It’s NCAA Tournament time again. And that means that it is time for me to go down my annual rabbit hole in which I fill out a bracket based on the question, “Which team’s mascot would win in a one-on-one fight?” After doing an Ultimate Bracket last year when there was no NCAA Tournament, I decided this year to film myself going through this year’s entries as I explain which mascot I believe should be crowned champion of Mascot Madness 2021.
Patience is difficult. If there is something that we do not like or with which we are not comfortable, we don’t usually want to stick with it. I get that. It makes complete sense. Yet just because we want something to be over doesn’t mean that it’s over. Just because it becomes more than we want to deal with or we lose interest that doesn’t mean we’re done with it or it’s done with us.
The people following Moses became impatient on the way. They were witnesses to their misery in Egypt and to the incredible acts of God that rescued them. But the wilderness was difficult. They had what they needed but they were uncomfortable. They had food, but it wasn’t good enough food. “Why did you bring us out here to die?” they asked. They weren’t going to die, but things got tough and it felt like they were.
According to Numbers, God sent poisonous snakes to set the people straight. Did God do this? The reader can judge for themselves. I have a hard time believing God does something like this. Partly because we seem to do a pretty good job inviting the poisonous snakes to the party ourselves. Our impatience clouds our judgment and then it bites us in the butt.
The de facto joke (if you can call it that) as we enter into Lent is that no one wants to give anything up because we have already given up so much in the last year. We’ve been in Lent since mid-March. We had to give up time with friends, going to restaurants or the movies, seeing our favorite teams play, and so much more. Lent came for us, elevated its game, and then stuck around for well past forty days.
One of the refrains of Ash Wednesday—this first day of Lent—is “Remember you are dust and to dust you will return.” I usually think about that in very narrow terms. The minister says it to me as she or he imposes the ashes on my forehead. Yet this last year has been a reminder that all of this is dust. The world as you and I know it can vanish with a gust of wind: a pandemic, a diagnosis, a fractured relationship, anything. Our world is dust.
What do you do when you and all around you is dust? I guess that you could sit in the ashes and mourn its fleeting nature. Or you could just throw caution to the wind and roll around in as much dirt as you can while the getting is good. You could grow numb to the seeming meaninglessness of this whole random venture. Sometimes we feel like doing all three of these things in one Tuesday.
I'm still up because both my boys woke up in the middle of the night, so I'm sitting with them as they fall back asleep. I'm going to treat this like it's still Wednesday because in the chaos of this day I forgot that it was Epiphany, which is when we remember the Magi bringing gifts to the Christ Child.
I was explaining to my boys the other day that we don't know how old Jesus was when these visitors arrived. We only know they came from the East and, in Asia, the East covers a lot of territory. We don't know how many there were.
What we do know is these individuals of high honor lavished this young family with immensely valuable gifts. That they knelt before a child and simply being in his presence brought them great joy. We know that they did not tell a tyrant king desperate to hold on to power where that child was.
A funny thing has happened in perpetual reassessment of faith in adulthood: I believe in total depravity. Not necessarily in the theological construct that posits that we all are born into corruption because of original sin. One of the most consistent parts of my faith journey is that hardcore Calvinism has always seemed problematic to me. I just mean that I believe that we as humans are really, really screwed up. I believe we all hold that divine spark from God too; that Imago Dei.
But, good Lord, we are a messed up people.
You can look around for ample evidence. I won’t point it out to you, because I could look within for evidence as well. There is something askew and off the mark about us. There is something about us that is not quite as it should be. Now because we are made in God’s image, there is that capacity within us to be more like what we should be. We just often cannot or will not access it.
Today was supposed to be rainy and dreary. But it wasn’t. The rain came through more quickly and thoroughly washed away the last vestiges of 2020. And this morning the sun broke through the clouds. The air felt like spring. It was a new day in a new year.
Of course, this does not mean anything in the grand scheme of the world. A beautiful January 1 in one town does not mean that the tide has turned any more than the flipping of the calendar magically changes our circumstances. The things that made last year so difficult stubbornly still exist: the pandemic and the maddening number of people who don’t take it seriously, the leaders tilting at razor-bladed windmills for political gain, the sickness, the dying, the heartbreak.
The lingering of the past year made me stop in my tracks this morning. It literally stopped me. I took advantage of the beautiful morning and went on a new year’s run. The route I usually run takes me near 2nd Avenue where a suicide bomber set off a massive explosion on Christmas Day. Several streets downtown are still closed which meant that I had to stop and figure out a different way to find my way home. Despite the cleansing rain and the bright new day, the echoes of a harsh year still resonated.
In an effort to get out of my typical music patterns, I set out in 2020 to listen to as many different albums as possible. Many of these are albums that were new to me interspersed with some old favorites. The project got derailed in the last quarter of the year, but I still got to listen to a lot of great music. I listened to 67 unique albums this year and I’m hoping to hit a hundred in 2021 and hopefully hit 100 unique albums. Anyway, here in alphabetical order are albums that I listened to this past year:
In the whirling dervish that is Christmas season, music is one of the main things that ground me. I spend a lot of time in late November making different Christmas mixtapes (technically they are playlists but “mixtapes” sounds cooler) for different moods.
My Advent playlist is a little different from the others. It still features carols but it also dips outside to non-Christmas music songs that capture the longing, the tension, and the hope for light in the darkness that marks this time of waiting. Since we are in the midst of that season, I figured that I would share the songs from this mixtape with you.
In early June, the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery spurred a group of high schoolers to plan a Black Lives Matter march. They didn't know if anyone would show up. 10,000 people took to the streets that day and lifted their voices in peaceful protest.
Peaceful.
It’s an interesting word in the context of 10,000 people pulsing through downtown Nashville. That show of righteous anger does not really paint the picture of peace. I guess you could split hairs to say that it was non-violent and that is somehow different than peaceful. But the mandate from those young women beforehand was that this would be a peaceful protest. And so it was.
Yet the chant that still rings in my ears six months later is No justice! No peace! Again and again it would ring out; its staccato cadence bouncing off the buildings. No justice! No peace! Each syllable like a punch; a fierce passion jabbed into speech. No justice! No peace!
The second Sunday of Advent is about peace and it’s keeping me up at night. I grew up in a context where the stuff of Christianity was almost all personal. The primary concern was to make sure that your individual relationship with God was in the right alignment. If that personal relationship was right then you could personally experience hope, joy, love. And peace.
I was six years old when Hurricane Hugo tore through South Carolina. We lived in Columbia at the time and so we were spared the storm’s full wrath. My brother, newborn sister, and I all slept in my parents’ room that night. Even as they taped up all the windows in our house, Mom and Dad had exuded a calm that we would be okay and we were. But I remember the howling winds through the night; the sound was like a gash being ripped in creation itself.
I felt vulnerable and small and scared. The world could have come undone.
The tricky thing about Advent is there is more than a little about this time of year that is about the world coming undone. There is an untamed ferocity to the season that we often bury under twinkling lights, sleigh bells, and children’s choirs. The first Sunday—the beginning of a new year in the church—is about hope. Hope for a better tomorrow. A time-displaced hope for the coming Christ child. A future hope for when all things will be made right. But it is all hope with a jagged edge.
