Advent in Africa: When Anger Draws Love Close

 I’m finding myself a bit unprepared for Christmas this year. We have less than two weeks before the celebration, and my usual organized lists of gifts to buy, cards to write, and people to see are not even written.

Truth be told, I was planning to celebrate Christmas in the States this year for the first time in 12 years, but for various reasons, I came back to West Africa early. I’ll confess to being a bit nostalgic for what could have been—Christmas with family, doing all the traditions—even while conscious of the fact that this year will be anything but traditional, given COVID. Nostalgia seems to be holding me back from fully engaging.

That risks painting a very one-sided picture though, because I really love Christmas in West Africa. In a culture where even small things are reason enough for a party, you can imagine the festivities around Christmas. And while so much of American Christmas centers around the stuff—the food, the presents, the decorations—West African Christmas is centered around friendships and community. (I’m speaking in generalities here, of course.)

After 12 years, I find myself adapted to the culture and traditions of the people I’ve committed those years to, so that my actual preferences for how Christmas be celebrated have been reworked, looking like some weird hybrid that would be fairly incomprehensible to an outside observer from either culture. Of course, this type of adaptation and melding into culture means taking the good (relationship-strengthening parties) with the bad (really long church services)!

That is the life my colleagues and I signed up for and not just at Christmas. We’ve gotten good at explaining this life to others (presumably because that’s how we get the bills paid!). You want to know the good parts of life? Here are the adventures I’ve had, the funny mishaps I laugh about, and the miracles I’ve witnessed! You want to know about the hard things? Here are the daily challenges that drive me nuts, the weird foods I’ve eaten, and the cultural oddities that enrage me.

The tricky thing is that the more I find myself melding into the culture—the more I identify with my hosts—the harder it is for me to relay the real highs and lows. For example, the time I celebrated Christmas with friends in another city and right before the meal was to be served, I was pulled aside to cut up tomatoes because far more people than expected had shown up. I missed the meal and had to eat a leftover plate with my friend’s little brother. But this was an absolute delight for me—I’d been treated exactly like family, not as the perpetual guest. For once, there were people that were more guest-y, more foreign, than me, my accent and skin color notwithstanding. Of course, I just put that into words, but this identification with another culture draws us near to joy and sadness that defy explanation at times. And the bearing of the individual and collective sorrow to which this life draws us into proximity is perhaps the hardest to verbalize to our American loved ones because living in one of the poorest countries of the world exposes the soul to extremes the like of which we only see in our movies, the ones we thankfully leave behind when we exit the theater.

This might sound like a request for a pat on the back or a round of applause for my altruism, but I assure you it is not. While some of my colleagues probably deserve that applause and more, if I could give you front-row seats to my attitudes, thoughts, and reactions in some of those moments of sorrow, you’d be less than impressed. This week was a good case-in-point.

Three of my closest pastor friends came to my house for a time of prayer and a Christmas lunch. A few of my colleagues and I had prepared gifts, which we gave them after lunch. We’d had a great time together over several hours, but as they prepared to leave, they began to share with me a variety of needs. Last year hadn’t been a great harvest in their area, and this year wasn’t much better. For communities of subsistence farmers, two bad harvests in a row mean incredibly hard times ahead. Not only were the pastors struggling personally, but their communities were turning to them to find a solution as well.

Calloused as it sounds, I couldn’t help but be annoyed. Here we’d just presented them with gifts, and they turn around and ask for something more. I wanted to protest the seeming ingratitude. After they were gone, I began to reflect on the source of my annoyance—my anger, really. While I’ve had plenty of moments where people really do reveal ingratitude as they ask for one more thing in the hopes of getting just a little more out of you, I was fairly sure that wasn’t the case here. These pastors were really, truly overwhelmed by the need and the sorrow around them. Instead of sitting in that sorrow with them, I was furiously calculating what it was they were asking of me. Thousands of dollars. My problem-solving brain was blowing up with the impossibilities, and it was just too much. Have I ever mentioned that sitting…well…in just about any emotion, but especially sorrow, isn’t my thing?

But I do like solutions, and I found one. Anger is a very useful emotion for creating distance and separation, and we employ it, often unconsciously, as a way to protect ourselves. (Not that I know anything about this…) The sorrow of having three friends tell me that their families and their communities are in for a season of food insecurity and me feeling unable to solve this was just too much. I needed distance, so I chose to be annoyed about fictional ingratitude instead of leaning into the relationship.

On this little stroll through Advent themes, I’ve been leaning on the minor prophets as guides. Last week I tried to explore how judgment might lead to true peace. I mentioned that our culture has a weird relationship with judgment based on our relationship to truth, but I neglected to say anything about the emotional aversion we have to judgment, especially God’s judgment, because of its association (in our minds more than in the actual Biblical text—thanks Bible Project guys!) with anger. While we all have various experiences with anger and tolerances for its expression, one thing is sure: when anger is used against us in an effort to put distance in a close relationship, it doesn’t feel good.

The minor prophets certainly talk about God’s anger, especially in relationship to the people closest to Him, the Israelites. In fact, this is a pattern we see throughout the Old Testament (again, thanks Bible Project), God gets angriest with the people He has most closely aligned Himself with. The first person God is described as being angry with? Moses. And that is AFTER the Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

This pattern and our human experience of anger as an emotional tool of separation leave one expecting the minor prophets, with their imagery of judgment and God’s anger, to paint a very bleak picture of His love for Israel. Much to the contrary, the minor prophets hold God’s anger and His faithful love for Israel together. Micah is a great example of this. The book opens with an image of God trampling down the high places of earth and melting the mountains like wax. It closes with this verse: “He does not retain his anger forever because he delights in steadfast love.” The only thing He tramples on, in the end, is “our iniquities.”

God doesn’t need to protect Himself from our sorrows by creating distance, even when those sorrows are completely our fault. In fact, the angrier God gets with the rot and devastation that have come to His Creation and His Covenant, the more He seems to lean into the relationship. He channels that anger to addressing the sorrows that affect us, including our sin, all while reaffirming His faithful (or covenant) love. Far from putting distance between us, His anger seems to create the conditions under which His love can draw us near.

Jesus will do this perfectly in His Second Coming. He will come to this earth in judgment, angry, even, at the ills that plague His good creation, but His whole aim is drawing closer to Himself those He loves. He will restore Creation so that we can live in uninterrupted, untarnished relationship with Him. Nostalgia for the garden has not held Him back from engaging fully in the mess we’ve made.

And lest we doubt this, His Incarnation and birth show decisively His intention. He became “God with us,” tasting our every sorrow and injustice. As He walked this earth, His anger burned most intensely against those who setup systems that kept people from Him. His crucifixion and death show that when it mattered most, He was ready to lean into sorrow and pain, in order that we might know His steadfast love.

“He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.” Micah 7:19 (ESV)