Waiting for the God Who is Already Here

Posted on December 23, 2023 by awtraughber

Once again, Advent is coming to an end and I feel like I didn’t quite do it right.  That’s mostly normal for me.  This year I had hoped to blog my way through one of my favorite books in 2023: Andrew Root’s When Church Stops Working.  That didn’t happen, though I hope to do it soon.

This is the shortest possible Advent season you could have.  Most of the time, Advent starts the Sunday after Thanksgiving; that was not the case this year.  So the final Sunday of Advent is tomorrow, and Christmas is the next day.  Maybe I could blame my lack of productivity on having one week less to work?  I probably shouldn’t.

Let me say this for now.  Advent is a season about waiting, about (hopeful) anticipation.  I put hopeful in parentheses there because to live in hope is to live with a certain amount of lack, of having-not.  Advent is about remembering the waiting of the Incarnation of Jesus so we can better wait for His final return.  So something parenthetical is appropriate.  But it also points to an interesting tension: we are waiting for a God who is also already here.  Not in an incarnational way, obviously.  Jesus entered into time and then exited it with His ascension.  But the Spirit is present with us still.  We aren’t in Old Testament times, when the Spirit seemed occasionally present in specific situations.  I think too often we live like that practically, though.  And that’s worth thinking about this holiday season, as Advent turns to Christmas and beyond.

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Travel Bits

Posted on December 22, 2023 by awtraughber

A month has passed since I made my way to Victoria, BC for what has become something of an annual tradition for me. (Pictures can be found to the right.)  When I travel, I try and keep three things in mind: housing, transportation, and and travel time.  I do my best to keep one or two of those things at a minimum.  Victoria is nice because it is relatively close (when you live in Hawaii), not too expensive to get to (if you find a good deal), and is easy to walk.  In fact, I think this year I averaged about as many steps a day as I did in England and Scotland back in October,

Which is also to say that it’s been more of a travel semester for me than usual.  I took a quick, mostly inexpensive trip to visit friends in Fresno, CA back in September.  October was the big return to England and Scotland as a school trip (45 students this time).  Victoria worked out nicely in November: I got the cheapest ticket yet for the southern tip of Vancouver Island.  And now I’m sitting in the Denver airport at a cafe waiting for my flight to Nashville for Christmas with the family.

Victoria was good for me.  In many ways it was like a mini-England trip with a quieter itinerary.  Had the best steak pie I’ve ever had at the Bard & Banker.  Murchie’s never disappoints, especially if you get there at the right time.  The weather was cold but sunny.  This year’s movie was Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, which was great for the season.  And I found a few good buys at Russell Books.

I’m glad the semester is over and that I’m getting to spend a good portion of the break with family and friends on the mainland.  It’s looking to be a warm trip, at least until near the end.  I’ve got a short stack of books to read and some sleep to catch up on.  Maybe I’ll even get some reading done on this next, non-red-eye flight.

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Isaiah 40 and Advent

Posted on December 6, 2023 by awtraughber

Isaiah 40 is no stranger to the Advent season.  It’s also part of the culture of the school where I teach.  But I recently had a “fresh eyes” experience of one particular part of the chapter when I saw it in the context of Paul David Tripp’s Lost in the Middle.

The chapter begins with some Advent resonance:

1Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.
2 Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
    and cry to her . . .

And then goes full John-the-Baptist:

3 A voice cries:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
    make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Then it goes big again, broad with a call to proclamation:

9 Go on up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good news;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good news;
lift it up, fear not;
say to the cities of Judah,
“Behold your God!”

The end, of course, is about the call to wait and what God does as we wait.  But what I had not realized/remembered lately is that the immediate context is a sense of complaint, a sense of having not been heard by God.

27 Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
and my right is disregarded by my God”?
28 Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
29 He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.
30 Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
31 but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.

That last verse, verse 31, is the basis of our school’s alma mater.  I say “basis” because we add a tag at the end that turns the verse into a prayer.  As the song ends we sing “teach us, Lord/teach us Lord, to wait.”  Because waiting is something you have to learn to do well.  And that’s one gift that the season of Advent can give us.

(Scripture from the English Standard Version)

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Advent as a Time for Waiting

Posted on December 4, 2023 by awtraughber

Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent.  I’ve been writing about Advent off and on for over a decade, which points towards how resonant the idea of Advent is for me (particularly since I’m not a member of a liturgical church tradition).

