The Unexpected Fruit of Barrenness

How the kingdom of God delights in grand reversals.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Luke 1:39-45

I SAT ON THE COUCH AND WEPT, still dressed in stiff business casual. I had returned home from the classroom with the realization like a cold stone in my gut—I was not healthy enough to be a teacher. I could not finish my master’s program. I could not spend the hours or energy required to do this one thing I thought God had been leading me toward my whole life. This garden I planted and tended since my childhood, just now springing up, was to die.

So, I gave it up. There was nothing to be done but pray that God would do something beautiful in the uprootedness of it all. I stood in the middle of dead dreams, unsure how—or what—to replant.

While in vastly different times and with different implications, I find a resonance in the story of Jesus’ lineage and the way Elizabeth made her home in the wreckage of her uprooted dream. Her pain of a lost dream was compounded by the dishonor that barrenness brought in the ancient Near East. But in a moment, God reversed her story. “The Lord has done this for me,” she proclaimed. “In these days he has shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people” (Luke 1:25). Here was hope, growing soft and green in the darkness of the soil, as surprising as spring. God specializes in epic reversals. Elizabeth would bear not just any son in her old age—she was carrying the child who would prepare the way for the Messiah.

I was still on that couch with crumpled tissues clenched in trembling hands when a wise man, now my husband, helped me sort out what was still growing in the garden: those seeds planted by the hand of God that I had missed. Years later, I’m harvesting different fruit than I thought I would—but it’s better fruit. I consider this my own mini-reversal. God took a dream I thought had been rendered useless and flipped it into a reality of teaching through writing and discipleship, things that fit the contours of my heart better than a classroom could. I’ve made my home in this garden, and I can’t imagine it any other way.

God’s reversals fill the pages of Scripture. Consider the birth of Isaac to an elderly and once seemingly barren Abram and Sarai, Joseph’s rise from slave to ruler, or the way Haman’s plan to destroy the Jews was foiled by two Jews God lifted to positions of power in their place of exile. These stories speak to the way God delights in flipping situations upside down, bringing salvation in the most surprising ways.

All of these foreshadow the most surprising reversal of all. God was born as a baby to usher in the upside-down kingdom of heaven where the last are first. He defeated death and rose from his garden grave as the firstborn in the resurrection, purchasing our eternal life.

This ultimate reversal that flipped the principalities and powers upside down is what Elizabeth’s reversal first points to. Having a child meant that she would no longer be called barren, undoing her earthly shame. But the baby Mary carried would undo Elizabeth’s eternal shame. When Mary’s greeting reached Elizabeth’s ears, “the baby leaped inside her, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Then she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and your child will be blessed!’” (Luke 1:41–42, CSB). Elizabeth’s awe of God swelled as the Savior of the world, still in a womb, came through her door in the swollen belly of a virgin. The baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaped, like hope springing up, because Mary’s baby had arrived to save us.

This God is leading us home to the new heaven and earth, a beautiful garden city where death is no more. And until then, he is planting new life in you and me. Our God gives us something better than our earthly dreams. He gives us himself.

Alicia Hamilton authors Bible studies and disciples college students in New Hampshire.

This article is part of A Time for Wonder, a 4-week devotional to help individuals, small groups, and families journey through the 2024 Advent season. Learn more about this special issue that can be used Advent, or any time of year at http://orderct.com/advent.

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Church Life

The Surprising Arrival of a Servant

Jonathan Chan

Jesus’ introduction of justice through gentleness.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Isaiah 42:1-4

MAN OF SORROWS, lamb led to the slaughter. At the time of their recording in Isaiah 53, there was every possibility that these monikers would remain purely abstract. The Israel addressed in Isaiah is to face judgment, exile, and restoration under Assyrian captivity and Babylonian invasion. To a people under duress, Isaiah’s prophecies helped endow a messianic imagination and a vision of a salvific figure.

But the first suggestion that this figure would not take on the form of a military revolutionary, as some might have hoped, lies in the word servant, from the Hebrew word ebed, used throughout Scripture to variously connote a slave, a vassal king, a subject, and a tributary nation. The word foretells a chosen servant who receives the delight of the Lord and the Spirit, and who brings long-awaited justice to the nations.

