Anna’s Messiah

We haven’t been in a church building since last March. As the weeks turn into months it feels especially strange and sad to not experience the sights and sounds of the Christmas season in a church setting. Our Sunday mornings at home have not gone well. We came out of the gate fairly strong last spring, but the kids’ attention spans and our own commitment level to online services have since waned. In an effort to not miss the Advent season altogether, last week I turned on a podcast to listen to the most recent sermon from Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville.

Each week the podcast opens with a member reading a passage of scripture. But this week was different. I could barely understand the reader as many of her words were slurred. Within a few seconds I realized it was a young lady with special needs reading one of the most well-known passages of the season: Isaiah 40:1-5. And her effort is profound. You can listen below:

She reads: “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God… Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain…”

I love Christmas music and have been listening to it non-stop since before Thanksgiving. The familiar lyrics and hopeful tunes are a special kind of balm in 2020. And yet, a minute-long clip of a young woman I’ve never met laboriously reading a passage about God’s comfort for his people is the most beautiful sound I’ve heard all season.

Even as I sit down to write this, I can’t re-listen to it without getting teary. That same passage from Isaiah has been read thousands of times in cathedrals and coliseums by high-profile pastors, great orators, and professional narrators. These words inspired the magnificence of Handel’s Messiah. But I dare say the sound of them has never been more pleasing to God than when Anna from Nashville stood in front of her sparse, socially-distanced congregation and struggled through it.

How can the sound of a human voice reading a few lines from the Word of God be so stirring? Maybe because it reminds me that no matter how rehearsed, none of us comes before God with an appropriately worthy offering. Instead, we all come before him with a broken, helpless plea.

Comfort us, O Lord.

It’s hard to look at a nativity scene and not notice the absence of people in high places. Sure, we like to place three magi on camels somewhere near the manger scene. But the biblical account of that evening is more simplistic. It centers around a young girl, a regular carpenter, poor shepherds, and a newborn. There is no palace, no parade, no polished performance. There’s not even a midwife. It’s raw and messy and not at all how we would have orchestrated a cosmic event. But it’s exactly how God chose to save the world.

How can such a strange incarnation be a source of comfort to us? Why do we set these odd nativity scenes up in our homes and yards? Maybe we do so because the story drives home to us, year after year, that we can’t fix ourselves. Our help doesn’t come from human hands or our own resolve, but only from heaven itself.

Even this week I have used the same mouth to sing along to “O Come All Ye Faithful” and to yell at my children. I have overspent. I have thought unkind things about unmasked people. I’ve been self-loathing and prideful. And yet…

Love came down into this mess. Into my mess and your mess. Into the center of our selfishness, unworthiness, and unpreparedness.

Comfort us, O Lord.

He did and He does… with his coming.

As Madeleine L’Engle writes in her poem “First Coming”:

He did not wait till the world was ready,
till men and nations were at peace.
He came when the Heavens were unsteady,
and prisoners cried out for release.

He did not wait for the perfect time.
He came when the need was deep and great.
He dined with sinners in all their grime, turned water into wine. He did not wait

till hearts were pure. In joy he came
to a tarnished world of sin and doubt.
To a world like ours, of anguished shame
he came, and his Light would not go out.

He came to a world which did not mesh,
to heal its tangles, shield its scorn.
In the mystery of the Word made Flesh
the Maker of the stars was born.

We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!