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Some nights, when tucking in my youngest son, he struggles to sleep because some frightening reality has claimed a place in his consciousness. Before I can leave, he grabs my hand and whispers, “Mom, will you stay?”

He has never once asked me to do anything other than stay. Perhaps he knows, on some level, that staying is the best I can do.

We have entered the season of Advent. Last Advent was marked by the beginning of war in the Holy Land, by the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Those miseries, and so many more, march on.

In the darkness of night, in a season when that darkness falls over us earlier and earlier each day, I am struck by the hope held in the hand of my six-year-old son as he whispers in the night, “Stay with me.”

A few weeks ago, someone asked me how we might continue to care for our neighbors at this particular time–local and global. What can we do, they wondered, to express God’s love?

As I considered the question, the words of Psalm 23 filled my head. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”[1]

In this season of Advent, I am again overwhelmed by the fact that the greatest expression of God’s love is to enter in, put on flesh, and become human so that God might walk among us, be with us, and stay with us.

How can we express love in this season of hope and tumult? We can stay. Stay with our neighbors in their anxiety, joy, and fear. Stay in our striving for peace. Stay in the conversation that exposes us to ideas that are not our own. Stay in the neighborhoods and communities to which we have been called, refusing to walk away from those who have much to lose but instead proclaiming and pointing to God's boundless love and grace in all we do.

My son has never asked me to magically make his fear go away. Instead, he simply asks me to stay. Being with him in those moments is enough. He may still be frightened, but he is not alone.

The promise of God, revealed in both Scripture and so fully in the person of Jesus Christ, is that God does not leave. God’s love is so deep that God is compelled to put on flesh and dwell among us. In all things, in all seasons, the presence of God remains.

“And remember,” Jesus said, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”[2]

That is the promise we cling to and the fulfillment we long for. Christ is with us, and Christ is coming soon.

In this season of Advent, I am inviting us, people who long for and know the presence of the incarnate God, to pay attention to those among us who might be whispering through the night, reaching out a hand, asking us, in the way of the incarnate Christ, to stay.

We cannot bear or fix all the problems of the world. But we can stay. We can stay with those whose walk in the valley is long and deep. In the way of Christ, we can walk alongside our neighbors and friends. In this way, we proclaim both the presence of God now and the presence of God to come. We, too, become the body of Christ, a body compelled by deep love to stay. We can ensure no one is left to journey this life alone.

In this way, in this Advent, we bear the light of Christ. The one who is with us even now. The one who is, to our great joy, here and coming soon.

In the name of Christ.
Amen.

In Christ,
Bishop Regina Hassanally
Southeastern Minnesota Synod, ELCA

 

[1] Emphasis added.
[2] Matthew 28:20.

 

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