Advent Week 1 – Promises

My daughter finds it funny to remind me of the time her principal called our home during the day to tell me she had fallen from the monkey bars and, we would later learn, fractured a bone in her arm. For whatever reason, Caller ID described the school’s number as “Private Caller,” ostensibly “Annoying Solicitation.” My choice to let the phone ring will be an everlasting tale for her to hold over my head. Forever and ever. “Whatever you do,” she instructs her brothers, “don’t call mom if you break your arm!”

In some way, I had broken an unspoken promise that whenever my six-year-old called or needed me, I would immediately answer the phone. Of course, it did turn out fine after the school called my husband who called me. She did not wait long for her mom to rush to her side! But it did seem the world shifted ever so slightly. She gained some awareness that our lives are not one life but two separate lives.

Parents make many promises to a child, perhaps each of them unspoken. There are basic promises to feed, clothe and show love. And there are social promises to equip a child to make friends and swim in the larger world of peers. There is a promise to be present for the conversation that needs to happen, to listen to a worry, to talk through a dilemma, to help navigate the tough spots, to keep the cookie jar from an empty state.

It could be that parents construct an entire foundation under kids with our promises. No parents keeps them all perfectly, so as we build the foundation with promises, we also build it with empathy and forgiveness. Promise-keeping happens to be the language of Holy Baptism. God promises to hold onto the baptized from this life into the next, and to love us even when we let God down. In turn, hearing God’s unconditional promise of love for us, we make promises, too. Our promises are designed for the well-being of our neighbor.

At weddings and baptisms, I take delight in disclosing to the people making promises (couples and parents/guardians) they are making promises that are impossible to keep. I assure them they will not keep every promise made in the rites of marriage or baptism. They giggle nervously, but I hope my disclosure relieves some pressure.

If we were meant to keep promises perfectly, God would have improved the prototype for humanity. But we are broken people who break the promises we make to one another, even though we know we should not. We act selfishly and out of resentment. We struggle with addiction or get tangled up in an abusive relationship. We get too busy and out of the routine to take our kids to church. Being human requires forgiveness and new starts, or to quote Ann Lamott, earth is forgiveness school. Which is why God’s promise of unconditional love will hang over your head like my daughter’s everlasting tale of the time I chose not answer the phone! This umbrella promise covers you and any mistake you make, including the small mistakes like neglecting to answer the phone, along with the bigger and heavier ones.

In this first week of Advent, we inch closer to a promise God had made long before Jesus was born. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, the promise of Jesus’ coming is whispered on each page. The patriarchs of the first book of the Bible tried to follow God and failed, just like the Israelites who entered the story later on, and the promise remained. Through creation and judges and prophets, through insignificant and unnamed people and rich and famous ones, the promise of a Savior is carried from page to page until finally, the promise is a child. On the page we discover an impoverished couple on an obligatory journey into Bethlehem because a king had promised to harm them if they didn’t.

God’s unending promise to love you can be, at times, difficult to hear. The whisper is too low, like a handful of lovely people in their seasoned years who have admitted to me after worship: “I can hear the man’s voice but not yours.” The Bible is like that, too. We can hear God’s promise loud and clear on some pages but not others. We hear it in Isaiah, but turn the pages back and the pitch is too low in the book of Judges (not bedtime reading, that book.) And yet the promise is on that dreadful page, too!

God’s promise cannot be erased or compromised, and I wonder if the is so gracious as to become hard to believe. Can you believe you cannot undo God’s promise of mercy? It is a wild and unwieldy promise, and it is yours to keep.

PRAYER PRACTICE