Meditation by Pr. Mueller during A Service of Lessons and Carols for Advent on Sunday, December 10, 2023.
Comfort, comfort ye, my people. Some hear Handel’s Messiah. Or we consider the comfort needed for those suffering in Palestine and Israel.
What comforts you when you are most sad or stressed? A favorite comfort food? A warm blanket or afghan? A pet or stuffed animal? An embracing hug from a loved one or friend? Music is a divine gift that soothes and comforts us. We turn to music to express our deepest joy and most profound heartache.
Coming out of Covid into multiple wars around the world, climate instability, and political realities that would have seemed incomprehensible decades ago, we seek comfort from community, from music, from scripture, from sacrament, from the presence of Christ, from the faithfulness of God.
From Baruch we hear:
take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,
And put on forever the beauty of the glory from God.
The birth of John the Baptist signals a new dawn. John comes to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. And the story begins in the wilderness, a place of discomfort— representing that which is unknown, feral, uncontrolled, and challenging.
As much as Advent is about comfort, is also an invitation to God’s road construction project
in which mountains are brought low and valleys raised up. The powerful are humbled and the vulnerable lifted up. Advent—and indeed the gospel—is sometimes “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” a phrase coined by American humorist Finley Peter Dunne. He was talking about newspapers, but it also has theological resonance.
Yes, we seek comfort in our darkest night, yet discomfort is holy, too, as one writer puts it, when it “spurs our hearts to love and good deeds. [Discomfort] is a blessing when it drives us to seek justice and liberation.”1
In a world of such need, In a world of such despair, may the music, and this sacred gathering comfort our hearts, even as we leave to be signs of divine comfort in the world.
1Melissa Bills, “In the Lectionary” for Second Sunday of Advent, Christian Century, December 2023.