Meekness, humility, and modesty characterize Christ from the start, who came into this world as flesh and blood, as an infant in full vulnerability. He is close to the hearts of all those who suffer, including those who face the physical corrosion and psychological turmoil of poverty, disaster, and war. Christ was born into a world that had sought to destroy his infant flesh; the slaughter of the Holy Innocents under Herod’s heinous regime is evidence enough of this earthly brokenness. It is, as the poet Czesław Miłosz describes in his poem “Theodicy,” a world that “lies in iniquity,” where “there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures.” It is a world to which the servant described by Isaiah must bring justice.

Yet this justice is to come through an exquisite tenderness, a strength that lies precisely in gentleness. A reed that is bruised is so frail as to snap at the slightest touch, yet this servant shall not break it. A wick that burns faintly is close to being snuffed, yet this servant shall fan it back into flame. It is Christ who sees possibility and hope for the bruised, for the weary, for the exhausted.

Theologian Eugene Peterson once explained in Eat This Book that a metaphor is “a word that bears a meaning beyond its naming function; the ‘beyond’ extends and brightens our comprehension rather than confusing it.” The metaphors of the reed and the wick help to illuminate an understanding of human difficulty; the actions taken by the servant illustrate how Christ tends to the lowly. It is, as Dane Ortlund describes in Gentle and Lowly, Christ’s most natural instinct to move toward sin and suffering.

This is the Messiah for whom the world waited amid the silence of God—the one we commemorate in the season of Advent, in which each day is suffused with the dark mystery of anticipation.

At the heart of faith is a contradiction: a Savior born to die, an infant whose being prefaces a demise by the cruelest of tortures. Even under such indescribable physical, emotional, and mental duress, this servant will become neither faint nor discouraged. Justice will roll over the earth, not just from the jagged deserts familiar to the lands of ancient Jerusalem but beyond, to the distant coastlands that reach the waters.

It is a victory, a realization of justice that is achieved by servanthood, an obedience to the point of death (Phil. 2:8). It is an example of William Langland’s Pacientes vincunt—the patient are victorious, or perhaps, those who suffer shall win. Or as the imagined voice of Christ cries out in Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence, “It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”

Christ comes into the world as an infant, growing in the obedience and servanthood for which he has been called. Advent brings this swell of anticipation—a cradling of hope—for the arrival of the Savior, by whom justice will be established on earth through the humility of servanthood.

Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor. Born in New York, he was raised in Singapore and educated at Cambridge and Yale.

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Church Life

After Disaster, God Draws Near

Aaron Cline Hanbury

How Jeremiah’s prophecy points to Advent’s promise.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Jeremiah 31:31–34

THE PROPHET JEREMIAH writes from a social, political, and spiritual landscape cramped and dark, like falling into a pit, humid and heavy with the weight of regret. His words, the message from God, match the tone. Read any part of Jeremiah’s prophecy and you’ll see the theme: the failure of God’s people. They couldn’t keep their part of the covenant God made with them, and the young prophet delivers God’s response with unflinching force. Right in the beginning, Jeremiah’s earliest vision establishes what will follow: “From the north disaster will be poured out on all who live in the land” (Jer. 1:14).

Like Moses before him, Jeremiah initially protests the work God has called him to do, proposing his age as a disqualifier (Jer. 1:6). By traditional accounts, Jeremiah heard the call from God around 627 BC, which makes him something like 20 years old when the book opens. For 40 years, he continues warning of a disaster from the north.

Not unlike the time of the judges, God’s people are once again caught in a vicious, self-induced spiral of breaking their commitments to God and seeking vindication and consolation anywhere and everywhere else. Jeremiah delivers news of God’s wrath, and he prophesies about the ways God will respond to the people’s unfaithfulness.

The disaster arrives in 587 BC as Babylon destroys Jerusalem, bringing swift destruction to what had been eroding for centuries. Like a flood, the prophesied pouring-out wipes out God’s dwelling place in the land of Israel—an undoing of creation.

You could fairly assume that for a person like Jeremiah—an Israelite from Benjamin’s tribe—these were times more dire than what we see in Judges. That was before David, before the temple. With the breaking of Jerusalem, David’s kingdom washed away in a flood of Babylonian destruction. Jeremiah occupies this undone space.

Jeremiah hears from God not to take a wife or have children. At this point in history and within this Israelite culture, you’ll find no category for a single, childless man. One Old Testament scholar, Joel R. Soza, even suggests that the concept of a bachelor is so incomprehensible that there exists no word in the Hebrew language to describe it. The idea is that Jeremiah doesn’t just carry news of Israel’s tragedy, he not only occupies that place, but he actually embodies the undoneness of it all. Something laden with potential, now barren.

