Advent And Redeeming The Time

Every culture dating back to the prehistoric man has had a way of telling time. Calendars reinforce reality by offering rhythm, order, and meaning to existence. They mark the things we believe to be true about ourselves and the world around us. How we tell time is in itself a formative liturgy, rooting us in a particular narrative. The ‘holy days’ or holidays that make up our calendar reinforce reality through celebrations, festivals, parades, and tributes. Think for just a moment about our American calendar.  What we choose to observe says a lot about what we value: President’s Day, Veterans Day, 4th of July, Black Friday. In and of themselves these holy days may seem innocuous, but together they reinforce a specific narrative. 

Most of us learned how to organize time around wars, the rise and fall of empires, and the reign of kings or presidents. Think Pax Romana, the Dark Ages, or the Age of Imperialism. But in Jesus, we reorder time itself. Our understanding of how we think about the past, present, and future are reinterpreted through his birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection, and promised return.  As followers of Christ, we live in a different time zone. 

Since her inception, the church has been telling time radically different than the world. The liturgical calendar grounds us in God’s story and it is the lens through which we read and interpret the history of the world. For starters, the new year doesn’t begin on January 1, but with Advent. It then moves to the twelve days of Christmas, followed by Epiphany, commemorating the civil disobedience of the Magi who refused Herod’s orders by obeying a different king. December 28 is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, when the church remembers Herod’s genocide, and the eternal struggle of the powers that be with the coming reign of Christ.  The calendar then moves we into ordinary time, Lent, Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost. Ultimately, the liturgical year is the temporal structure within which the Church celebrates the holy mysteries of Christ: "From the Incarnation and the Nativity to the Ascension, to Pentecost and to waiting with joyful expectation for the Lord's return”.

As Christians who also happen to be Americans, it is essential to distinguish between the American ‘we’ and the Christian ‘we’, realizing that we the church are subjects in a Kingdom that is often times at odds with the kingdoms of this world. In fact, almost everything in God’s economy is upside down—the last are first, the poor are blessed, the meek inherit the earth, and the hungry are filled. 

The liturgical calendar reminds us that we live in the world, but we are most definitely not of it. It shapes our lives around an alternative narrative with contrasting formative practices and liturgies. In so doing, we remember that we are citizens in God’s pluralistic kingdom, a kingdom that transcends time, race, color, creed, and language.

In particular, this new way of telling time begins with Advent, a period of longing, anticipation, and hope. Advent is the seasonal recollection that “God has made us a people of promise in a world of impatience.” It is the recovery of how to live in a world of impatience as a patient people. Advent reminds us that things are not as they are supposed to be: that war, violence, poverty, and injustice are passing, but not quite yet. It calls to mind that the world itself is experiencing birth pains, that the present order is dying and a new creation is being born. It is the faithful practice of living in the ‘here but not yet’ Kingdom as patient people who know how to hope in the midst of despair.  “Our task in Advent is to journey in hope and expectation of the God who breaks open the heavens and descends in power and glory so that we fallen creatures might know healing and salvation.”

"On Generosity", By Walter Brueggemann

On our own, we conclude:
there is not enough to go around

we are going to run short
of money
of love
of grades
of publications
of sex
of beer
of members
of years
of life

we should seize the day
seize our goods
seize our neighbours goods
because there is not enough to go around

and in the midst of our perceived deficit
you come
you come giving bread in the wilderness
you come giving children at the 11th hour
you come giving homes to exiles
you come giving futures to the shut down
you come giving easter joy to the dead
you come – fleshed in Jesus.

and we watch while
the blind receive their sight
the lame walk
the lepers are cleansed
the deaf hear
the dead are raised
the poor dance and sing

we watch
and we take food we did not grow and
life we did not invent and
future that is gift and gift and gift and
families and neighbours who sustain us
when we did not deserve it.

It dawns on us – late rather than soon-
that you “give food in due season
you open your hand
and satisfy the desire of every living thing.”

By your giving, break our cycles of imagined scarcity
override our presumed deficits
quiet our anxieties of lack
transform our perceptual field to see
the abundance………mercy upon mercy
blessing upon blessing.

Sink your generosity deep into our lives
that your muchness may expose our false lack
that endlessly receiving we may endlessly give
so that the world may be made Easter new,
without greedy lack, but only wonder,
without coercive need but only love,
without destructive greed but only praise
without aggression and invasiveness….
all things Easter new…..
all around us, toward us and
by us

all things Easter new.

Finish your creation, in wonder, love and praise. Amen.” 

                     -Walter Brueggemann

Creation Groans



All Creation Groans

“Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence!”[1]

Hope and lament, wonder and revulsion, justice and unmitigated terror: this is the world we inhabit, a world groaning not only with the birth pangs of new creation, but with the death throes of the old order.  Friday delivered another stab in the heart, one more reason to hate and one less reason to live.[2] Newtown reminds us that we inhabit a time between times, when our joys and our sorrows are mere inches apart.  And in the stark reality that horror brings, we cling to the faint hope of a creation “where there will be no more death or mourning, nor crying or pain.”[3] It may be altogether fitting to be reminded of this paradox during Advent, a season when all mankind yearns for deliverance from evil.  It is this season of preparation and anticipation that points toward the coming of the Holy One, the Messiah, whose righteous reign will finally and forever more bring peace and goodwill on earth.  It is this world, which is ‘here but not yet’ that we long for.  But for now, this present darkness casts a long shadow over our future hope.

