Inducto: Advent From the Underside

 

 

Advent comes from the Latin word, adventus, meaning coming. It is the season for the Church year when people of faith wait in expectation and hope to celebrate God to entering fully into our human existence. A Coming into the depths of human experience and existence  of God who chose to be born to a poor, pregnant-out-of-wedlock,  teenage girl on the margins of society rather than into the life of a properly married couple living a well-to-do life that included attending a respectable religious institution.  At the heart of this world changing, every-life changing event was a young family displaced by world events, struggling far away from the support of family and familiarity of home. A young family cast so low in the society of those days that their baby was born in a stable among the animals and cold. God chose to be born into a family from the underside of society and culture and religious institutions, to an uncertain young couple where, perhaps, even actual paternity of the baby born on the night we celebrate as Christmas lay as a shadow between the proud, overwhelmed, joyous new parents even as the wondrous events we still celebrate today were unfolding around them.

 

“And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25: 40)

“Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own;  but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly  call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:12-14)

Several Advents ago, I was praying with Paul’s letter to his beloved friends in the church at Philippi for some months preceding. Somewhere in the small and subtle movements of life and faith, it came to seem important  that I prepare for the birth of God into human life and living in some way that took me beyond the grace and beauty, the joy of family and friends, the blessed Advent celebrations of my local congregation.  Grown into adult life, Jesus, fully-man and fully-God, told us we can come to know him by caring for the “least of these,” for our sisters and brothers on the underside of society.  It seemed well that Advent to heed Paul’s example of growth in faith and intimacy with Christ pressing forward beyond my own familiar comforts and customs “towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

From this, I came to prepare  that Advent for the birth of God among us through season of praying and coming to know the commonality of our human lives and our shared need for deliverance with those on the underside of our society--Advent from the Underside.  If Jesus would be born in these days and this place, he would be born to some among these people. How could I come to know him in the intimacy of love and trust, faith and joy that can only be known in the experience of the fullness of our need of him? What would he teach me about loving him and others as he loves us all? Advent from the Underside.  

 

 



“Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:11-13)

So today, I am grateful for all that I have, for family and amazing friends, for my work which calls me to join those huddled at the foot of the cross and to the garden where Christ speaks our names, and, for a life time’s graces of stewarding hounds and horses and kitty’s of many sorts.

Today, I am grateful for all those I have lost, for the graces of the journeys of grieving them, and, for that which was mine but is no longer and for gifted strengths that lay beyond.

Today, I am grateful that my strength is not mine but is in Christ who offers new life and hope beyond all that I am and all that I have. Amen.

And, well, I have to be grateful this Thanksgiving morning that Foxhound Kelly is happily occupied scrubbing the very last molecule for peanut butter out of the empty jar.