Jeremiah 31 is a common reading in the Christmas season. The familiarity of the passage might mean we miss the force of its words, and that this message of a new hope passed through chapped lips. Sometimes, those of us on this side of history merely nod at parts of the old stories with which we’d do better to sit. That’s part of the waiting period, of Advent.

This is the prophet who inhabits an unfaithful land, who delivers God’s harshest judgments, who feels them, and who endures long enough to say these words:

“The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel.’” (Jer. 31:31)

Jeremiah tells a shattered people that, one day, God will again draw near. And this time, his ways will be written on hearts and he will be known beyond instruction. He will forgive and will establish a new covenant, one freed from the actions and inactions of men, one that begins a return to peace and fruitfulness, to Eden. Though dim still, it brightens.

Aaron Cline Hanbury is a writer and editor.

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Church Life

When You’re Ready for Jesus to Return

Karen Stiller

The weariness of trial reveals our priorities.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Haggai 2:6-9

THERE WAS A MOMENT, in the aftermath of my husband’s premature death, when I thought about Jesus coming back and longed for his return with an urgency I had never before experienced. I always knew we were supposed to long for the return of our King—a kind of obligation of anticipation. But I confess I had previously liked my life too much.

But now, I wanted him to stop all the delays. I imagined the moment arriving and seeing Jesus and thinking, Yes, yes, there you are. Fantastic! And then pushing past him as quickly as politely possible to search for my husband. (Is this what it will be like? A busy airport arrival lounge?)

I imagined throwing myself into his arms once again. (Dear God, please let it be a little bit like that.) I have never known such longing. And I know that this reveals my longings to be out of order. Of course they are. I feel a bit badly about this, but I can confess it to the God who knows us, and who I have discovered made us more resilient than we know and capable of so much love that the vastness of this love’s loss causes grief to feel like an ocean.

Advent isn’t normally about feeling badly about ourselves or our lives. That’s Lent’s job—the party pooper of the Christian liturgical year. Advent is more like that event planner friend who is cooking up a great feast and making all kinds of fantastic plans for the next month. We wait. We mark off days on the calendar. We are impatient as we prepare.

Enter Haggai. His name even means “festival,” so he’s perfect for Advent. He’s also just what the returned exiles of 520 BC needed to get them moving on their temple rebuilding project, which they had been neglecting. The temple had fallen into disrepair during their forced absence. There was government pressure to leave the temple in ruins, and the people had been focusing their efforts on their own houses rather than the work of rebuilding God’s house.

Haggai hears the call to speak into the lives of God’s people. He stirs himself for the task and stirs the pot, prophetically speaking. He urges the people into action. They come to see their priorities have been misaligned and their longings have been in the wrong order. They find their courage. They start to rebuild and repair the temple.

“Work, for I am with you,” says the Lord (2:4). I wonder if there’s a moment in the life of a prophet like Haggai, when they see that the message God gave them to deliver has both landed—hit the mark almost exactly—and they experience a moment of pleasure. A job well done. That is a fine thing to consider.

The sun came up for Haggai and his work crew, and it comes up now for us, each day as the morning turns to afternoon and we turn to work and toil. We sweep. We tidy. We build new temples and patch up the old ones. There is garbage to be taken out and fresh flowers to be put in vases. There is holiness to be seen to, and lived out of and toward, as much as we can muster, while we wait.

And what about our hearts that long? They can also be an offering. Our longings will all be swept up in joy that might feel even more vast than the ocean that grief becomes. We believe, and we wait.

We are in the afternoon of the most promising of days. So much more is to come. “I will shake all nations, and what is desired by all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,” says the Lord Almighty (2:7). Come, Lord Jesus. Come.

Karen Stiller is author of Holiness Here, The Minister’s Wife, and other books about the church.

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Church Life

Zechariah’s Furnace of Transformation

Christina Gonzalez Ho

What silence and solitude do to the soul.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Luke 1:18-20

IT IS TEMPTING to dismiss Zechariah as a fool for doubting Gabriel. After all, if a visitation from an archangel is possible, why not a miraculous pregnancy? Surely Zechariah, being a priest, knew the story of Abraham and Sarah, who also bore a son in their old age. But we know that logic can become puny in the face of deep disappointment or pain—and in Zechariah’s case, the pain ran decades deep.

