Blogging Towards Sunday
December 2, 2007
The 1st Sunday of Advent
Waiting on the World to Change
Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent, the liturgical season of the four Sundays preceeding Christmas. Advent means "coming" in Latin. It's the celebration of participation and experience of the good news of the birth of the Christ child in distant and long ago Bethlehem. It's experiential in that we are invited today to experience for oursevles what those over 2,000 years ago waiting for the coming of the long awaited Messiah, or Annointed, of God to deliver them from foreign oppressors in Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greeks and Romans. We participate in that historic period of waiting through the telling, re-telling our hearing of the story of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth as we move together through our reading from text to action.
What did those long ago prophets imagine? What did John the Baptist imagine in his time preparing for the arrival of Jesus? What did Mary think of, and reflect upon in her heart during those long 9 months? What did the Shepherds, the most excluded of peoples think between their angelic vision and their discovery of the baby in the manger? What did those Magi imagine as they traveled searching the night sky, checking their maps and confering with Herod? How did they all imagine that the birth of this child would not only signal but embody the victory of God over the forces of division, destruction and death in the world?
The scriptures for this first week of Advent talk of HOPE - the hope of the prophets that God would indeed bring light into darkeness, freedom from captivity, hope to the hopeless. A hope best symbolized in God's intended future for all the nations of the earth - a giant table, sort of like Thanksgiving without the sales and football, to which everyone would come to eat, be healed, made whole and know community with one another and with the Living God who will sit and preside over the table. The hope of the early church that this ultimate victory would come soon, that pushes us to prepare, to await this deliverance not as passive spectators but as active participants scanning the horizon for a sign, putting oil in our lamps, perparing the banquet feast room and table. The hope as John expressed it in Revelation that there would come a new heaven and a new earth that would be without the sea (the eternal symbol of division, destruction, death and chaos throughout the Bible from the chaotic pre-mordial waters of the creation story, to the destructive waters of the flood, to the enslaving waters of Egypt).
The scriptures all point towards a way of living that is both in the moment and looking forward, both remembering the past and anticipating the future while living fully in the now. It's about living with perspective in terms of who we are, who are neighbors are and how God in Christ calls, invites and challenges us to love them as God first loves us. When we get that wrong, when we live it backwards focused on ourselves out of fear, mistrust, greed, or competition...then we move towards the evil that so often dominates the systems of our world. Our hope in Advent is that the light of Christ not only shines in the darkness, but shows us the way to something bigger, better, a promise hinted at in the birth of that baby in the manger.
What is our hope? That's the question that these scriptures ask us. It can't just be a trinket on a shelf, or a postive thought on a hallmark card. I has to be gritty, human, real, authentic, honest. What is your hope? What is the thing that gets you up out of bed, into motion and sustains you through the trials, trails, and treats of your daily life?
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