I'm a Grinch. I dread the month or so where all I hear on the radio is Christmas music, I hate exchanging gifts, and I certainly don't decorate my apartment for the Christmas season. I despise the commercialization and secularization of Christmas and try to avoid it whenever possible.
But last night I sat in back row of the church in which I grew up, half-singing, half-listening as my church family sang Christmas carols in hymn style. There's just something about hymns that allows for reflection, something about entirely mic-less worship that everyone should experience at least once.
Christmas, this season of hope - God incarnate, God become man. God come down to conquer this world through humility and self-sacrifice. God who died and rose again, God who will return to set things right.
That was my prayer last night: "Lord, return soon. Your Kingdom come (soon, Lord!), Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This is a crazy messed up world in which we live, and I know it's sometimes messed up in my little hometown church, too, but last night as our voices blended to rise to the heavens, it was easy to see the Kingdom that is already here, Jesus present in His bride. I don't know the form that His return will take; I'd like to think He'll probably surprise us once more with His love, his grace, his humility. But He's coming, and last night I could both believe it with joy and hope for it with a desperate longing. The beauty of my church family worshiping without the bells and whistles of a praise band and the knowledge that the world's a dark, dark place combined to give me a taste of the "here" and "not yet" aspects of the Kingdom of God.
It was a night filled with song, a night filled with the simple beauty of human voices raised in praise to the God of the universe, the God here among us, the God returning soon to make all things right.
I won't soon forget it.
Maranatha.
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