“Your prayer has been heard,” the angel told him—a prayer he surely quit long ago, when the last hope for children disappeared with Elizabeth’s fertility (Luke 1:13). After that, Zechariah must have resigned himself to his reality: He was childless, and always would be. That an angel had just blasted through the roof of that reality did not dispel it completely. After so many years of heartache, Zechariah had trouble believing.

Some time ago, my husband and I experienced a miscarriage. When we became pregnant again a few months later, I struggled with dread every day. Every time I felt a twinge, I was terrified it was a harbinger of something worse—stabbing pain, a gush of blood, unstoppable, irreversible loss. I found it difficult, almost impossible, to believe I was actually going to have a baby. One afternoon, as I sat on the couch, battered by wave upon wave of anxiety, I asked God for a clear sign the pregnancy would be successful. If this baby will be born healthy, let someone knock on our door right now. But even as I prayed, I knew no sign could take away my anxiety. The experience of loss was still too keen. If I’d seen an actual angel—who knows? But I’ve never waited for anything as long as Zechariah had.

To Zechariah, Gabriel said, “And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words” (v. 20). Later, we are told Zechariah was struck deaf as well (v. 62). This sounds like a punishment. To be rendered suddenly without hearing or speech is to be isolated from others, forced into solitude—as Henri Nouwen writes in The Way of the Heart, “Silence completes and intensifies solitude.” Yet Scripture does not present solitude and silence as punishments, but as invitations.

Solitude, writes Nouwen, is “the furnace of transformation.” In the silence, stripped of worldly props and scaffolds, we are forced to confront our own “frightening nothingness.” It is this excruciating vulnerability that becomes the doorway to God’s presence, to the place where we surrender to his love. This is the solitude that Zechariah, through silence, was compelled to enter—the solitude of Moses’ 40 years in the desert, and of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.

With no distraction from his doubt—and no way to voice it, either—all that was left for Zechariah to do was listen. In the silence, God spoke to him again, and this time, he believed. When Zechariah finally spoke months later, it was to prophesy about the Messiah, in a song bursting with wonder, faith, and love. In the silence, Zechariah was transformed from a man of resignation to a man full of hope.

Silence, waiting, the relinquishing of control—these are painful experiences before they are life-giving ones. But the promise of the gospel is that someday life will come. Until then, we wait—like Zechariah, like Elizabeth—for the promises of God to be made manifest. Help us, Lord, to surrender to you in the silence and waiting, so that we too may be transformed.

Christina Ho is the author of the audio series “The Last Two Years” and the cofounder of Estuaries.

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How Insecurity Thwarts a Kingdom

Ryan Keating

Herod’s violence reveals the futility of earthly power.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Matthew 2:-1-12

IT WAS A GROUP of astrologers “from the east” who first informed Herod that an heir to the Jewish throne had been born in his territory (v. 1). They must have traveled a long way, and I wonder if they had any idea what kind of man this king was. I imagine Herod making his visitors wait outside in the sun while he finished his lunch. And when he finally listened to their account of an auspicious star pointing to a royal birth, the significance of the story was difficult for him to digest.

Matthew tells us that “all Jerusalem” felt the upheaval in Herod’s soul, where insecurity and contempt burned through stability and reason (v. 3). The deadly pistons of conspiracy churned, fueled by a reservoir of fear that he wouldn’t have been able to acknowledge; but it must have escaped like steam from his expression and tone, obvious to anyone in his orbit.

He received the news of God’s chosen deliverer as a threat. The existence of a tiny, legitimate, messianic king of Israel felt like an assault on the identity that Herod had constructed for himself, a brittle tower of power and self-importance. And the urgency of his arrogance and fragility was the only justification for wielding the coercive violence of the state to kill babies in broad daylight.

The Magi refused to participate in his plot. They were wiser men than Herod realized, which isn’t surprising. His kind of pride and hatred make it difficult to truly see others for who they are; all of his internal energy was expended on convincing the world that he was as great as he imagined he should be.

After their visit with Jesus, the Magi escaped back to their country. It is scandalous and wonderful that these foreigners were the first to worship Jesus in Matthew’s account. Although sometimes in subtle and subversive ways, Matthew highlights the radical inclusion of the nations in the new people of God throughout his gospel. In fact, many of my friends from places like Iran, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan all want to claim the Magi as having come from their homeland.

