REFLECTION 8TH DECEMBER 2024

By Rev Dr Fei Taule’ale’ausumai

ADVENT 2

How has your year been thus far? Do you want to forget it? Life is tough, and even though many of us live what might be called privileged lives, we still have to go through tough patches–those times when we are sure our lives as we know them are over for all intents and purposes. Sometimes there are terrible blows–the loss of a spouse or a child, the ending of an important relationship, a deep betrayal, a loved one’s diagnosis of…you name it…cancer, Alzheimer’s. Eventually we make it through, unless we are the ones whose lives are threatened with a terminal illness or injury. But for a time, life seems impossible: The joy is gone, the relationship is gone, the loved one is gone, the way of life is gone, the sense of purpose is gone. Sometimes all at once. I know that many of you have gone through that kind of anguish. I also know that there are many sorrows and burdens that I will never know even from some of you, sorrows you have borne in silence, hidden in hearts.

Each time we are given bad news our hope even though diminished somewhat still finds a way of staying alive in the midst of bad news after bad news. Somehow we will find a way through all this. This season of Advent is the Season of hope and peace, Emmanuel God with us. This is hope and peace coming alive again in our lives and in our world.

How often do we look around ourselves and think of all the many blessings that God has given you in your life even when you have travelled through the most difficult of life’s storms?

I wonder when was the last time that you sat down and counted the times that God has been a very real presence in your life and in the lives of your family and those around you? Every time we get over a hurdle and pick ourselves up to move onto the next day that is day that God has come into our life. Emmanuel God with us. We do not need to look for the miraculous to see God at work; God is a constant presence in the normal everyday experiences of our lives. If God wanted something majestic to happen, then Jesus would have been born with all the pomp and ceremony of palaces and wealth. But God chose the most unlikely candidate to bear the Christ Child, an unwed teenage mother and called her “blessed”.

So where have you found hope in the midst of your own tragedy? Every now and then I see a little shoot of life bursting forth from a dead stump. What seemed like the end of everything worth living for is being transformed before our eyes, in little, tiny ways that sometimes we don’t even see it happening. Often, we don’t notice-

-and though still hurting—we begin to take a step forward towards healing. As most of you know my nephew Albert and his wife Helen gave birth to Albie junior. He was the first live birth after 5 attempts, 2 still births and 3 miscarriages later. Many women in Helen’s position would have given up, who wants to go through tragedy after tragedy time and time again? Some of us struggle when it happens once or twice, but five times. That’s what I call resilience, perseverance and a faith based on hopefulness. This is my Christmas miracle for me and for my family, hope born anew and born alive in the birth of Alapati junior or AJ. Never give up hope.

I wonder for us how are our lives being lived out through these Advent days. For some of us it might be darkness and of unexpected light, days of endings and of unexpected beginnings, days of death and unexpected life. And the signs of all of

these are not much…a shoot out of a stump, a branch out of the roots, a step forward, a smile…not much, but they are enough. For every now and then, peace breaks out in a place where we never would have believed possible. Every once in a while, the deepest, oldest wound begins to heal. Every now and then, a hatchet gets buried that is never dug up again. Every now and then a baby is born when all else feels hopeless and barren.

For me, I believe it is only when we go to the weakest, the smallest, the saddest, the scariest, the most broken places in our lives that we may also stand in the stable and receive the gift of knowing Christmas. It is then that we can celebrate it with the kind of deep joy that outlasts the pine needles that fall from the Christmas tree and the wrapping paper carted away in the rubbish.

Perhaps the homeless and the abandoned can relate to the child born into poverty lying in a manger in a stable. All they know is cold and fear and uncertainty and no place like home. That God might come to earth like one of them and know even for a moment what it’s like to be in their place means even more than any lovely toys or presents they may receive at shelter parties. It is the hope that something in their lives might change for good. If God understands, then maybe other people, with voices to speak the truth, might understand as well. Christmas is for all those children.

God enters what the world overlooks and brings a radical and renewing justice. Today, God continues to reverse our expectations of power and worth and calls us to see God’s face in the lost, the betrayed, and the vulnerable.

There are 17 more days till Christmas the waiting is almost over; after we finish our last-minute shopping and look for special hams and turkeys on offer in the supermarkets we will await the commemoration of the birth of Christ. Come into our world to turn our worlds upside down. So that we can understand what it means for us to live justly and humbly.

God has also chosen to act in us. Christmas is a time when we are filled with a greater power to live out the peace and love of Christ and let our ordinary lives bear God to the world.

Through Advent we pray for hope, we pray for peace, we pray for healing and wholeness, we pray for a sure refuge in the darkness as we await the light for something new to be born in us, something small and bright, a tiny flame that will carry us into the future. In the name of that light of Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.

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