Delivered

What a train wreck of a year. So long, 2023. And good riddance.

Today I’m thinking about the word “deliver.” What does it mean? Google says it means "to be set free" from the Latin verb "liberare," but now I am wondering what exactly I am being set free from, and why my spiritual deliverance sometimes feels like bondage. Google can't answer that question for me. It has been a brutal year for me, and I am left pondering if I am missing something. Singing Christmas carols and watching nativities has brought me more questions than answers this year. Will my faith in Christ's deliverance hold strong if I am born into yet another new year of heartbreak and challenges? "Oh come, oh come Immanuel," I sing with renewed fervour, but what if He never comes?

At Christmas, we celebrate two parallel deliveries in the birth of our Savior. The first is literal. Birth is called a “delivery.” Mary delivered her Son with her own flesh, and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger. The second delivery we celebrate is more spiritual than physical. Christ delivers us spiritually with His flesh, swaddles us in the garment of His priesthood, and gathers us to His bosom the way a Mother receives her child, or like a hen gathers her chicks. It is an experience meant to parallel the birth of a child. Rebirth is as real an experience as our own miraculous birth from our mothers.

Delivery can also be a cruel experience, for both the mother and the child being delivered. I have witnessed it with my children, standing there like a helpless idiot at the suffering of my wife as my child remains too long wedged between worlds. All of my children ended up in the NICU because of the trauma of their birth, gasping on their own meconium. Some days I feel like I am also stuck in the birth canal, fighting for my life, choking on my own crap, heaved and contracted by the slow rhythm of days that shoves me out of the amnion and into what feels like a world of cold oblivion. 

Most weeks I am lost in the midst of my labor pains, unaware of the exceptional pains of my great Deliverer, the tearing of His flesh or the gushing of His blood that are required weekly for me to receive new breath, a new spirit, and a new life. But on New Year's Eve, I take a moment and recognize that Jesus and I have labored together through a lot this year, through another 365 circle around the sun in a timed contraction that brings me closer to the ever dilating cervix of my mortal exit. This has been terrifying for me, to face my own mortality and waning, but despite what it feels like, I have not been alone in my suffering. A mother in labor cannot be separated from her child. Neither Christ be separated from me.

Like the Lord’s people waiting for deliverance from the Romans at Jerusalem, all the world has been taxed. The tax is at times grievous to be borne. We all live and work and scroll our phones in a world run by usurpers. The irony is that we worship a God that’s completely absent from the pantheon of our oppressors. This tests my faith to its limits, because my God seems so powerless here in a system run by whoever has the most soldiers. How can I put stock in a sacrificial lamb in such a place as this? How can this brother nailed to a cross save me in a world already boasting in their victory won with warriors and weapons? I am mocked for believing in a God who appears to have lost the war. My victors make merry that when I most needed strength, I am reaching for a God they are crucifying before my very eyes. They inscribe on his cross, “Behold, the king of the Jews.” Or perhaps in my case, "Behold, the king of this poor repressed bisexual Mormon." There is no victory for me here. Or so it seems.

Christ does not immediately deliver me from them, this nation of selfish despots and grandiose tyrants. His kingdom is not of this world. This is always frustrating to me, and so my suffering continues. Though I hold onto my belief in Christ's eventual victory, I am often unable to feel anything else except the daily ache that I must carry with me, the relentless loneliness—my deepest, loneliest of hurts. It is hard to praise God when all I feel are the pangs of a wound that does not heal. But this cross I carry connects me to Him. Sometimes the tenor of my worship is more of a lament than a praise, but my God understands this even better than I do. "Is there any other way?" "If it be possible..." and “How long, O Lord?” are as holy prayers as anything else in the scriptures. They are prayers the God of all has uttered Himself as He groaned beneath my load.

In years like this, carrying the burdens I have now, I am annoyed and desperate at the news that Christ’s deliverance will not take me out of the fire. It was a rude jolt for me in recent years to gradually fall out of the comforting faith of my youth in which obedience alone brought blessings and safety. But the truth cuts deeper. A baptism is not just a cleansing baptism of water, but a purging baptism of fire. In some ways, Christ's deliverance is an extraction out of the womb of my comfortable innocence that puts me directly into the birth canal of my great purging—the sanctification that comes when I pass through this burning, dilating ring of fire. That is one meaning of deliverance that packs a punch. Though covenants with Christ can bring comfort, they can also bring pain. Both those things are true. But in the crucible of my faith, I'll admit that sometimes all I can feel is the pain.

Deliverance. Delivered. De-livered. In the myth of Prometheus, his punishment from the gods for stealing fire from mount Olympus was to be bound to a rock while an eagle swooped down at him daily to eat out his liver until it grew back again the next day. The savage cycle of eagles tearing open his flesh daily feels disturbingly relatable. Like Prometheus, I am also bound to this rock, de-livered by the daily grind of discipleship that tears at my bowels. But that is not the definition of de-livery Christ is talking about. To be delivered is not just to be insanely mutilated. No one would continue on such a path. Chapels and temples dedicated to this God wouldn't have anyone in them at all. 

And here is my declaration of faith: Jesus Christ is the rock we are tied to, but He is not the torture. He is the Deliverer. Binding myself to Him is not a pointless ravaging, but the purposeful purging of my natural man. Sometimes it grows back just as quickly as it is removed by the eagles, but daily repentance and taking up the cross of discipleship brings me peace and reconciliation. It is a work I will continue to engage in willingly, (though at times "turning a rather steely eye toward heaven" as Elder Holland puts it.) It is the joy of the saints, the comfort of the comfortless, that which always looks like madness to those watching on the outside of it.

Prometheus, by Patrick Rasenberg

So passes another day being de-livered by the eagles. Another year closer to my delivery as a Son of God. This is a difficult process, but it is not without joy or devoid of meaning. What gives my suffering meaning? What makes "all the difference" on this "road less traveled by?" 

It is the love of Christ. I can feel Him here with me. This is the path toward love. He is de-livered and delivered alongside me, like a mother giving birth to Her child, or like a Prometheus at the sacrament table regenerating for another go with the eagles. He is here with me in the sacred spaces of my innermost heart. I would rather spend a lifetime of purging with Him here than face a lifetime of comfortable luxury without Him. His love is perfect. It dazzles me. I am drawn to it again and again. Learning to love the way He loves breaks my heart wide open again and again with my incompetence, but I tie myself to this rock willingly, because this is the rock that bleeds for me. This is the rock that delivers me, the only sure foundation in a world of fiery darts and tempestuous whirlwinds and reliable unreliability. (Helaman 5:12) This is the rock that delivers me from the absurdity of my inevitable death and sin.

So here at the end of another year, I am reminded once more that "the days are accomplished that [I] should be delivered." (Luke 2:6) And we all will be. So I say Merry Christmas to that, and a very Happy New Year.