Today’s find: Stewing

What is it about a raw carrot that can help you to see?

Or raw celery, for that matter? Uncooked onions? Washed-and-peeled potato chunks? Good nutrients, all. But not necessarily good food. Not yet, anyway. When you first toss the ingredients into the slow-cooker, they’re still hours away from becoming an irresistible stew.

Patience, it turns out, is an important ingredient in the recipe. Perhaps the most important ingredient of all. 

That’s an unpopular – perhaps even disqualifying – characteristic in our current culture. We want things now. We want things easy, even if that means tolerating insipid writing from a chat-bot.

But there’s something to be said for taking a bit of time to stew, don’t you think?

A bit of patience, like a bunch of raw carrots, can help us to see things more clearly. Patience can reveal depths of gustatory delight – a savory pattern at the heart of things that we’d likely otherwise miss.

Our generation is not the first in human history to get in such a hurry, of course. Impatience is part of our nature, it seems. And so the apostle James finds it necessary to caution his disciples (many of whom, presumably, had walked right alongside Jesus in Galilee),”Be patient…”

No doubt, many were getting impatient with their Risen Lord. Why doesn’t he “come with vindication,” like the prophet Isaiah promises? Even John, the one who had leapt with joy in his mother’s womb at his first encounter with the Incarnate Holy One, seems a bit exasperated at the modest pace of salvation he experiences late in life: 

“Are you the One who is to come,” he asks of Jesus from deep inside his prison cell. “Or should we look for another?”

As if to say: “Have I wasted my life, Cousin, announcing your coming into the world? Where is this refining fire, this burning of chaff, you promised us through the prophets?

And Jesus answers: “Open your eyes, John: See how the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised, the poor come out on top. See how I come – not wielding raw violence and oppressive power, but delivering a different kind of Good News … a power that raises up even the least in the Kingdom, and draws all into the very heart of God.” 

So our Advent question comes out looking something like this: Can we learn to savor the slow(-cooker) work of salvation? Can we resolve to make our hearts firm, and trust in the promise that the coming of the Lord is at hand?

O Wisdom

Lord and Ruler

Root of Jesse

Key of David

Rising Sun

King of the Nations

Emmanuel

Come, Lord Jesus!

Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.

IHS