As I understand it, Advent is the beginning of the church calendar, a time preceding Christmas where Christians remember the first coming of Jesus and anticipate his second.  While some churches fast during this time, many do not.  A number of churches, perhaps most especially those who have adopted the season from another tradition, treat it like a preamble to Christmas with a little bit of waiting, but not a lot.  And waiting is what I like most about the season.  Because waiting is a regular part of my life, and because waiting is difficult.  Consider these words from James K. A. Smith’s recent newsletter:

And so we turn, finally, to Advent. The long slog of ordinary time gives way to the focus of a season.The irony, of course, is that it is a season of waiting.

This year, I am particularly struck by how bad we are at waiting for God. Or at least how poorly I wait. This is not simply because of impatience, though that is certainly true. It’s also–maybe more so–because we seem to lack the capacity to recognize God’s arrival. God never shows up like those waiting would expect.

Smith continues:

We look for God in the extraordinary and God arrives incarnate in the mundane, even abject, hidden right before our eyes. We’re waiting and waiting and miss the fact that “God has taken place” perhaps because we keep scanning the horizons for meteoric arrivals. Or maybe because we’re too distracted. What if the arrival happened and we’re only still waiting because we couldn’t recognize it? Maybe what we’re waiting for is not the arrival but the healing of our attention so we might see where God has already taken place.

I think Smith is onto something here, but mainly because he’s putting into words some things that have been on my mind a lot lately.  Waiting has been a long-term theme for me that has taken on more importance these last few months as I reflect as a way for preparing for the future.  It’s also been something of a theme in a book or two that I’ve been reading over the last few months (one that I will get into more over the next few days).  All that to say: I think we all need to learn how to wait, and we need others to wait with us.  This should be something that Christians do extremely well, though I’m not sure how true that is in practice.  (I know it’s not as true of me as I would like.)

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Yesterday I was getting some grading done, so I brought up an Advent playlist that I had made back in 2019.  Present me was quite impressed with the song choice of past me.  The following song by Andrew Peterson, which is not technically an Advent song, struck me in the strong presence of waiting in the lyrics.  It doesn’t hurt that this concert version begins with a Lord of the Rings quote and comment.

Listening to it yesterday reminded me why I loved that song, and the album it is from, so much.

So here’s to Advent.  And here’s to learning to wait.

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“Made for People” Redux

Posted on November 30, 2023 by awtraughber

Back in August I wrote a few posts about Justin Whitmel Earley’s Made for People.  I enjoyed the book so much that I did a short seminar on it for some students at school a few weeks ago.  Instead of reading through parts of the book, we took some time to talk about some of the key points from the early points of this talk, taken from the Village Church:

It’s a good starter for a longer discussion, which I think the book deserves.  You never quote know what people walk away with after such a seminar, but I hope they hear something worth taking with them.

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“Full of a Beautiful Gloom”

Posted on November 29, 2023 by awtraughber

I’m not totally sure what to make of this recent Plough essay by Clare Coffey, but I know that I like a lot of it.  In the piece, Coffey tries to tackle the weird “vibe” that takes us through autumn, from Halloween through Thanksgiving, then from Advent to Christmas.  She begins her look at “spooky season” by talking about a couple of different approaches to traversing the time (either as “stickler badgers” or as “jolly hedgehogs”).  And then she talks some about the history of how people have understood the time (and how it shows up in songs and stories).  It’s a fun, colorful read, even if the colors are more muted than the bright colors of summer.

While the whole article is worth a read, here’s how she brings it to a close:

Christmas still bears some traces that mark its closure of the spooky season. There’ll be scary ghost stories / and tales of the glories of Christmases long long ago, goes the song. And the most beloved piece of Christmas literature outside of scripture is in fact a ghost story. But as the bright lights twinkle through the season, any memory of shadows and hauntings dissipate into merriment, let the cold bite as it may.

That’s as it should be. Spooky season is almost over. Christmas is coming to kill it, thanks be to God. But for a few weeks more, I will indulge in the gloom and doom, the left hand of salvation history, before the lights go up.

This Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, which for many begins with the lighting of one candle.  Bit by bit, light by light, for sure.  This piece is a good reminder of that.

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The Doctor at Sixty

Posted on November 24, 2023 by awtraughber

It’s sobering to think that ten years have passed since “The Day of the Doctor.” But it has.  And a few hours from now, the first of three “60th Anniversary Specials” will drop on Disney+ (something else that is sobering to think about, really).  Even if it’s a temporary thing, David Tennant is back in the picture.  Here’s a scene shot with him for the recent Children in Need special.

In honor of the 60th anniversary, the BBC has put together this short video, which also gives us more of a glimpse at the next Doctor and companion.

And this is probably the best thing you could read to mark the occasion.  A good retrospective with an honest assessment of where things stand as another decade turns for the Doctor.

