A reflection for the first Sunday of the season of Advent
Advent is the season of the church calendar that begins four Sundays before Christmas day. That Sunday, which is today this year, is also New Year's Day on the church calendar. The purpose of Advent is not to get ready for Christmas. It is to prepare for the coming of the Son of God into the world. The Christmas season on the church calendar begins, reasonably enough, on December 25 and the season of Christmas lasts a short time after then.
Traditionally, the passages for first Sunday of Advent are not about Bethlehem or the manger or the wise men or shepherds or any of the things we usually think about when December gets here. This Sunday is about the judgment of God upon the world through Christ. Often the passages make us look well beyond the manger to the return of Christ into the world in power. Jesus taught a lot about the final judgment. Today’s passage from Luke is one example, which seems to start the season rather depressingly:
Luke 21:25-28
25
"There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth
distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. 26
People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world,
for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27 Then they will see 'the Son of
Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory.
28
“Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads,
because your redemption is drawing near."
We
should stop to ponder just what the Good News really is as we head into Advent.
I would advise not to think too much ahead to either Santa Claus or Bethlehem; the
gospels show it is not an easy trip. Let Advent be a time to look inward at our
souls to discern whether we are preparing ourselves for the coming of Christ.
The Scripture passages for Advent emphasize the prophecy of Christ’s coming,
the fact of Christ’s coming, and the promise of Christ’s coming again. Passages
of the return of Christ are full of images and metaphors from another time and
place. I don’t understand them all. Their origin is a people whose fundamental
way of understanding reality was very different from ours.
But I
think that this passage and the others like it in the Bible to compel us to
ponder a critical question: What do we expect from the future?
Jesus
paints a picture of creation coming loose. The order and regularity of the
natural world so painstakingly explained in the first two chapters of Genesis
is cast to the winds. God is shaking things up now, which Jesus and his hearers
already knew would happen. The prophet Haggai wrote, “This is what the LORD
Almighty says: ‘In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the
earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all nations, and the desired of
all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,’ says the LORD
Almighty” (Hag 2:6‑7). (You may recognize this passage as the text of the fifth
piece of Handel’s Messiah.)
Luke’s signs and portents point to fear and foreboding, and people faint. Yet even in such times, God remains steadfast. God comes with power and glory. We are not to faint when God shakes things up but are to stand and raise our heads because our redemption is drawing near. Even in chaos, redemption.
What do
we expect from the future? Luke says that one day the end will come but that
the end is one of hope for everyone who follows Christ. To hope for the future
requires a point to the present. Advent should make us face how we understand
the fundamental condition of humankind: that there is something about human
existence that makes salvation, however defined, necessary. That is to say:
·
what are we saved from?
·
what are we saved to?
·
and what are we saved for?
Here is
what I think.
We are
saved from a life of unconscious relationship with God to a life
of conscious relationship with God. All of creation exists in relation to God.
Human beings are always in relationship to God. The question is how whole and
healthy that relationship is. We are saved from broken, sickly relationship to
restored, repaired relationship through the initiative of God’s grace and our
response to grace.
We are saved from meagerness of life to abundance of life. Jesus said he had come so that we may have life more abundantly. Being the materialists that we are, we tend to misunderstand what abundance means, no time more so than at Christmas: you know, the stuff. At Christmas it’s easy to ignore Jesus’ caution that, “a person’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15). Abundant life is more than that. The abundant life is one in which unholiness is being swept away and holiness of life is being nurtured. Abundant life means to turn from ways of death to ways of life.
Isaiah
wrote that human beings have a "covenant with death" and an
"agreement with the grave" (Isa 28:16‑18). This condition goes beyond
the simple fact of individual mortality. It is not merely persons who are being
saved by God, it is societies, politics, the human community itself.
Individual persons are often quite admirable.
But collectively, communally, nationally, as a species, we are inbred to
strife, warfare, criminality, domination and oppression at every level. No
individual can escape it no matter how pure in heart. Every person participates
no matter how devoted to right. Yet the promise of salvation is that the
destructive and self-destructive side
of human nature can be quelled, and that the better angels of our nature can
flower in God’s grace. “Jesus Christ [is] liberator of every dimension of life”
(ABD).
So we
are saved from destruction and violence to creation and peace.
We are
saved from the temporary to the eternal. The idea of salvation in
Christian faith has always included the promise that the grave is not the end
for Christian people. We will be raised to live again in a new creation, just
as Christ was raised, and we shall be like him. “For those who have no faith
and no knowledge of God, death stands as a final denial of life. All that we
may attempt or do is eventually swept away by time.
On the other hand, the [Good News of Advent
is] that beyond the end of time stands the Lord, who has come among us in the
person of Jesus. Those whose lives are lived under Jesus’ Lordship can live
expectantly, filling each day with activity that is meaningful because of its
divine mandate and its contribution to the fulfillment of God’s purposes for
human life. Similarly, neither the end of life nor the end of time itself holds
terror “for those who know God’s love because they know the one who determines
the reality that lies beyond” the here and now. “Thus those who know Christ as
the Son of God can approach the end with heads raised high, knowing that their
redemption is near” (21:28) (NIB).
Those are only some of the things we are saved from and saved to. But just as importantly, what are we saved for? This question is an urgent one if we are to avoid being so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly good.
Paul wrote in First Corinthians, “. . . we
are God’s fellow workers. . . ” (1 Cor 3:9a), and in Philippians, “for it is
God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” (Phil
2:13). We are saved for a reason, for a purpose. The way I best understand it
is what you have heard me say before: We are saved to be the body of Christ in
this time and this place, to do what Christ would do if he were here. Just as
Christ in his incarnation represents us to God, so do we in our adoption by God
as Christ’s brothers and sisters represent Christ to humankind and the rest of
creation. The redemption of creation is the ongoing work of God.
We are called to be fellow-laborers with
heavenly forces in the renewal of the world, we are to be living
letters of God to the world, individually and collectively through the church.
Through worship, prayer and devotion, through acts of charity and in struggling
for divine justice in human affairs, we envision and work for a world free from
anguish, suffering, and despair, a new order in which there will be justice and
peace for all creation.
Christ
has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. The return of Christ is the
“God‑provided goal . . . toward which all life should be directed.”
“The
days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made
to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” That day has come in the person
of Christ. Prophecies have already found their fulfillment already in the life
and work of Jesus Christ, in whose grace we await the culmination of God’s
history with the world.
