Are you ready?
Have you “raised your head”, as Jesus says, to see the signs of what’s coming, so you’re all prepared?
How many of us are ready for Christmas?
Okay, how many of us are ready for God to finally come in triumph and glory and transform the world?
Ready for God to come on an avalanche of chaos, disruption, destruction, uncertainty and surprise?
Jesus has told us – and we’ve repeated the story to one another for two thousand years, so we might remember that Jesus told us – to be always ready to “stand up”, to be firm amid the chaos in our faith and our hope; to “raise our heads” with courage and confidence.
Any time, everywhere, we are supposed to be alert for the signs and the reality of the glorious final arrival of Jesus in all of God’s unbounded power and splendor.
I want to be.
I just don’t think I ever quite am.
It’s not just the chaos I’m not entirely prepared for. I’m not sure I’m ready to cope with the arrival of all the glory and the finally unambiguous and overwhelming presence of God.
I may make this confession every year.
I know I work through this thought process regularly.
Because, frankly, whatever Jesus’ first disciples were expecting based on these signs and parables Jesus told them about, I’ve never quite figured out what I should be expecting about the new coming of the “Son of Man”, or when we should be expecting it.
And, like many of you, every year around this time I have to confront the dissonance that comes when the church starts talking about the dramatic (and perhaps traumatic) arrival of God’s final judgement and renewal of the world at the same time that we’re preparing our children to tell the story of the arrival of a charming helpless baby. And while the rest of the world around us is frantically urging us to prepare for an annual blast of gift-giving and overeating.
Which is may be what the church expects for us.
Because the very first thing we do in our church year, in our season of Advent, is not to celebrate the past but, in light of that past, to embrace the future.
To remind ourselves that the faith we share is not just about what God has already done. That faith is also about – mostly about – what God is going to do.
We start our cycle of faith with the story of the final thing we look forward to – the ultimate triumph of God’s glory, power, and love in transforming the messy, corrupted, selfish world we know into the healed, healing, generous, trustworthy full experience of God’s creativity, justice, and love.
And that’s the Advent, the “coming” we are preparing for.
Not just in this short, crowded four weeks of December, but a preparedness meant to start now, and last us all year; always.
The job of the Advent season is to remind us that when we were baptized – or whenever we first claimed our faith or that faith claimed us – when we accepted the gifts that God has already given us, we committed ourselves to the hope and expectation of God’s coming again, to believing and trusting and living so we can be ready for that at any moment.
In fact, we’re supposed to be so focused on our expectation of, and preparation for, the ultimate coming of Christ to transform our world that we are utterly surprised to discover God showing up as a helpless human infant when the 25th of December rolls around.
Some twenty centuries of remembering the baby – while the ultimate revelation and salvation hasn’t happened yet – has led us to deeply set habits of expecting the baby. Expecting the coming of God to be gentle, adorable, and already done. A mission accomplished, and worthy of celebration with joy and generosity and cheerful gatherings and an overabundance of rich, sweet foods.
And it is.
But it’s also not.
The coming of God – accomplished once in the infant Jesus – is what we are still waiting for, and we’re waiting for the triumph of God. The restoration of unquenchable, overwhelming rightness and justice and health and truth everywhere, not just within us.
We’re waiting for the full and unfiltered divine power of God to be right in the middle of our daily lives and transforming the entire world.
That is what we’re supposed to be preparing for this month.
All the time.
I wonder what our Decembers, what our Christ-Mass preparations, would be like, if we expected not a baby in a manger, but a powerful divinity wrapped in clouds and eye-tearing glory, twenty-four days from now.
What would we shop for, and give as gifts, in celebration of all tumbling together into the chaos of holy transformation, of entry into a world we won’t recognize – but that we long for as the fulfilment of holiness and love?
I imagine our gift lists would be more likely to include a compass, and sturdy shoes, than scented candles and fuzzy slippers.
Lightweight, sturdy backpacks ready to adventure with us would be more popular than a better TV to be secured to the wall.
Our kids would ask Santa for maps and seeds and healing kits instead of squishmallows and playstations.
We’d exchange traditional family recipes for light, stable, energy-dense food, instead of sweet cookies and candy.
One thing, though, would be exactly the same.
We’d gather together.
Because even more than when we are preparing to celebrate a good thing already done, when we are preparing for a good thing yet to come that will change everything we know, we need friends. We need relationships, and community, and love.
We need to share stories and songs and care that strengthen us, renew us. We need to give each other, and receive from each other, the power of peace and confidence and joy.
And we need to keep expanding that circle of trust, and support, that network of shared hope.
The friends, the companions we already have, may be enough for the celebration of what God has already done. But the celebration of what God is going to do is a celebration that keeps pulling more people in. That must keep us building new mutual supports, new trusts; keep expanding our shared experiences, and our shared hopes.
Because to be ready in Advent, to be ready for the Advent, the Great Coming of God, is not to be done with the work of celebration, and generosity, but to be in the middle of the actions of love, and hope, and trust. To “raise our heads” and notice the signs of God breaking into our ordinary world, and to respond with hope, and confidence, as change goes on and on around us.
God has not asked us to complete love, to finish faith, (and certainly not by the 25th of this month!) but rather to “stand up”, together, ready to join the transformation of Christ’s coming, to live our love and faith in the midst of God’s making all things new.
No comments:
Post a Comment