Advent Invites Us into Holy Waiting
“Are your uncles gay?” This question, asked by a fellow elementary school student after I had just shared how I had spent Spring Break visiting my uncles, my mom’s brother and his partner, introduced my eight-year-old self to a new word, gay. A word that would set my uncles apart from others. A word that has allowed people to identify who they are. A word that has also been used to judge and exclude.
When I was discerning a call into ministry, I was attending Brandermill Church, an ecumenical union of the Presbyterian Church USA and the United Methodist Church. The United Methodist motto at the time, Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors, drew me into a denomination whose understanding of God I would deeply connect with. A denomination that would ordain me as an elder. A denomination that would also use the question, “Are you gay?” to exclude my siblings in Christ from ordination and marriage. And yet, I have held onto the hope that our deeply rooted beliefs in an open table, the vows we make to those being baptized, our faith in God’s grace given for all, would permeate our understanding of full inclusion as a church.
As I approached the stage at the Hampton Roads Convention Center on June 16, 2018, tears began to fill my eyes and cover my face. Tears that snuck up as I reflected on the words I had just said, “ I will, with the help of God,” be loyal to The United Methodist Church, accepting its order, liturgy, doctrine, and discipline. I was hoping that all my family, friends, and church, would feel fully welcome at my ordination service. Yet I was making a vow to uphold a discipline that would exclude some of them from full participation in the church. On that day, as I was filled with a strong conviction for the call that had lead me to that place, gratitude for the many people who had mentored me, walked beside me, and held me up in prayer, and humility towards a God who had invited me to share in the joy of ministry; sorrow also overcame me for the ways that the church I was being ordained into was visibly broken.
Advent invites us into holy waiting. This season, as we anticipate what 2020 will look like for the United Methodist Church, I have connected deeply with the pain, agony, and unpleasantness of the more realistic portrayals of the birth of Jesus. These, in place of the overly sentimentalized and romanticized images of that first Christmas, allow us to imagine the exhaustion of Mary after a long journey and hard labor in not ideal conditions. They invite us to picture the rejection of Jesus’ family, because there was no place for them. They give us a better understanding of the birth of Emmanuel, God with us, into the raw reality of a visibly broken world. They introduce us to the Messiah who in his ministry would say to some of his disciples, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow” (Matthew 26:38, NIV).
This Advent I try to practice patience as I wait to celebrate again the birth of the one who came, who comes, and who is to come. This season I find comfort in the one who would know our moments of deepest sorrow, anguish, disappointment and pain and would embody God’s intention for the world. This Advent as I wait, I hold onto my hope for the future, when God’s love will be fully known through the one who we celebrate this season.
Devon Earle is one of the pastors at Fairlington United Methodist Church, a Reconciling Church in Alexandria, VA. She is an ordained elder who has a passion for being the church in and with the community.