Pastor’s Corner – December 14, 2025
Through the Lens of Advent Matthew 11:2-11
Lately I’ve been reading Ocean Voung’s essays and books (From the Archive: The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation – The Rumpus) and listening to the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett (Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath | The On Being Project ) These are very moving stories and poetry that have helped me reflect more deeply what an Advent posture of our faith can mean. Though the word Advent was never used by the poet, I can’t help but make that connection and invite you to think more broadly and deeply through the lens of Advent and raise questions of what it means to be a church; to practice our faith, to love and be loved as human experience, and to love God that can stretch beyond ourselves. I believe all this is possible because Advent is eschatology, a view from endtime gazing at our present moment, our circumstances and reality and asking us what it means to be alive today.
The liturgy we practice in and around sacraments of baptism and eucharist are not mere words we play with, but mean something that points to something greater, what is real and mysterious, divine spiritual reality that connects us with God, moving us to live more meaningful lives of service and love. Ocean Voung, though not religious in any particular order, as a young poet often walked the streets of New York City. One day he heard the news of his uncle’s suicide, who was very close to him and only three years older. They shared a childhood and grew up together, making the news all the more devastating.
In Ocean’s walks over the years, he noticed one consistent architectural piece in all buildings – a fire escape. The poet asks, “What is the linguistic existence of a fire escape, that we can give ourselves permission to say, Are you really OK? I know we’re talking, but you want to step out on the fire escape, and you can tell me the truth? In response to his uncle’s death he wrote, The Weight of Our Living.
“The poem, like the fire escape, as feeble and thin as it is, has become my most concentrated architecture of resistance. A place where I can be as honest as I need to — because the fire has already begun in my home, swallowing my most valuable possessions — and even my loved ones. My uncle is gone. I will never know exactly why. But I still have my body and with it these words, hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living. I want to use it to talk about my obsessions and fears, my odd and idiosyncratic joys. I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope. I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night — we can live. And we will”
In reflection, what if the church can be the fire escape from the building? What would it look like? The world is burning, the fire has already begun. The end time has come, and our hope in Christ is to live out what is not yet but now here. In our construction of a fire escape, we can invite others to be in a safe space to be who we are in truth and be alive. How shall we relate with one another in love as we create a condition where we can flourish and thrive authentically as human beings, to bring out our best selves, rather than our worst? Advent calls us to reimagine our lives and how we do church, creating hope, creating a fire escape. Amen.
Pastor Dae