What’s more, this Jesus will grow up and teach us a different way to live in a world like ours. And his method will not be to reassure pretty good folks like us that we pretty much see things for what they are. He will tell stories, violate norms, ask questions meant to provoke or expose our deep confusion about how God sees things. He will tell us that the ones we see as last, and least, and lost are the first ones God seeks out and finds. He’ll insist that we find our lives by laying them down for one another. That we save them by losing them. And he will live out what he taught us all the way to the incomprehensible love we see on the cross and in the resurrection of that love, even on the far side of death.

Your skin and your bones are so wonderful, and they are good even on the days when you and I wonder about that, and they are carrying us around this big, tumultuous world. And yet, you and I are also so much more than skin and bones. I wonder about those moments when the realization grabs us, as surely as Elizabeth grabbed Mary. When we are touched and touched; when we feel someone squeezing our hand or something opening our heart that and know there’s more – more to us, more to our lives, more to this world than we had previously dared to imagine.

Maybe the God of Advent is a God who loves us too deeply to be anything but angry and hurt when we build our lives on nothing. A God who grieves when we turn from the offer of God’s selfless love and build false selves for the sake of a world that says, “Sure I’ll love you if it’s in my interest to do so. Knock yourself out proving you’re worth my attention.” Maybe Malachi rages like a jilted lover because God won’t let us settle for lives built on such fickle, conditional loves instead of on the one great Love that will never let us go.

Advent, and life for that matter, are not only about Jesus coming to us. They are also about us coming to him. Are we willing to draw near to him in faith? Are we willing to acknowledge and to accept help beyond what we can do for ourselves?

The Very Rev. Ian S. Markham, Ph.D., is dean and president of Virginia Theological Seminary.

Our real lives are intertwined with the kingdom and the saints. We don’t leave one world and enter another when we walk into or out of church or the woods or our homes or our offices or our classrooms. It’s not separate, none of it. The boundaries are not fixed – in fact, there might not be any boundaries at all. Because it’s all real. Nothing is separate. The home of God is among mortals. This is real.

So maybe there’s a way of remembering, even a form of nostalgia, that is not a wishing we were back in another time and place, but the opening of a present experience of love for the world as it is, in all its beauty and brokenness. And maybe there’s a love for the things of the world, even by way of memory or nostalgia or that sacred homesickness, that can actually be, not a distraction from, but the way into an expanded love in us for God. Put another way, what if learning to actually feel a form of love for my neighbor, with all his quirks and sins, is how I actually learn to feel a transforming love for God?

“Take heart. Get up. He is calling you.” Take heart. Take another look at the one standing in front of us, offering us eyesight and insight. “My teacher, let me see again.” Can you and I see where Christ might heal each of us, and can we see the way that God might lead you and me, and how beautiful the way might be if we just opened our eyes?

Like a number of buzzwords and phrases in business, the term ‘servant-leadership’ has been bandied about so much that it can seem to lose its meaning. At its heart, it is not just a business philosophy. It is a way of life. As we move forward together as families, as a congregation, as a people, how do we serve each other along the way, and learn that the service we offer each other may be the Way?

See, I really do think this is a love story. A sad one, about how hard we can make it for love, even God’s love, to get through to us.