her, I do have confidence she won’t see her new baby as her “cross to bear.”

Whether alone with or with her husband, she will see her child as a gift to be cherished, nourished and enjoyed.

This kind of green-shoot hope comes from a sense of God as ever-new life waiting to be welcomed, especially in the midst of suffering.