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.
