O. Hobart Mowrer: "You Are Your Secrets"

God is a stealthy neighbor.

Photo by Guilherme Stecanella via Unsplash.

This Sunday marks the fourth week of the season of Advent, a time of reckoning that culminates in the Christmas holiday. The fourth week of Advent traditionally focuses on love, particularly love for our neighbors, and the central motif this week is the angel. The fourth candle on the Advent wreath is known as “The Angel’s Candle.” This is a time to reflect on God’s love for us, manifest in the appearance of an angelic host to the shepherds.

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For deep philosophical reasons I’ll have to get into another time, reasons that come from three years’ study of philosophy at a seminary, I believe that our world is a very, very, very complex narrative told by an unauthored Author. One implication of this view is that we can know something about the Author from the characters in the narrative, when they are at their best, anyway. Within this framework, the profundity—or perhaps I should say, “the scandal”?—of Christianity is that Christians believe the Author entered the narrative as a character. He was born, perfectly lived life in a way that demonstrates the Author’s nature, taught those of us walking around in the time/place where he lived, died in order to conquer death, came back to life, and sent some people to tell other people that this resurrection changes the entire narrative. At some point, he promised, he would return to put things right in a world where, if you’re watching even casually, a lot has gone wrong and keeps going wrong.

You’d think if we did live in a story and the Author did enter into it as a character, He’d do it with great fanfare for all the characters at the time to see. Without knowing how He actually did it, if I had to guess how He would do it, I’d say we should expect something that makes Independence Day look tame, an invasion that makes America’s “Shock and Awe” campaign in Iraq look like a string of firecrackers, a celebration that makes the fall of the Berlin Wall look like a high school homecoming parade. But not only did the Author enter the narrative without fire or fanfare, when He became he, a baby in a manger, He told almost no one… [read more]