Matthew’s version of the events also reveals a parallel with the Old Testament Exodus story. Like Herod, Pharoah had ordered the slaughter of babies in a desperate attempt to eliminate a perceived threat to power. The shrewdness of Shiphrah and Puah, wise midwives whose names are worth remembering, thwarted his evil plan (Ex. 1:15–21). And Moses, God’s chosen deliverer, was rescued and raised in exile, which was, of course, God’s plan all along.

I live as an exile on the island of Cyprus. I was unjustly deported from my former home by a leader who considers me a threat to national security. He doesn’t want the good news of God’s deliverance to spread. He cannot see the wisdom of our work caring for refugees. And he cannot see the goodness of the people we serve. But, now seven years later, I can see the hand of God moving us to complete a greater plan. And I am learning to focus on its goodness, and on his goodness, even when I am called to dark government offices to respond to false accusations in our new home as well. His kingdom is coming.

I imagine that Joseph and Mary were too inspired by the greatness of their son to let their lives be defined by bitterness toward Herod and the dark politics of the world around them. There were days to redeem and long afternoons to join in the work of hoping for the renewal of all things, even as they made the long walk back from Egypt and watched Jesus suffer alienation, false accusations, and persecution. In the end, after our own long days of waiting, we all join the Magi in worship.

Ryan Keating is a writer, teacher, and pastor on the island of Cyprus. His poetry can be found in publications such as Ekstasis and Fare Forward.

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On the Heels of the Miraculous

Courtney Moody

Joseph’s call to obedience in the midst of the mundane.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Matthew 2:3-15

SWEAT DRIPS off Joseph’s forehead onto the dust road. The afternoon sun glares off his back and onto the sandy landscape. A pebble has lodged itself in his sandal. He’d love to stop and take it out before a blister forms, but there are miles to go, and Mary has finally calmed a now two-year-old Jesus back to sleep after their donkey was spooked by a snake.

Not too long ago, life had seemed wonderful beyond their wildest dreams. They’d been blessed with rich gifts from several wise men who followed God’s star all the way from the East to see Jesus. The Messiah was here. Mary and Joseph had been specially chosen by God. It would be easy to assume Jesus would remember his earthly parents when the time came for him to overthrow the government and establish a new kingdom.

Then the warning came in the form of another dream. Despite doing his best to obey and explain to Mary their sudden need to flee the safety of their hometown, Joseph must have had questions rising within him with each step they took toward Egypt. What happened to the miracle? If Herod was threatening God’s Son, why didn’t God just strike him down? What were they to even make of all these dreams and angelic appearances?

I always find myself encouraged at this time of year— not just by the Nativity but by the many surrounding days that compose the season of Advent. Faith is easy when we’re in the middle of a breakthrough: that amazing job offer, a miraculous doctor’s report, the divine provision. But when life returns to the mundane, faith can become a challenge. Staying joyful as we go back to our jobs, washing dishes and clothes, and the many other tasks that clutter our lives, becomes the true test of faith. This is especially true when real, severe trial comes on the heels of the miraculous.

Attacks often come right after a spiritual high and place us on our own road to Egypt, calling us to test our confidence in the Lord. A miracle comes and reminds us of God’s wonderful presence—and then comes the plunge into difficulty and uncertainty. We find ourselves asking the same questions that would have likely come to Joseph: What happened? Why doesn’t God just fix this? Have I really heard from God?

Questions are natural. They can lead us to deepen our faith. When we take our questions to God, he draws near with comfort and answers. As Joseph looked back at Mary, he saw Jesus: the promise of the angel who appeared to him. God’s Word made flesh. Breathing. Fidgeting. Tangible proof that God did and would come through.

Through Joseph’s obedience, God would bring the family to safety in Egypt. Word would eventually reach them of what had occurred back in Bethlehem and turn into a testimony of divine intervention. As they remained there, Jesus would grow older. Immanuel would be with them, reminding them of the eternal presence of God and his promises. Waking up and sitting down to their morning meal with Jesus would be their reminder of God’s faithfulness, and eventually, they would come out of Egypt and fulfill the prophecy of Hosea.

As we find ourselves underneath the beating sun of suffering or trial, wondering what happened to the miracles, we may find ourselves struggling even in our obedience. Perhaps our questions feel like a swirling sandstorm obscuring the guidance of God.

But just as Joseph could look to the Son of God for encouragement, so can we. In the fulfilled promises of Advent, we find comfort. Though the road to our own Egypt may seem long and filled with sweat and stones, Jesus is Immanuel, “God with us.” In obedience, we can keep walking with our eyes on him, knowing that the cool breezes of the evening will eventually come and that the miracles have just begun.

