(Un)Mute Yourself, Day 1
Mark 13:33: Keep “an abundance of caution,” for you do not know when the time will come.
For the first day of (Un)Mute Yourself, a brief meditation on today’s chosen word and verse:
To be entirely honest, I lost count of how many times I’ve heard “an abundance of caution” since February of 2020.
Wash your hands out of an abundance of caution.
Wear a mask out of an abundance of caution.
It is out of an abundance of caution that conferences have to be canceled this year.
It is out of an abundance of caution I am terrified to get on an airplane and travel across the country to see my family.
Oddly, I’ve had to live in a state of abundant caution in the United States, and not because of COVID-19. I’ve had to live in an abundance of caution, being very aware of the skin I inhabit. I would never know what day or what hour would bring. Sometimes the day or hour would bring indifference. There have been instances where the day and the hour brought about a physical assault and verbal assaults. I walk the sidewalks of this sleepy suburb with an abundance of caution for my personal safety.
It’s not often, though, where this abundance of caution has gone global. I’ve been aware of living with an abundance of caution, never knowing what the next day or the next hour would bring… yet I never anticipated that others would have to live with a different interpretation of this uncomfortable abundance. Not knowing the day or the hour in these peculiar days has been challenging, to say the least.
Yet how long? I don’t even know what day it is anymore. The season of Advent snuck up on me. I thought I would have more time. Yet at the same time, there hasn’t been enough time. I wake up knowing that each day is a new day, but I’m not sure of what day it actually is. All I truly know is that it is some day. My spouse, who is very much into the sciences, told me it sounds like I’m stuck in the space-time continuum. I am arriving at this season of Advent, wondering how we already got here because yesterday was Pentecost, and the day before that is Easter. It’s been so hard trying to mark time this year day to day, and a new liturgical year feels like it’s suddenly come upon us, and it feels like it took forever and a day to reach this first day.
I’ve been struggling with just how to be alive this year in the midst of so much death. I’m struggling with not just a single abundance, but what now feels like an overwhelming multitude. Abundance can indeed be difficult, and my thoughts and feelings are beginning to disconnect in order to function at a baseline. I know I need to live in the multitudes of abundant caution, whether it be COVID or the ever-present threat to Black and Brown bodies in a world seeping with white supremacy. I cannot throw caution to the wind, especially when lives are at stake.
What does bring me comfort in this peculiar time of abundance? Knowing that God’s timing has been at work throughout the course of all of history. God has been at work, but on God’s time. God works in unexpected, unanticipated, and incredible ways. I think about the verse near the end of the Gospel lesson used on this day for the Revised Common Lectionary, “for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly” (Mark 13:35). The master that is due to arrive… but when? What about that hour, over two thousand years ago, when so many were asleep in Bethlehem? That hour, when God unexpectedly broke into our world? That hour, God breaking into our world in a manger as a baby, not clothed in majesty and power, but in the unexpectedness of utter humility and helplessness? In a body that needed to exist within an abundance of caution as a newborn babe born not to earthly royalty, but to bring about a new understanding of the realm of God in the everyday, broken, and seemingly unredeemable? That is truly the unexpected hour. As Christians, we cannot write off that unexpected hour, no matter how unfavorable or inconvenient the powers and principalities of this world deem it to be.
I continue to wait for that day, for that hour, even though I have no idea when it will arrive.
Check back here throughout the season of Advent for featured contributors offering their reflections. While it may not be daily (#thanks2020), there will be content featured here.
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The prompts for the entire season of Advent are as follows:
