advent journal: mooing at kyle

Everything that is going on in the Brasher-Cunningham household alongside of Advent beginning before we were finished with Thanksgiving leftovers mean I am a day late beginning my annual Advent Journal, which starts this year with my sermon from yesterday, “Mooing at Kyle.” I hope your Advent is full of hope and wonder.

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We have had a two-year-old at our house these past few days—and me made me think about angels.

This Thanksgiving, Ginger and I were fortunate to have a table filled with people we think of as chosen family—nine in all. Among them was our former foster daughter and her wife and their son, Rafa, who is two. He is bright and curious and in love with the world. He brought so much joy to our time together.

When it came time for pie—and the rain had stopped—we all went out to our barn to have pie together. When we got to the barn, Rafa said, “Where are the cows?” Kyle, one of our other friends (who is also a great father) responded with a really good cow impersonation that both startled and scared Rafa.

Over the next few minutes we watched and listened as his mothers helped him get beyond his fear. Neither of them said, “Don’t be scared,” or “It’s no big deal.” They asked him questions about what he had heard, they identified Kyle as the one who had made the sound so Rafa would know where it came from, and they helped him form a response: “Go moo at Kyle.”

It wasn’t too long before Rafa had walked around the table to where Kyle was and boisterously shouted, “Moo!” And we all laughed.

Here’s where the angels come in.

One of the hallmarks of the story of all that leads up to Jesus’ birth is the messenger who brings the news, and pretty much every time they show up they offer the same greeting: “Fear not!” or “Do not be afraid,” depending on the translation.

I’m not sure that is the most helpful thing to say, when it comes to fear.

Maybe it crosses some sort of line to critique a divine messenger, but bear with me. Fear is not a choice; it’s a reaction. A response. If something frightens us, we get scared. That’s not a flaw, or a mistake. Life is populated with frightening things and scary situations. Being afraid is not a flaw.

The task is to do what it takes to get through or beyond our fear, to not be paralyzed by it. We have to learn how to moo at Kyle, if you will. And that is often a big task, depending on the moment. When we look at the story unfolding in front of us during Advent, we can see how Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth, Zacharias, and others did more than simply not be afraid when they heard a voice they didn’t recognize. They figured out how to moo at Kyle, to get to what comes after fear.

Hope is what comes after fear. Love is what comes after fear. Laughter, often, is what comes after fear. So are rest and peace and growth. Fear is not the last word, in part, because fear is a response not a choice. Love and hope are choices.

We can hear overtones of that in the passage we read this morning. Paul wrote to the young congregation in Thessalonica, which was a diverse group of people trying to figure out how to live together, and said he prayed they would have overflowing love for one another—that they would choose to grow together, to grow with and toward each other.

Perhaps that’s what the angel was trying to get at as well, if we look closer, or translate it differently. Maybe “Fear not!” was intended less as a divine imperative and more in the spirit of Rafa’s moms helping him figure out how to make fear a temporary place rather than a full stop.

At the heart of Jesus’ story is that God poured God’s self into human skin and became vulnerable. To be human is to be vulnerable; neither of those are choices either. Jesus did what the angels could not. He walked the earth as a living, breathing, fearing, loving person. He was vulnerable, too. He understood grief and pain and loss and joy with those understandings called us to live like the lilies and birds we talked about last week, to choose to live through and beyond our fear and to grasp, as poet David Whyte says, “the essential, tidal, and conversational foundations of our identity.”

Life is not about being fearless, it’s about being together, about sharing our griefs and losses, about honoring the details of one another’s lives, about investing in a legacy of love that makes us all better at mooing at Kyle.

So, be afraid. Life is often scary. And then listen for the voices of love that call us to what lies beyond fear, what will get us through our fear, what reminds us love is stronger than fear. Amen.

Peace,
Milton