Not Passive, Not Helpless

Dear First Pres SLO Family,

Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus, the one we hope for—the one we expect.

I’ve been leaning into that hope these last few days. It’s been an awful week of bad news and bad behavior. The tragic shooting at Brown was all the more painful when it turns out that two of the college students near the incident had been through school shootings in high school, too.

We’ve also been shocked this week by the senseless antisemitic killing of Jewish people in Australia, who were simply celebrating the first day of Hannukah. Another 15 people are dead, with more seriously wounded and in the hospital.

And closer to home, the killings of Rob and Michele Singer Reiner by their own son has shocked us all. Many of our own families have been impacted by addiction and depression and other issues. To see the Reiner family torn apart this way is beyond tragic.

Our responses reveal a lot about who we are in times like these.

We can throw our hands in the air and give up—sometimes it’s just too much, and we have to retreat a little in order to engage the world in a healthy way. We can also fight. I don’t mean to lean into the violence, I mean to double down on our support for the treatment of addiction and mental illness, to reach out to families who have been impacted and seek out ways to help.

That’s not what we got from our Head of State this week. I won’t repeat it here, but his response to the deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife was cruel and offensive and lacking in the kind of leadership we all expect and need—no matter what political party we may support.

All of this—the deaths, the pain, the lack of any meaningful response from the one person who can speak for all of us—all of this just adds to the sense of desperate longing that comes with Advent.

In this season of expectation, it would be easy and perfectly acceptable for us to shake our fists at God and cry out: “Just what exactly are you waiting for?”

I don’t have an answer that will satisfy all of our confusion and pain. What I do have is a reminder that God’s people waited for centuries for the Messiah to come. During that time there were wars and violence, they were taken into Exile with no real hope of returning, and yes, they were led and ruined by a succession of evil, incompetent kings.

Into that time of suffering the Messiah came, born humble and poor, forced to scrounge and run and escape violence. It is that Messiah who grew up and showed us what God is like—what God cares for, what God loves, what God grieves, and what God promises.

What I can offer you this Advent season is this: God has been faithful in fulfilling his promises in the past, and because of that we can trust that he will do the same in the future.

In the meantime, we wait.

We’re not passive or helpless, though. We are the Body of Christ on earth until he comes again. We are the agents of healing and protection, the teachers of love and grace and mercy, and occasionally even the ones who have to make sacrifices to bring about the world that God intends.

And so let me invite you to this holy task, as we wait for the one who promises to come again.

Blessings to you and yours this Advent season,

Pastor John