PRESENTS AND PRESENCE

The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a rather harsh winter for much of the nation. Visions of shoveling snow, worries about getting stuck in a ditch I have slid into because of that snow, power outages, and so forth all come to mind. All of this reminds me of something Robert Farrar Capon once said. He was reflecting upon how we assume that God will always get us out of the messes we get into, whether those of our own making or not, if we only have enough faith. But God never promised to get us out of the ditch we slid into. God did not promise to miraculously restore our electricity.

Rather, what Capon said God said is that God would be with us in our car in the snow bank, in our home in the dark, while we waited for help to come. God never promised to be the Big Helper in the Sky. He promised to be the Great Handholder here with us. God’s ministry was and is a ministry of presence: being with us through thick and thin, through ill and well, through it all. To me that is very comforting even though it will not take away the discomfort of the cold and/or the dark, will not get me out of the ditch, will not repair my electric line.

And there is no “if we only have enough faith” about it. Yes, we need to believe that God will be, is present with us wherever we are. We need to reach out to that Presence. But the Presence is unconditional. It matters not whether the mess we are in is of our own making or not. God is present to be with us through it.

           

This is the time of year when we feel the compulsion to give material presents to those we love. Sometimes we even give presents at Christmas simply because we want to, out of love, and for no other reason. That, of course, is the reason for the greatest Christmas Present of all. On Christmas we celebrate the fact that God gave us the great present of his Son’s presence among us. God gave us the Present for no other reason that God loves us. No greater gift could God give than that Gift. Yes, theologians tell us, even scripture tells us, that God’s greatest gift was his Son’s death on the cross and resurrection to new life. For because of that Greatest-of-All Gifts, we are all given the eventual gift of eternal life when we die.

Yet the fact still remains, the here-and-now is a little more important than the hereafter, here and now, stuck in a ditch, house without power, spouse deathly ill in the hospital. The present of the promise to be in God’s presence eternally is wonderful and gratefully accepted. But when we are in the ditch in the snow, lonely and cold, what we need most of all while waiting for someone to come along and lend a hand is the comforting presence of God.

           

And God is there. In the stillness of the cold, in the darkness of the night, God is there. Sometimes I think that the reason why God chose to have His Son to be born in a barn where no one else was, in a tiny town no one really knew or cared about, with no one around except those whom society considered to be nobodies, was to remind us that most of the time for most of us it is in the quiet and the lonely and in the nowhere moments that we find the ability to find the presence of God.