Aliens, asses, and oddballs: How God speaks

Most Christians are aware that it is their season of Advent.

That is to say, it is the season when Christians prepare and “wait” for the arrival of the Christ.

It is the season when Christians lean in to listen for messages from God.

Us Christians would do well to remember this:

We use the expression, “That guy is talking through his ass.”

God is the only one who has ever actually done it (Numbers 22.21-39).

In the Gospel of Luke, God first sends an angel to a priest (Luke 1.5-25). A priest is a professional intermediary between God and humanity. This priest has one job…and he blows it. He fails to receive the message of God and therefore God takes away his ability to speak the message to the people.

From that point on, God chooses to speak to and through people who polite folks could only describe as unacceptable, unfit, unqualified, and unusual: An old woman, a pregnant teenager, a small-town handyman, a gang of carnies (shepherds), Eastern astrologists, a crazy old man, and a octogenarian widow. The message they spoke was as queer as they were: The Christ who is coming is coming for us because he is one of us.

God does not choose these people because they are clean, good, moral, and religious. He’s chooses them because they are ready to receive what he has for them. They are apostate, less-than, outside, queer, rejected…and that makes them wholly available and open to the gift of God.

As Jesus himself said in the Gospel of Matthew 9.17: “People do not pour new wine into old wineskins.”

Does it bother you that you may be so full of your religion that you don’t have any room for the Christ when he comes to you?

Then maybe you’re beginning to get what Advent is really all about.

Consider these words:

“We don’t have any blueprints. We’re creating a world that we have literally never seen before, organizing families based on love and not by blood, guided by a compassion that so few of us have been shown ourselves. So many of us have not received love from our families. We’ve been betrayed by the people we trust most. So what we do here is create entirely new languages of love. Ones that are about creating the space for us to be our authentic selves…We are interested in love and inclusion as a tool of revolutionary change…If we take these intentional steps to unlearn these deep-seated biases and create space for people…to embrace who they are, then we will definitely create a better world than the one we were born into.”

If you’re familiar with the Gospel of Luke and its sequel, Acts of the Apostles, do these words not describe the Christ and the movement he started?

Do these words not describe the “peace on earth and goodwill to all” that we await during Advent?

Then consider: These words do not come from a Christian preacher who speaks from the pulpit of a highly-regarded church.

They are the words of Tiq and Kim Katrin Milan, LGBTQ activists who delivered a beautiful TED talk that could double as an Advent sermon.

God speaks through aliens, asses, and oddballs. Are you listening?

Grace and peace.