A Space Not of Your Own Choosing
One of my favorite Advent hymns is “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” It has a beautiful and moving melody that elicits that Advent feeling of waiting and longing. Listen to this version by Enya for an especially haunting sound:
The band for King & Country made an rock version:
The first verse is:
O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.
This fall I returned to the church that sent me into ministry and I preached about being in exile. While we are loath to think of ourselves in exile, I defined it as finding yourself in a place not of your own choosing. Such a place might be divorce, widowhood, barrenness, chronic disease, terminal diagnosis, joblessness, or addiction. You may even find yourself in more than one of these places at the same time. Yet all of these places are places of loss, and with loss comes grief; hence, the mourning. Things are not how we would rather have them be.
The refrain of this hymn is:
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you, O Israel.
Even in these spaces not of our own choosing, God is with us. Even these spaces where we’d rather not be, can be blessed, are blessed. It can be uncomfortable in these spaces. It can be downright painful. These spaces may feel completely un-holy. And yet.
And yet Mary sang the Magnificat (the Latin name for Mary’s Song, Luke 1:46-55) from such a space. A pregnant, unwed teenager in a culture where that just wasn’t done, sang a song of joy. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you, extending mercy, scattering the proud, lifting up the humble, and filling the hungry with good things. And yet Mary laid her firstborn child in such a space not of her own choosing, in a feeding trough, after giving birth in a barn. She wasn’t in a familiar space nor did she have the help and guidance of her female relatives when it came time to give birth.
And yet. And yet, even in these spaces which we did not choose and would rather not be in, God is with us.