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On England and Scotland

Posted on October 30, 2023 by awtraughber

If you scroll down and look to the right, you’ll see that I’ve finally updated my Flickr account with a handful of pictures from my recent school trip to England and Scotland.  The trip was good, with an almost identical itinerary compared to our last trip, which was the fall before Covidtide.

I learned a lot logistically, particularly about the importance of group size and how packing out a day does an injustice to everywhere except the locations you visit in the morning.  Only one of our days was packed more than usual, but it felt like time to sit and relax was fleeting.  Part of that boils down to helping out those who get lost or who don’t feel well, which is understandable.  Part of it, maybe, was the group size.  And maybe familiarity has something to do with it?  Time will tell, I think.  I do look forward to looking back on the trip with fondness as time goes on.

One highlight of the trip was that we got to see a Shakespeare performance while in Stratford-on-Avon.  Last time, we also got to see a Shakespeare performance, but King John isn’t exactly considered “top tier Shakespeare.”  This time, we got to see Macbeth, which was quite good.  The play was set in a near-future dystopia, but you wouldn’t know it except for the costuming.  The acting was well-done; the staging was great.  You get the sense that they knew their audience would be tempted to nod off into sleep because of scenes with clanging pots and fire shooting up through the stage floor.  I will admit to almost nodding off a couple of times (though both times I caught myself).

There were other differences, of course.  One of our favorite hotels, which we have requested three times over the years, has not fully recovered from lockdowns and Covid.  For some reason (a seasonal thing, perhaps?) the actors that usually perform in the round at Shakespeare’s birthplace were not around (though they should be back by now).  Some consolation came for that loss with a reading of Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse” by a local in Edinburgh.  The other big difference was the location of our last-night ceilidh dinner show.  At first we thought it was completely different from the performers from our last two trips.  The venue was much smaller, but the haggis tasted much better.  And, it turned out, the performers were almost exactly the same.  They did work in a set of more recent pop songs into all of their traditional Scottish fare, but I didn’t mind.  It’s always good to hear a rendition of the energetic music of the Proclaimers.

I’m grateful for the trip, always thankful for the opportunity to visit a beautiful place far away.  I could do without running to the gate (twice) in the Frankfurt airport, but I’m grateful that I made it both times.   I’m glad the trip happened, just like I’m glad to be on this side of it.  As the wall above the entrance to Skipton Castle states: desormais.

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Other fun moments:

  • As always, eating lunch at the Marks & Spencer cafe;
  • Having afternoon tea in Ambleside by Lake Windermere;
  • Getting a not-yet-released-in-America copy of Francis Spufford’s new book;
  • Sitting down to fish and chips in Skipton after not getting to do so twice elsewhere.

Biggest surprise of the trip: Doctor Who merchandise was almost impossible to find.  Finally found some in Edinburgh on the very last day.  It was almost eery how little anyone seemed to know about the Doctor.

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A Summary of Things

Posted on October 16, 2023 by awtraughber

Brad East, of Abilene Christian University, has a knack for observation and summary.  Case in point: today’s blog post titled “A Loosening.”  The premise?

It seems to me there has been, in the past twenty years, what I’m going to call a “loosening” in low-church American Protestant contexts. And the phenomenon appears to be widespread, not limited regionally or denominationally.

He then goes on to write about eight particular areas of church life there things have “loosened.”  But he also acknowledges that this “loosening” has also happened simultaneously for multiple generations in a way that is quite striking (and potentially alarming).  It’s a good read, one that should leave us asking some good questions.

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The Possibility of Recovering Something Lovely

Posted on October 2, 2023 by awtraughber

We’re just under two months away from the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary adventure.  Crazy to think it’s been ten years since Tennant and Smith and Baker celebrated the 50th.  There’s a lot at stake in the 60th anniversary story, as Russell T Davies returns and brings Tennant and Catherine Tate along with him as an “in between” moment before the next Doctor takes over.  And Davies is telling the one story really left to tell from Tennant’s time: what happens if Donna Noble remembers her time traveling across space and time.  Here’s the trailer:

What’s also interesting to me is that as much as I enjoyed Tennant’s time as the Doctor, I didn’t always track well with RTD’s storytelling approach.  I was much more of a Moffat guy in that regard.  So it will be interesting to see how RTD does.  And I’ll also be interested in seeing how this all sets up the next Doctor, as I kind of lost interest with the last one (and I was a fan of Whitaker and Chibnall going into things).  The other factor to consider is the role that Disney will (or won’t) play into things.  I imagine the show will remain as smooth as the Chibnall years.  But maybe it can get back some of the frantic heart of the show that I felt was missing (even near the end of the Capaldi run, really).

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