Say, It's My Birthday!

I will admit it. I am a hopeless Tim Keel and Jacob's Well fan. So there. And so, with charge conference season almost done, and with it being my birthday (52, she says proudly) I went to JW this a.m. with Caleb. And am I ever glad I did. Something was wrong with my clock (really), and so I did not make it to the first service of the a.m., but I did the second. Oh my. Music. People. A video that both Caleb and I really thought was amazing...REALLY amazing...you'd have to see it, and I am not sure if it's on line or not. I couldn't find it on the church site (www.jacobswellchurch.org), but you can find there Tim's sermon today, in the sermon audio section --on wilderness, preparation, Advent, the voice crying in the desert, wilderness. Oh, Tim, I have missed your preaching this fall while I have been out and about. The line near the end that you shared, that Messiah makes the wilderness a garden reminds me of Charles Wesley's Easter hymn text, about how, with Easter, Christ hath truly opened paradise--and another hymn writer (Nicolaus Hermann) says it in another way:

The glorious gates of paradise
The angel guards no more;
This day again those gates unfold.
With praise our God adore,
With praise our God adore!

With the incarnation, God takes away the angel guard at the gate of the Garden, and says to us "you may enter in again"--forgiveness is coming and Jesus is its name.

I have lived in my own wilderness off and on over the years---divorce, grief, depression, loneliness, vocational displacement (also known as the superintendency :-)) ---not unlike most of humanity, and still, I know that, as Tim shared this morning, it is in the wilderness where we most poignately meet our Lord. It is where God can shape us most, and where our hearts are prepared so that we can proclaim the continual coming of the Lord. What a good birthday gift, to be reminded of the redemptive healing that comes from facing ourselves in those wilderness times, and that God enables us to emerge from them with an integrity and self-awareness, and most importantly, deeper faith than we could have had otherwise.

And I am a Tim Keel fan, and proud of it.