I am singularly unqualified to make this statement, but I'm going to anyway. The book, The Prayer of Jabez, matches our cultural approach to Christmas. What makes me unqualified, of course, is that I haven't read the book. But from what I've been told, the author makes a theological elaboration on an obscure Old Testament prayer, by an obscure figure. The prayer reads, "Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my border, and that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from hurt and harm!" In the immediate context, Jabez sounds like a spoiled kid praying "Gimme, gimme, gimme." The annoying thing is that God apparently grants Jabez's request, thus vindicating the gospel of prosperity, a reading of God as Santa, Christmas as, "Mine! Mine! Mine!"

As I thought about this week's scripture, I was struck by the "yes" and the "no" of Jabez's lesson to us. As followers of Jesus, we are called to spread the faith, to expand the borders. The technical term is "evangelism." The church was never intended to be an exclusive club keeping the uninitiated away from the truth. The church is supposed to be praying Jabez's prayer-enlarge our borders! Increase us! Grow us!

The problem with reading more than one thing at a time is that the various authors have conversations in your head. My book on tape this week is Brunelleschi's Dome, about the 15th century construction of a gigantic church dome in Florence, a project so challenging that the builder's innovative solutions to the technical problems changed architecture. This reminded me that, with 20 years in construction, I don't see buildings the way other people do. For instance, most people see buildings as static, unless there's an earthquake. But buildings are constantly moving, even when they're standing still, a fact that engineers put to work and call compression and tension. It's the building materials both pushing downward and outward, compacting and stretching. These two movements hold skyscrapers up and keep the bookcase from crashing onto the floor below, it is how roofs peak and walls stay vertical instead of giving in to gravity.

The movement of Advent is similar, but only if we see the paradox of Jabez's prayer-both a plea for enlarging and an acknowledgment of our need for stripping away, an acknowledgement of our radical reliance on God. Up until Brunelleschi, domes were built around scaffolding that was only taken away after the final pieces closed up the top. Brunelleschi devised a way to both build upward and inward without scaffolding, keeping the dome from collapsing on itself. The inward-focus of Advent invites us to both stretch and compress as we grow. The forces at work on us-besides the normal events of living in 21st century Oregon-might even be fellow Christians accompanying us on our journey, witnessing to God at work in them and us.

Advent's compressing movement might be what happens when our life falls apart. Your marriage is crumbling. Your kids never call. Just when you need her the most, your best friend tells you you're too needy for her to hang around. The doctor says there's no treatment for what you've got. Your company is sold and your job is out-sourced. The bottom fell out of whatever market you've been investing in. The props that made your life work have fallen away, and the weight of living has crushed who you are.

But stretching is also what Advent is about. Which isn't always good news, because sometimes stretching requires us to see ourselves differently. Perhaps you and your friend have parted company philosophically or theologically. You never thought you'd be the kind of person who would break those promises. God has called you away from a place of comfort to a new realm of responsibility-ordination as an elder, delivering food boxes and not just writing checks, caring for an elderly person, mentoring a disabled person, taking a new job, enrolling in school, taking up a musical instrument. What seems to be the end of the world for you personally may be the beginning of God's reign.

A Chinese farmer had only one horse to help him. One day the horse is missing when he goes out to start the work day. Thinking the horse might not have wandered far, he asks his neighbor if he'd seen him. He had not, but opines, "This is the worst thing in the world!" The farmer replies, "Maybe the worst thing, maybe the best thing." The next day, in searching for the horse in the hills, the farmer finds him along with five other horses which he takes back to his farm, increasing his wealth five-fold. Now his neighbor thinks, "This is the best thing in the world!" The farmer replies, "Maybe the best thing, maybe the worst thing." The next morning, the farmer's son falls off one of the new horses and breaks his leg. This time the neighbor cries, "This is the worst thing in the world!" The farmer replies, "Maybe the worst thing, maybe the best thing." The next day, the emperor's army comes through, carrying off all the able-bodied young men for the war. The neighbor laughs, "This is the best thing in the world!" The farmer replies, "Maybe the best thing, maybe the worst thing."

This is Advent's movement, Isaiah's message today. Sometimes the worst thing in the world is the best thing. Exile, yes, but punishment will end-the broken heart, the remorse, the ruin. Righteousness will win. You may think hope is dead and buried, but Isaiah's comforting message assures us that hope sprouts even from pain, so surely, the rescue is as good as happened.

The Baptizer's word today is not "Repent!" nor even "the kingdom is at hand." The Baptizer's word is negative. His witness is so important that, until he says who he is not, he cannot witness. And his word to us today is "Witness!" To witness is hard, not because we don't believe, but because we do. Maybe Fred Craddock is giving us the benefit of the doubt when he says, "The more important the subject matter, the harder it is to say the words." The gospel is so deeply at the core of who we understand ourselves to be, that our fear of inadequacy and unworthiness gets in the way. We don't want to offend. If our witness is rejected it is we ourselves who are rejected. The witnesses who give me the willies are the ones who know all the answers, who've got the gospel all sewn up. These silver-tongued slick talkers don't seem so much to have come from the empty tomb as from their safety deposit box. It's the gospel of prosperity, and somehow that doesn't ring true to the gospel of Jesus Christ. "Enlarge my boundaries" can be read with way too much em-pha-sis on the "my." The Church is called to witness, called to enlarge its boundaries. It's a corporate call. During Advent, we are tempted to think our witness is the fullness of the church calendar. Which is, indeed, a rich and rewarding thing this time of year. But that witness must take into account the movement of Advent, both compression and tension, both reducing the superfluousand stretching the core.

As John the Baptist reminds us, "We are not the light; we came to bear witness to the light." The True Light is in the world, but he is so easy to miss. In this Age of Certainty about faith and "right thinking," when "knowing Jesus" means buttoning the flap on our hip pockets to keep Jesus where we want him, are we willing to allow all of the facets of Jesus to emerge, to be expressed in our lives? Tension, indeed! Stretching. The Babe in the manger is also the roving food bank, miracle worker, snake oil salesman, debate champion, revolutionary, criminal, incendiary, prophet, judge, king, bad boy and Good Son. Compression and tension requiring us to tell the truth about ourselves, about what we long for the most. We are not the light. But we are called-as individuals and as church-we are called to allow our lives to witness to that light.