Advent is a season of waiting, waiting for God to come into the world. Waiting for the birth of Jesus that declares God is with us, establishing God’s justice and mercy and peace. We do not wait passively or distractedly; we wait actively and fiercely. John the Baptist captures this in one word: Prepare.

Many of us have long known that how we read a parable is dependent on who we are, what our life experiences are, what assumptions we make about the world, and what assumptions we make about the characters in the story.

The story of Job exists at least in part because there are in fact no good answers to why awful things happen to people. Because even the most elegant theology falls flat when you are looking at a murdered child, a destroyed life.

To embrace the glorify creation means to embrace all of creation, including that which is not objectively beautiful or otherwise felicitous.

This view, that humans are to dominate nature, is deeply ingrained in western Christianity and it has erased creation from the faith experience and absolved us of any ethical concern for it. It has opened the door to massive exploitation of land, animals, and people, with the church either complicit, not noticing, or occasionally finding the energy to whisper about it.

We might well wish for a little more of “heaven” right now. It would be so nice to be able to look forward to a place where there is no Covid, no politics, no racism, no global warming, no hurricanes, no robocalls!

The truth is, as Christians, our track record on keeping the simplest of commandments: Love your neighbor as yourself is rather dismal. We often act as if Jesus’ core teaching was merely a polite suggestion.

Stories, especially Biblical stories, do not have A point—they are stories—they have many facets. And because as readers and hearers we bring our own experiences to them, they have different points for each of us.

As a first-century poor uneducated Jewish man living in a brutal client state with an unchecked priestly aristocracy under the Roman occupation, Jesus was a politically, economically, and religiously traumatized person. Jesus’ own lived experiences of over-taxing the poor, both by the Temple and by Caesar, influenced his desire to show the 5,000 hungry families how the kin-dom of God operates in a divine economy of abundance, where all have what they need.

Being crammed together in a small boat which is tossing on stormy waters seems to be about as good a metaphor to describe our current existence as anything, The question is, how can we deal with our fear?