Courtney Moody is a ballet dancer, writer, and poet of faith. Her publications include Ekstasis and The Way Back to Ourselves literary journal.

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Church Life

The Future’s Great Light

Morgan Mitchell

How Isaiah prophesies the expectation of Advent.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Isaiah 9:2-7

AFTER THE HOURS of heat, the early evening beckons with a soft light and its pleasant coolness. The late hours crack the egg of the day to reveal the golden yolk of the setting sun. It would be a mind-bending exercise to try to explain darkness without describing light—it’s likely impossible to do so. Light beckons on the horizon of even the darkest moments.

The prophet Isaiah, however, had awakened with the dawn. He was a prophet of Judah who ministered during the reign of four kings; the progeny of a family of rank and status; a family man; one who had a willing spirit to do what the Lord had called him to do. Commissioned to be a mouthpiece of God, he spoke with prophetic force even though his words would fall on deaf ears, and his throat would grow scratchy.

His work and writing bears some of the most profound words in all of Scripture, echoing themes of holiness, justice, allegiance, trust, righteousness, and hope. The words read today in Isaiah 9:2–7 reveal sparks of this truth, reflecting the contrast between light and dark, hope and heaviness, honor and gloom.

This contrast is foreshadowed even in the names that Isaiah gives his sons: the first named ShearJashub, or, “a remnant will return” and the second named Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz as a warning, “quick to the plunder, swift to the spoil,” a balancing act that neither contradict nor cancel each other out, but fleshes out the theme that this unified story directs us toward throughout the Advent season (7:3; 8:1).

We simply cannot explain the darkness without describing the light. “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned” (v. 2).

When we turn away from God, there is a spiritual darkness that will haunt and startle us. After an amazing work of God in our hearts we begin to redirect, reroute, reorient ourselves toward light, and find it so real, so sustaining, that the noble crew of C. S. Lewis’s Dawn Treader called it “drinkable.” We begin to experience the goodness of things to come like “drinkable light” and that break in the clouds and sunlight on our back fuels the drumbeat to freedom—a freedom that comes from aligning our values, allegiance, obedience, delight, and hope with our God of unfailing love.

Isaiah knew that Bethlehem would be the place that God would hem the garments of eternity. This “Prince of Peace” would one day be acquainted with the truest form of darkness imaginable—a darkness no one else could endure—so that we may walk in the light.

Isaiah foresaw a future light and was welcoming the dawn that would one day break after a long, dark night, casting beams of hope 700 years into the future. He saw a radiant heir that would come as a peasant even as he was the Messiah. Jesus shines a light past the evening, awakens the dawn, and sets the course for redemptive history—a baby growing to be a man who would experience true darkness, so that we, with sleepy eyes, may gaze upon eternal light.

Morgan Mitchell serves as a pastor in San Diego, specializing in church small groups, discipleship, and preaching.

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The Fruit and Fire of the Spirit

Alyssa Stadtlander

Mary’s encounter with God’s power reveals the arc of the Spirit’s work.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Luke 1:30-38

I IMAGINE MARY, rubbing her eyes in the light cast by the angel in the doorway, the phosphorescence filtering through the dusty, dusky air of her room.

Some days, I imagine the angel appears to her as a young boy about her age, gazing at her with wide, curious eyes and cocked head, grinning as he makes his pronouncement about the good news that is coming through her. Other times, I imagine the angel as an older grandmother, kneeling in front of her and brushing the hair from her eyes, comforting her like a mother would upon delivering news that is about to change everything. Still other times, the angel is simply a flash of light, a pillar of fire in the wilderness, while Mary blinks, trying to absorb the message flooding her room, knowing that every moment in her life will arrange itself according to this one; there will be a before, and an after. “How shall this be?” Mary asks (v. 34, KJV throughout).

As an answer, the miraculous words from the angel slip into the warm air: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. … For with God nothing shall be impossible” (vv. 35, 37).

And suddenly, something happens, full of life and earthy glory, the presence of God somehow forming that which is new and real inside Mary’s womb.

The first time I heard these words—really heard them—I wept. Desperate to feel anything from El Roi, the God who Sees, I longed for a glimpse of the Holy Spirit coming upon me, the arms of the Most High cradling my small body curled up on my college apartment couch. I envisioned my own light-filled hope that God indeed saw me and instilled purpose within me, that I was worth the effort of drawing near.