John the Baptizer knew this ambiguity all too well.  The one who first proclaimed the way of the Lord is suffering bewilderment.  After ushering in the Kingdom of God, calling Israel to repentance and baptizing Jesus into the Jordan, this new Elijah finds himself rotting in prison, awaiting execution.  The highway he prepared has come to a dead end. 

“When the men came to Jesus, they said, ‘John the Baptist sent us to you to ask, ‘Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?’”[4]

This ‘greatest born of woman’ is now doubting the one whose sandals he had been unfit to tie. Are you really the ‘One’ he asks, because if you are, why am I about to die?  We can’t help but join John’s entreaty of Jesus.  Why do we still suffer Lord, if you really came to save us? Where are you when our are babies are ripped apart in the womb?  Where were you when are our children's bodies were mowed down like grass before the sickle?  Like John, we may not doubt God’s existence, but we certainly question his justice.  And suddenly, the man of sorrows answers, "I am here on the path to Golgotha." 

Advent asks us to abide in the paradox between the trough and the cross, to remember that Christmas isn’t simply about lowing cattle and kneeling shepherds, it is also a divine reckoning, when the Lord finally bares his Holy arm before the nations by sentencing his Son to death.  Advent is abiding in the dark silhouette of the cross as it looms over the manger.  It is the anticipation, through the death of Christ, of a new way, a new world.  But this way is not simply a new path navigating through the destruction and death of this world, but an entirely new creation birthed out of the death of the old.  In Christ, a new day is dawning when the “blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the good news is preached to the poor.”[5]

We are not alone in our anguish, we worship the God despised and rejected by men. This baby will share our grief. His fingers will carry our sorrow and his tiny head will be crushed for our iniquity.  He will be well acquainted with grief and from his death will spring forth new life. “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or ever come to mind.”[6]

Blessed is he who does not fall away as we prepare once again the way of the Lord…     

---

[1] Isaiah 64: 1.

[2] Wiesel, Ellie. Night.

[3] Revelation 21: 4.

[4] Luke 7: 20.

[5] Luke 7: 22.

[6] Isaiah 65: 17.

Advent or Apocalypse: Waiting On New Creation

“But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory…Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come…Therefore, stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come…lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay Awake!”

 

At first glance, this lectionary reading seems strange for the first Sunday of Advent.  It sounds like we’re celebrating the first Sunday of Apocalypse. Heavens torn asunder, the sun darkened and stars falling from the sky replace our iconic images of lowing cattle, a dark cave with kneeling shepherds and a star in the East. And yet, these highly charged metaphors of cosmic cataclysm are the perfect starting point for a season of expectation as we not only celebrate Christ’s birth, but we anticipate His second coming and His great day of vindication.

Mark’s audience also awaited something: primarily, messianic deliverance from their Roman overlords. Like them, we too find ourselves in exile, waiting patiently for the ultimate restoration and redemption of this world. In this election year, we’ve grown weary of the rulers, powers and principalities of this world and anticipate the day when Yahweh will make all things new. But we are still waiting, and some of us are even losing hope. Mark’s readers thought the day would come in their lifetime, but now, some 2,000 years after his word’s were pinned, Christ’s Kingdom on earth is still not complete, causing all of creation to groan expectantly as in the pains of childbirth.  We join the first century church yearning for Christ’s arrival as the satisfaction of God’s ancient promise to bring all of creation back under his rightful rule.

But, in the meantime, we turn our full attention to the ambiguous face of human history. Mark’s choice of apocalyptic language has little to do with holding the carrot of eternity before our nose. The precise raison d’etre for apocalyptic language is to deny the imminence of easy kingdom victory, to force us to accept the agony of history. With millennia in the rearview mirror, this kingdom fruition stuff ain’t happening overnight. The total effect of the ever-retreating horizon of kingdom fulfillment is to support an atmosphere of genuine hope amid our current frustration. Mature faith in the cross understands the enduring struggle that historical existence entails.  We want absolution now, but eagerly wait his coming again in glory. It is precisely the conviction that the new order is ‘here but not yet’ that motivates each Christ follower to join in the unfinished, genuine struggle for new creation.  Advent season compels us to enter into our historical moment, to choose between the old order which is passing away, and the new world which is coming through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

And so, we wait and watch for His coming like the disciples in Gethsemane who also heard the command to “watch and pray…” And like them, we now see the entire world and our call within our world through the lens of Gethsemane: to stay awake in the darkness of history, to refuse to compromise the politics of the cross and to follow Christ through the crucible of suffering.  Advent takes us beyond the stable, up Golgotha’s hill and to another cave, but this one is empty, save a young man proclaiming glory to God in the highest. The resurrection of Jesus is the boundary event of our existing paradigm; it is the starting point for this expectant new creation.  It provides a wholly new way of understanding our human experience.  And as we celebrate his birth, we join the litany of disciples awaiting his second coming when God will be all in all as the waters cover the sea…

Oh, come, Desire of nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Oh, bid our sad divisions cease,
And be yourself our King of Peace.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!