The Words of Waiting

Words. Image. They are powerful! They have the ability to create and frustrate, build up and tear down, birth new realities and preserve the old banalities. They, in a sense, are our realities. It is interesting that God created using words, spoken, articulated and alive. The Word is Grace-soaked and God alive. The word spoken brought order to the chaos and created ex nihilo, (out of nothing) something! That is why we stop and unwrap at this time of year words that not only have meaning but produce purpose for us as people of faith.

Word and image (story) go together in any pursuit of understanding in the Christian faith. Our fundamental Word, after all, became incarnate, visible and tactile in Jesus. Word and image really cannot be separated, even though we try it often enough. Word without image easily vaporizes into an abstraction; image without word can, and almost always does, degenerate into an idol. Word and image need one another.

And so, our great words lead us into Advent anticipation. Words like Emmanuel, God with us. This word is an incredible reminder that we are not alone. That our human journey is taken by a God who understands and loves so much that God became one of us. This is our hope for a life that allows us to be noticed, recognized, attended to, and called by our first name, by the Trinitarian God of the universe. Incarnation, God becoming a human being in Jesus Christ. The humility of God in Christ allows God to get bigger by becoming smaller, taking on the form of a child, a teenager, a man, and a crucified man at that. Through this crucifixion, death and resurrection, our despair becomes joy and our angst becomes peace. This crucible life that Jesus undergoes is one of extreme love for humankind, past, present and future. These italicized words are just a few of the words that we will explore this holy-day (holiday) season as we seek to experience Emmanuel through the words of waiting.

And so our images, the stories that burn in our collective consciousness and become our framework to make sense out of a life that seems more chaotic than ever. Stories and images of Angels announcing, a virgin giving birth, a babe in the straw, wise men from afar, a Messiah promised and delivered only to return again. When our words go flat through repetition and familiarity, we need these images and stories to reawaken our imagination into play and to sharpen our awareness of and participation in the word and the Word-made-flesh. Join us for an incredible line-up of worship experiences that promise to bring together word and image into powerful advent anticipations as we EXPERIENCE EMMANUEL THROUGH THE WORDS OF WAITING….