Approaching Advent From the Underside

Advent is soon here, though the stores seem to have it full throttle Christmas already with Thanksgiving dinners not yet prepared. It is easy for Christians to make ourselves feel holy and above it all by judging and criticizing the retailers and their love of money and those who are so spiritually vacuous that they are already buying Christmas.

But, this is not the truth of Advent’s coming . The truth of Advent lies in the reality of what is to come, in Advent we are waiting for the Cross—the cross of suffering and the cross of resurrection. Without them, Mary’s boy would have been just one more Jewish born to struggle against ancient infant mortality rates, perhaps surviving to become a man struggling to survive the tyranny of the Pax Romana and whatever fates consigned children born without benefit of wedlock in the 1st Century Ancient Near East. As we come upon Advent, we are waiting to struggle, once again, with just what it means for God to join with us, to make his presence in our hearts and minds and lives so real, so palpable, so intimate that we no longer need to judge ourselves and others.

This is so difficult. So foreign. It is so contrary to the habits and haunts of our hearts and minds. It is contrary because it begins with us. The baby, the cross of suffering and the cross of salvation ("sozo" in Greek, bring to safety, restore, get well) are for our lives. It is so Other. It seems too impossible to be true. Those old ingrained habits of thought keep our worlds organized and orderly, so we divide things up, us and them . All the while waiting anxiously for someone who seems never to come, like Vladimir and Estragon, in Beckett’s, “Waiting for Godot.”

The difference is, of course, that the God we wait for is come. This baby we wait for broke down all those old barriers of our too frail and worn out human ideas about God out there and us down here, of us in here (the church) and those out there. Immanuel, God with us, is just that: God with us, and we are with God. There isn’t much else for us to do.

It is exactly the most simple and the most difficult thing in the world for us to truly believe that we are truly, deeply, intimately, dearly loved in Advent and on Christmas, and every day, with a grace so strong it would suffer and die for us, and with a hope so real it needs only for us to pray to open our hearts and minds to it in midst of the uncertainties and griefs, the differences and dissimilarities between us and the harsh realities of our living. Emmanuel will join us right where we are saving us, healing us into closer relationship with our Father, bringing us into that same compassionate connection with one another.  Amen