In this Issue:

Nativity, Maysville, moves forward undr Kibler, Kilbourn-Huey

Episcopal Church Breaks ground for a new building

Lewis and Narnia: Episcopal Heritage

Seed Planting

Out of Deep Waters: Second line brings new life to New Orleans

Commentaries

From the Bishop: The Yearnings of our hearts

Reflection: ...and Christmas comes once more

X-ercizing: Packing and unpacking Christmas

Diocesan Calendar

Past Issues

The Yearnings of Our Hearts

Fifty years ago this month something truly extraordinary happened in the history of our nation. On December 1, 1955, a woman named Rosa Parks, who went to glory this fall, sat down on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., in a seat that the law said she could not sit in. She was arrested, the Montgomery bus boycott resulted, and the Civil Rights Movement began. America was changed that day forever. It was more than extraordinary. It was holy.

What made it holy was that God broke into human history that day in December of 1955 through Rosa Parks. God worked in a powerful way that changed the way things were. And, as God seems almost always to work, God began with one unlikely person, a person the culture said was not quite worth what other people were worth.

On that day when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus so that a white person could have it, I’m sure she did it in part because she was tired and she deserved to sit down as much as anyone. But I doubt very much that that day in 1955 can be viewed in isolation from all the days in Rosa Parks’ life that had preceded it. And all the days in Rosa Parks’ life that preceded it were themselves preceded by years in the life of an African-American family whose members had not been able to experience all that had been promised to them as citizens of this country. And those years were preceded by generations of human beings who had lived in this country, at first against their wills and then in bondage until just 90 years before Rosa Parks refused to move on the bus that day.

And so on Dec. 1, 1955, there was more going on, I believe, than simply the tired feet of one woman. It is no wonder that the event occurred in the season of Advent. What culminated that day were decades, centuries in fact, of the yearning of the human heart for the promises of God. What happened was that the yearning of the human heart and the yearning of God’s heart became one. And in that convergence of human yearning and God’s yearning, the world was decidedly changed.

It is not a change that has revealed itself in full yet. It is a change that remains, still, in part a promise and a hope. It is a change that leaves us a bit impatient for its fullness, and sometimes disappointed. But it is a change that, once begun, there can be no doubt will be completed.

That is what happens, inevitably happens, when the deepest yearnings of the human heart for life and freedom and justice and peace are one with the deepest yearnings of God’s heart. And when the deepest yearnings of the human heart are one with the deepest yearnings of God’s heart, the one thing you can count on is that God will provide a messiah.

Messiah is a Hebrew word that means “the anointed one.” The messiah is one who is anointed by God for God’s own purposes, for the fulfilling of the deepest yearnings of God’s heart. And before there is a messiah who can fulfill the deepest yearnings of God’s heart, there must be a man or woman who yearns for what God yearns for and as deeply as God yearns for it.

Surely that is what happened in Jesus — the deepest yearning of Mary’s heart that the poor would be fed and the oppressed protected (Lk. 1:51-53) and the deepest yearning of God’s heart for the same thing brought together in a specific time and a specific place. And the Messiah was born. That is what happens when we yearn for what God yearns for.

This Advent season, that is what I wish for — that the deepest yearnings of our hearts might be one with the deepest yearnings of God’s heart. And when that is true, I have no doubt, the Messiah will be born again and again in us. That is how the world is always changed. It was changed when the Messiah was born in Rosa Parks and it was changed when the Messiah was born in Mary. Perhaps we can’t see the full extent of how God changed the world in those extraordinary women and disciples of Jesus yet, but we will. For now we can catch a glimpse. And the more we glimpse, the more our hearts yearn for the fullness of God’s changed world. The more we yearn, the nearer the Messiah is to being born.

Ginger, Andrew, and Matthew join me in wishing all of you a holy season in which the deepest yearnings of your hearts may be one with God’s so that the Messiah may be born in us, each and every one.

Agape,

Advocate Online Staff:

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