Advent has long been a somewhat puzzling season to me. We start out focusing on Second Coming (of all things), and then switch to Mary and Joseph narratives, and finally bring out the Wiseman the week after the Christmas tree comes down. Most mainline Christians are not oriented to keep an eye open for a literal Second Coming of Christ. But we are oriented to a shopping season that introduces Nativity images and Christmas Carols around Thanksgiving... and so it all just gets kind of fuzzy-weird.
But this year, it started to make more sense to me. Sitting in worship on the Fourth Sunday of Advent 2014 at Foundry Church in Washington, led by a pastoral team of three magnificent women, some loose ends came together for me.
You can't really do Advent until you have already experienced Promise fulfilled. In other words, Advent, by definition, is not a Jewish season. It is a Christian season, a reflection on the landscape of our lives in light of the coming of Christ into our world and personal reality. Another way of looking at this: you can't find the energy to hope for crazy-big wonderful reality, until life has already delivered to you a significant down payment on such hope!
Our church (in Washington DC) fought a civil rights battle in the last few years for LGBT rights alongside a host of allies. I reflected last Sunday in the pew that we are truly winning this battle. There is such joy in this for those of us who are engaged in this human rights cause. It is truly a miraculous season - where years of thin hopes are being fulfilled in ways beyond anyone's dreams. Because of the Promise fulfilled in this amazing odyssey in 2010-14, I realized that my capacity for hoping and waiting are increased this year, from years past.
In other words, the mighty works of God (that we live to experience) have a way of stretching our faith imagination for the future!
When we think about the coming of Christ into the world anew this week, where does the world desperately need the in-breaking of God-presence and reality into the global plot? I think about the need for working through the challenges of race, justice and inter-ethnic trust in America. I think about the rise of radicalized groups within Islamic culture and the challenges to peace and justice around the world. I think about the rising global climate crisis, where enormous cooperation between nations will be required in order to save the planet as a sustainable habitat for life. These are big deals - and they easily overwhelm us.
Yet this is the God who sent us Jesus, who wiped out 19th century slavery, who buried both the Roman Empire and the old Jim Crow. This is the God who continues to expand healthcare to the least and the last around the world, even in Mississippi. This is the God who invented feminism many centuries before it came to full flower. ...the God who is taking out homophobia in Cecil B DeMille style.
I really believe that the best is yet to come.
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