Advent I: Jeremiah

and after all the backstabbing 
the secrets the careful maneuvers 
the desperate gambles the failed
battles the long slow starvation
after the people drank their urine
and the parents ate their children 
as it had all been foretold him
and he had not had the courage to listen
after the journey deep into the heart 
of the enemy kingdom after the exile 
after the years of huddling alone 
the ghosts the regrets the uncleanness
he could not be free of the legacy 
of failure that would be his forever 
after all that he was brought suddenly
to the table of his mighty captor 
who fed him good food and wine
opened his windows spoke with him
treated him kindly like he was 
a human even here beyond hope

the great lamenter watched and chose 
to end his accounting there
with the old crumpled captive king 
at a feast prepared by his enemies 
light flooding into the prison cell 

Because Advent begins in exile.

***

I started this rhythm last year, posting a weekly Advent poem, and I knew I wanted to do it again. It’s a little scary, committing to something I don’t yet have in my hands. What if one week the poem just doesn’t come? What if the only thing I have to offer is subpar, meager, unpolished? What if I get too busy? What if I miss a week or mess it up?

What if this is the only way to grace, opening my empty hands in expectation, taking the next turn with the ones beyond as yet unlit? Didn’t the Bible say this is faith, evidence of things unseen? Not without evidence—but not seen yet, either.

It’s a little thing, feeling daunted by committing to sharing things I haven’t yet created. But of course we all have more serious versions of it, trust falls that feel like free falls, those weightless moments in between the questions and the answers, the risk and the confirmation, the closing of one door and the opening of another.

It’s also the heart of Advent, this waiting. Waiting is so uncomfortable and yet when Advent comes every year it feels like a relief to me—like at least the unavoidable fact of waiting is acknowledged. I am so grateful for a tradition that builds itself around the harder seasons of life, the ache of the human experience. And it doesn’t do this just to make us feel better but because it’s true—because we really did have to wait thousands of years for the fulfillment of the messianic promises, because we have been waiting thousands of years more for Jesus’ second coming.¹

***

I wanted a kind of theme to scaffold this year’s poems, and this was one I’d already written during my 30-day poetry challenge this November. I hadn’t connected it to Advent originally; I just wrote it after finishing my (months-long) read-through of Jeremiah. I was a little stunned by the ending. I’d forgotten that Jeremiah closes his blistering, blustery, wordy, weighty saga with this tidbit about Jehoiachin, one of Judah’s last kings:

³¹ In the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the year Awel-Marduk became king of Babylon, on the twenty-fifth day of the twelfth month, he released Jehoiachin king of Judah and freed him from prison. ³² He spoke kindly to him and gave him a seat of honor higher than those of the other kings who were with him in Babylon. ³³ So Jehoiachin put aside his prison clothes and for the rest of his life ate regularly at the king’s table. ³⁴ Day by day the king of Babylon gave Jehoiachin a regular allowance as long as he lived, till the day of his death.

It’s about 586 BCE and Israel—both the northern and southern kingdoms—has fallen. Babylon the inexorable has sacked the great city of Jerusalem after a long siege, and Solomon’s famed templed is looted and burned, and God’s people are led into the bowels of a foreign land as captives, or else the very poorest are left to eke a living off the land. The worst part is that it’s not like God just ignored his people’s plight but that, according to the prophets, he invited this destruction. The people had forfeited their right to the land and God’s protection, and who could say now how the cosmic promises to Abram and David were going to be now fulfilled—had they forfeited those too?

It’s no surprise that Jeremiah is known as “the weeping prophet.” He even wrote a whole book called Lamentations, and I don’t know, it just struck me that after all that this small image of kindness is what he closes out his book with.

***

When I was thinking of how to organize my Advent poems this year, I thought about this poem and about all the people who played a role in the narrative leading up to—and beyond—Jesus’ birth. Every year it gets me how this faith of mine is a grand story, so divine and so human, so full of grit and details and personalities as well as dimension-tearing interventions of the transcendent.

So this year, each poem will focus on one character in the story.

And I’ll start with Jeremiah because Advent begins in exile. It begins in the failure, in the wreckage, the ruins. When the promises grow stale and you begin to think you must’ve missed it, God’s voice, God’s will, God’s presence. It buries a seed in the soil of a home that is not quite home, and it begins to bud in a place where you are always a little bit on the outside. But bud it does because Advent means “the coming,” and God has come and is coming and will come again.

If he can do it in Babylon, he can do it here.

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In Other Words…

Goodreads reviews:

I’m finally caught up on these—and I did get some more five stars before the end of 2024! Here are the latest with links to my goodreads reviews:

• The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope (5 stars, reread)

• Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer (4.5 stars)

• Misreading Scripture through Western Eyes by E. Randolph Richards and Brandon O’Brien (5 stars)

I probably won’t hit my numeric goal but that’s okay—especially because by the next time you get a post from me, I’ll have a brand-new copy of Brandon Sanderson’s Wind and Truth in my hands and I know it will be worth every one of its 1,000-plus pages.

Thank you for journeying through Advent with me.

Aberdeen

1. My first footnote! Traditionally Advent is not only or even primarily about preparing to remember Jesus’ first coming which we celebrate at Christmas but preparing for his second coming—the perfect now-and-not-yet season. See Fleming Rutledge’s marvelous collection of sermons Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ for more on this.