by Elyse Nelson Winger

Advent is here, but the coffeehouses are celebrating Christmas. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and caffeine is calling. I head to one of my regular haunts, order a cup of the day, and the barista behind the counter asks: Bold or mild? My answer is swift: Bold! I love bold coffee. And I love bold Christianity. To me, bold faith is about compassion and courage, peace and proclamation, exuberance and empowerment! I want to drink bold coffee and preach bold sermons and pray bold prayers. I want to be a part of bold communities that proclaim God’s grace and mercy for the whole world. I want to contribute to bold conversation about the history and message of our Scripture. I want to share in Women of the ELCA’s mission to mobilize women to act boldly on their faith in Jesus Christ. So when the barista asks me, "Bold or mild?" there’s not even a contest. I hear mild and wonder, why not just drink decaf?

And in this season of Advent, when I hear mild, I also hear meek. References to "Mary, meek and mild" abound in prayer and devotional poetry. Charles Wesley penned the children’s hymn "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild." Mild, gentle, meek Madonna and Child paintings cover postage stamps and Christmas cards. Even the Mary in my children’s nativity set exudes this meek and mild attitude, with downcast eyes and humble pose. So, I have to be honest. Mild coffee doesn’t jolt my tastebuds, and a meek and mild Savior and his mother don’t inspire.

But really, what is meek and mild about Mary’s prophetic praise of God in the Magnificat? What is meek and mild about Jesus’ teaching, healing, dying, and rising again? Nothing! Mary and Jesus are bold to the core! And yet, Jesus did not say: Blessed are the bold. He proclaimed: Blessed are the meek. So, what does Scripture really say about meekness? And what is its relationship to boldness?

A glaring contrast
The Book of Sirach encourages us as follows: "My child, perform your tasks with meekness; then you will be loved by those whom God accepts" (3:17). The letter to the Colossians exhorts us to clothe ourselves "with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience" (3:12). And Paul begins his second apology in his second letter to the Corinthians like this: "I myself, Paul, appeal to you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—I who am humble when face to face with you, but bold toward you when I am away!—I ask that when I am present I need not show boldness by daring to oppose those who think we are acting by human standards" (2 Corinthians 10:1–2).

Well. It didn’t take long for meekness and boldness to collide. Could the contrast between the exercise of boldness and the virtue of meekness be more glaring? (Clearly, Paul would’ve chosen bold coffee in Ephesus, but taken a mild cup in Corinth.) For Paul, acting boldly is a necessary evil, reserved for situations of conflict and correction. Boldness is used to "destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God" (2 Corinthians 10:4b–5).

Meekness, on the other hand, is used as an appeal to reconciliation, compassion, and humility; it could easily take its place between "gentleness" and "self-control" in Paul’s list of the fruit of the spirit in Galatians. So, have we had it all wrong? Should Women of the ELCA do a massive edit of its statement and proclaim that its mission "is to mobilize women to act meekly on their faith in Jesus Christ?" How can boldness be lifted up when the fruits of the Spirit so strongly lead to meekness?

Fortunately, there’s a richness and depth to the meaning of meekness that embraces the virtues of gentleness, humility, and patience and that requires boldness! And it begins with Jesus’ teaching: "Blessed are the meek." Note that he didn’t say, "Blessed is meekness!" And so it seems to me that we must really get to the heart of what Jesus meant by the meek and then let reality guide our practice of meekness.

Called out with promise
Advent is a wonderful time to ponder this relationship, for one of our readings for the second Sunday of Advent is Isaiah 11:1–10. The Christian understanding of Jesus’ identity, mission, and message has been profoundly shaped by the prophecies of Isaiah, and here the identity of the meek is clearly revealed: "A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth" (11:1–4a).

Later in Isaiah, God’s promises are proclaimed yet again: "The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the neediest people shall exult in the Holy One of Israel" (29:19). Isaiah is not speaking of a spiritual state of poverty, meekness, or neediness. He is addressing the real-life situations of inequality. And he is promising a new day of hope and restoration for those who have been slighted by society’s injustice and greed.

