"Though the Darkness Hide Thee"

I love the song "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." I love the plaintive cries, because those are the cries of my own heart. Are you, too, a lonely captive waiting for freedom, waiting for a Savior, waiting for cheer? When the final chorus rings out,"Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel / Shall come to thee, O Israel!" I can hardly stand it. For a moment, liberation! I want to raise my arms up high, as high as I can! I want to dance like David danced.

A captive doesn't dance. Only someone who is free can do that. The heart that is victorious, being led home...that heart can dance wildly and joyfully. 

Sometimes I want to dance, but lately I've been reading. I've been trying to listen. It's funny, too, the message I'm getting from different places...it's similar. It boils down to this: God loves. God loves me and the rest of the world; he loves his children, and as David Naugle in Reordered Love, Reordered Lives says,"out of extravagant love God created us to be happy in a proper relationship with him and his creation-our chief and total good."

God wants our good, he wants good for us. And we need him in order to find that good. In fact, it is only in him that we are able to find that good. He, and he alone, must save us and make us happy and whole.

How far is God willing to go in order to save us from sin and self-destruction? For, surely, that is where we end up when left to our own devices.

My pastor unexpectedly addressed this very thing in his sermon yesterday. He preached on Psalm 18:25-29, and he went as far as saying that God loves us so much that he identifies with us to the point of mimicking us. This thought made me squirm. Does it make you squirm? The thought of God mimicking us? It sounds outrageous. But the Psalm reads this way (I emphasized the parts that I myself was focusing on) (read: tripping all over):

²⁵ With the merciful you show yourself merciful;
    with the blameless man you show yourself blameless;
²⁶ with the purified you show yourself pure;
    and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.
²⁷ For you save a humble people,
    but the haughty eyes you bring down.
²⁸ For it is you who light my lamp;
    the Lord my God lightens my darkness.
²⁹ For by you I can run against a troop,
    and by my God I can leap over a wall. 

"You make yourself seem tortuous"? This clanged around in my head throughout the whole sermon, crashing from one lobe to the other, trying to find a way into my thoughts as something other than nonsensical. Apparently, the first thing I needed to do was look up tortuous. It must not mean what I thought it meant.

Tortuous: 1. full of twists, turns, or bends; twisting, winding, or crooked: a tortuous path. 2. not direct or straightforward, as in procedure or speech;intricate; circuitous: tortuous negotiations 
lasting for months. 3. deceitfully indirect or morally crooked, as proceedings,methods, or policy; devious. 
(from dictionary.com) 

Wait! Here I am getting ahead of myself. I did not whip out my phone and look up this word in the middle of the sanctuary. I sat and listened. My pastor went on to say that we are the crooked ones, and the word in the text actually means bent out of shape, twisted. We are the sinful and the broken. (Well, I suppose I can relate to that! Just a little!) His take on this second part of verse 26 then led us directly to Advent. 

To help make his point, Pastor Ron shared a story from Brennan Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel. Manning tells the story of a surgeon (Richard Selzer, from what I can gather, who told this story in Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery) who has had to cut a nerve in a woman's face in order to remove a tumor. The cut leaves her with a twisted mouth, and she asks if it will always be so. He must reply affirming that it will. She understands. Her husband is there and he smiles. "'I like it,' he says, 'It is kind of cute.'" Selzer goes on to say that the young man "'bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.'"

The twisted, the crooked...found out, closed in upon, pressed on intimately and passionately, and in like measure, by one who loves, without condition.

Here is where knowing this word tortuous shed light on my path, making straight what had been tortuous, indeed. 

We are the crooked, the bent out of shape and God comes to us in the God-Man Jesus. He meets us there in that humble hay-filled manger. Flesh and bone, weak and needy.

God meets us and becomes like we are. We are the (as Pastor Ron said) "disfigured men and women, boys and girls...this broken, sinful human race," and he bends low, no, he more than bends, he leaves his heavenly home altogether and takes on the flesh of man.

He meets us. 

But he doesn't want to leave us there, does he? As if the miracle of his incarnation isn't enough (the God of the universe becoming like us!), he shows his great love for us by working us, refining us, slowly shaping us into the bearers of his image that he intended for us to be, heirs with his Son, and actually making us like him! Like him! 

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
Romans 8:29 

"Even in its ruined condition a human being is regarded by God as something immensely worth saving. Sin does not make you worthless, but only lost." - Dallas Willard in The Renovation of the Heart

I may be one lost, and you may be one lost, but worthless? No. No, we are of infinite value. And he is making us ever more lovely. A little at a time, he is showing us his face, he is breaking through the darkness, he is revealing his beauty, power, majesty, and glory. One day we will see him face to face. No more shall he be hidden. No more shall we be lost. 

And then? Oh, how shall we dance then?!