Isn’t this what God is always doing, cultivating new mercies from a generous fount, an overshadow of his Spirit and a word of change? The poem of creation itself begins with these lines, a foreshadow of the kingdom to come:

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Gen. 1:2–3).

This simple, impossible declaration that calls light out of darkness persists, enacted by a Spirit who is, even now, moving on our behalf. The same Spirit who lit the first sky with light, who became a pillar of fire in the wilderness, who poured out an unshakable presence into prophets, priests, and kings.

The same Spirit who overshadowed a young girl in Nazareth and created a holy thing inside her womb; the same Spirit who raised the girl’s son, the Word of God made flesh, to life 30 years later; who flung tongues of fire upon humanity to light our way, that we might all—Gentile and Jew, slave and free, male and female—see the beauty and presence of God together. The same Spirit is living within you, too.

In the midst of our own uncertainties, as we face the coming night, our bodies—like Mary’s, like Jesus’—have the capacity to hold the power of the Most High who is, even now, hovering over the face of the deep waters within us, creating a new way forward in the places we have deemed impossible.

This Advent season, may we practice echoing Mary’s words of acceptance—“be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38)—and pay generous attention as the Spirit fills us with power and love. May we pause and wonder on the stoop of our soul as the sun sets, as we wait for the promised light. May we feel the pillar of fire within us burn.

Alyssa Stadtlander is a writer and actress based in Boise, Idaho. Her work is published in Ekstasis, Mudfish Magazine, Fathom, and others.

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Church Life

Restless Nights and Renewed Callings

George Sweetman

Clarity comes from God in the midst of Joseph’s anxious wrestling.

Illustration by Sandra Rilova

Read Matthew 1:18-21

THE GENEALOGY at the end of Matthew chapter 1 is curious, isn’t it? After a long and, to many ears, boring list of begetting names and family lineages, the story ends with the news of Mary’s scandalous pregnancy and Joseph grappling with a miserable decision—publicly shame Mary (with the resulting possibility of her death!) or divorce her without a fuss, but likely to a life of misery and loneliness.

There are nights that I fall into my pillows with a mind full of restless and toxic thoughts that keep me staring at my white ceiling and from much-needed sleep. Nonetheless, what occupies my mind is nothing compared to what Joseph was dealing with upon the news that Mary was pregnant. His days must have been filled with a paralyzing sadness at this betrayal, and nights restless with their tossing and turning as he faced what seemed like only two options. Imagine: You’re excited about the prospects of marriage, you’re moving through the betrothal stage of the process—more than an engagement but not yet marriage—working diligently to ensure that all is lined up for a wedding feast that will include friends, family, and days of eating, drinking, and celebrating only to be told months before the big day(s) that you’re going to be a dad and, oh, by the way, the baby isn’t yours (of course!) or even another man’s!

When Joseph is finally able to sleep after stewing over the pain of his impending Solomonic decision, he is visited in his slumber, and the dream changes his life. A messenger from God appears to him and whispers, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:20–21).

Here’s the thing: Joseph is a simple worker of wood; he is not any rabbi’s apprentice. Nonetheless, he is a faithful Jew—going to temple on High Holy Days, observing feasts and fasts, and having some understanding of the Hebrew Scripture from the training of his youth. The angel’s proclamation of the Spirit’s presence could possibly have made some sense to him. And yet, what he’s told in the depth of his REM sleep that night causes him to take massive action and redirect the entire course of his life. When Joseph wakes, he knows what to do. Does doubt linger? How could it not? Is he still confused? Probably. Does he begin to calculate the reputational cost of his obedience? Likely. But there is no wavering for Joseph.

The Spirit’s work—that which began at the creation of the cosmos, continued through the kings and prophets as told in the early scrolls, and that animates his ancient world—that work must continue. It must be birthed. And the child, “Jesus”—not a unique name of that generation or time, but one with the immeasurably important promise he will save his people from their sins—will be received and cared for by his earthly father and presented to the world.

After nights struggling under a shroud of doom obscuring his family’s future, Joseph rises that morning with a renewed call and a God-word that rests upon his shoulders. The dawn of a new day has begun. The dawn of a new life is promised. The dawn of a new creation is about to break through, and the dark of the night has been dispelled. Everything has been changed.

George Sweetman has served as the dean of student life at Tyndale University in Toronto for the past 25 years.

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