Jesus is the new bearer and fulfillment of this promise. He proclaims: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Moses — left in the bulrushes because of society’s injustice, raised among oppressors, never quite fitting in, and belonging to a people who would always be foreign in their own way — was indeed meek. Jesus — born into a peasant family, creating community with fishermen, women, and outcasts, preaching the kingdom of God, and being unjustly executed as a common criminal — was indeed meek. Jesus was one of them. And he blessed them, calling them out with a promise that they would inherit the earth. He emboldened them to claim this blessing now, to speak with fresh joy about the love and mercy of God.

When we look at Jesus’ teaching in this way, boldness and meekness are actually inseparable. Blessing implies calling, which requires passion, which necessitates boldness. The followers of Jesus who preached the gospel in Acts of the Apostles were the meek, and yet they spoke boldly. Acts 4:13 records the response of the Jerusalem crowd: "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized them as companions of Jesus."

The meek were blessed friends of Jesus who were emboldened by blessing to heal the sick and preach the gospel. And the meek are truly all of us who recognize how powerless we ultimately are without the love and mercy of God. A genuine practice of meekness, humility, and compassion requires boldness for its sustenance and sharing. Looking for the meek and for signs of their boldness in the midst of injustice is our Advent calling. Jesus’ blessing of the meek calls on each us to recognize and bring blessing.

Woe was me
Advent was approaching, my pregnancy was coming closer to full term, and my pastoral internship at St. Andrew’s Church in Cairo, Egypt, was underway. Today my supervisor, David, and I would visit the Christian churches atop the Moqattam Hills.

We drove through the gates of the walled church complex in downtown Cairo and into the chaos of the Cairo streets. We traversed a maze of highways and bridges, our sturdy French station wagon mingling with overflowing minibuses, darting between cars, avoiding trucks coughing up crud, passing bicycles ridden by young men topped with pallets of bread, and dodging donkey carts driven by the zebeleen, or garbage collectors, of the city.

After more than a year in Cairo, I was used to this kind of traffic. It was not enjoyable, but it was always a spectacle of life, in all its glory and gloom. Today I took special notice of the donkey carts, for they all eventually made their way to the outskirts of town, where we were headed as well. Little did I know how much gloom awaited.

We left the main highway. The streets, now unpaved dirt and mud, twisted up the hill. And as we ascended, the trash appeared. At first, what looked like a littered street after a weekend fair became a perilous track through nothing but garbage, piled tall and pouring out of doorways. My stomach was tightening and my horror growing. We kept moving, and then I saw it: the mountain of garbage. And dotting this landscape of waste were apartment buildings, filled with families whose laundry hung from open windows.

Sprinkled all over this hillside of trash were goats and pigs and dogs—and children. The horror of the sight now overwhelmed me as I clutched my belly. I can’t do this. Please turn around. I couldn’t make it to the hilltop churches to visit an ancient Christian community whose livelihood was collecting and sorting and recycling the trash of the city. Woe was me, for I had had my fill.

For months, the injustice of grinding poverty had been increasingly revealed to me as I lived as a privileged foreigner in Egypt. Today, the revelation was complete, and I was wrecked. I thought of our own garbage collector, Ibrahim, who had proudly showed me the Coptic Christian cross tattooed on the inside of his wrist upon our first meeting. I thought of his children and grandchildren, growing up here in a dump for a city of 16 million people, and I wondered: How do they make sense of their lives as God’s children and baptized followers of Jesus?

A different story
I didn’t make it to the top of the Moqattam Hills that day, but I did visit the neighborhood below them again, this time to see a program for women and girls, funded in part by local Christian organizations. And there I witnessed a bold response to Jesus’ blessing of the meek. Whitewashed walls and climbing flowers marked this spot as a place of hope.

From the courtyard, the hill of trash was still visible, but the cleanliness and brightness of the buildings told a different story.

In this program women and girls were learning basic literacy and business skills. The women were taking rags, clothing, and cloth from the hillside, washing them, cutting them, dyeing them, and making rugs, bags, and purses. And they were selling them all over the city, through micro-credit programs, at holiday bazaars, and at small shops for tourists hoping to make purchases that would benefit the local community.

Someone had been bold enough to bless the meek and to empower them to share in the inheritance of the kingdom. Someone had heard: Blessed are the meek. And with humility, meekness, and boldness, they were working for the sake of the kingdom of God.