What you don’t understand or see, the bits of yourself you can’t pull together in a convincing story, are all held together in a single gaze of love.

Immanuel himself has descended into this darkness, he has taken on all of our unknowing and questioning, and—can it be?—even our doubts. So the faith and the hope will pass away, but love never ends. Come and join me, let us make our home in this luminous dark.

In baptism, we signal our death, with Christ, to the ways of this shadowy world. And we rise again, with Christ, like dawns. Ten thousand little lights breaking forth, icons of that which is most real.

The invitation being offered to us opens up a world of surprise, uncontrollability, and ever-widening tables. This meal, this communion, is the most lively fellowship you can participate in. Its culture is not stagnant or decadent. It feels eccentric, resonant, and human. This scares most of us because we have become accustomed to worlds that are expected, manageable, and increasingly narrow.

Christ himself has come down into our darkness and has promised to never leave us. The Spirit, that great fire of God, dwells within us as a pilot light of grace. We long for the days when the flame burns bright. We endure the days when it flickers. And we trust that there is no darkness that Christ himself has not known.

James knows that wandering is a normal part of life. He wandered from the truth for most of his life, even when it was right in front of him, even when it was made flesh. And he knows what it is like to return. He has felt, in his body, the gracious restoration of his soul. And so when he speaks to the church, the very last thing he asks them is are you a place that people want to return to?

Like a kind stranger, he comes toward us and takes us by the hand and points and says, “Look, Look.” And he peels back the curtains of death and pain and beyond all that gray he shows us a flame that burns with the brightness of ten thousand stars. It is the flame of God’s love.

He stands as a figure of Christ himself, who appears to us first as a stranger, and then as the one who heals. If we let him, he can change our lives even now into little shores of salvation, where all strangers are regarded as friends. If we ask him, he will do it for us.

We’re called to listen for that fearful word: neglect, neglect. If you’re not hearing it yet, you will someday. Someone, somewhere, is being overlooked.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.

The church is traditionally depicted as an ark, a harbor of safety from the storms of life. Perhaps, on this side of our recent divisions and scandals, it seems more like a lifeboat, or even just a piece of driftwood. Imagine it however you’d like, the point remains—we are floating in the midst of a storm in which many people have lost their way.

For all these things to be done in love requires an imagination which knows that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, an imagination which knows that even a bush in the middle of the wilderness can become holy ground, an imagination which knows that God at times shows up not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the low whisper.

These gifts come not all at once, but each one decently and in order, each one in the season we need it. In this way, the Spirit gives us God’s own life, revealed in our midst like fireworks of grace.

Christ takes these questions upon himself, bears them in his own body, and offers them in his one sacrifice for the life of the world. Advent’s true mystery is that Christ is the one who accompanies us even as he is the one whom we are waiting for.

Neither the political leaders nor the religious leaders are able to see Jesus for who he is. Rather, it is these Gentiles from the east, strangers from a foreign land who come and bear witness to this great revelation, through their journey and through their worship. The problem and promise of Epiphany is that it is something that happened long ago in history and yet it happens still today.