Third Sunday of
Advent
Time gets all mixed
up in Advent. Yes, Advent means coming,
but what, who is coming? Christmas?
Jesus? Isn’t Jesus already here? So, then,
are we waiting on his return? Some are. The Revised Common Lectionary adds to
the confusion by having us read texts about John the Baptist, as here in John
and last week from Mark. When John was out there in the Judean wilderness
eating locusts and honey, he wasn’t preparing for Jesus’s birth. Right? Jesus
was already an adult by that time, about to embark on his ministry. Time gets
all mixed up in Advent.
We think of John
the Baptist as a forerunner, someone who prepares the way of the Lord. He’s the
advance man who gets the crowds ready. We think of Advent as preparation, of
getting ready—with the emphasis on getting ready for Christmas. And then Advent ends when Christmas comes, and
then after Christmas we put Advent away along with the ornaments for another
year. Advent makes an appearance for four Sundays, but even then, Advent gets
short-shrift because the push to get right to Christmas is intense. So, we start singing Christmas carols on the Third
Sunday of Advent. And this year Advent
is under even greater pressure, because it shares the same day as Christmas
Eve. Some churches will opt out of the Fourth Sunday next week and will have services
only on the evening of December 24. My
High Church friends are horrified by the thought of playing with the liturgical
calendar; Low Church friends are, like, “Whatever.”
I guess I’m in the
middle. Presbyterians don’t have to
worry about the liturgical church police knocking on the sanctuary door. For
the most part, we’re free to order worship however wish. I’m not for skipping the Fourth Sunday of
Advent, but neither am I too worked up about it. It’s all a bit contrived, the liturgical
calendar. It emerges out of the cycle of feast days in Judaism, but it took a
long time to be fixed. Christ’s birth was first celebrated on December 25 around
273 A. D. For more than four hundred
years of the Christian Era, the feast days were very fluid. The Protestant
reformers were suspicious of the calendar. I know plenty of Presbyterians
raised in churches and never heard about either Advent or Lent or Ash
Wednesday.
What’s not
contrived and essential and grounded in scripture is the unique attitude toward
time that Advent heightens. Because we
are prone to think of time moving in a linear fashion—flowing from the past
through the present and, thus, shaping the future—it’s natural for us to think
of Advent as having a fixed duration that begins and comes to an end, leading
to something else. What we miss, though,
is the Bible’s distinctive orientation toward time, that is, how God chooses to
act in time. Many years ago, George MacLeod
(1895-1991), founder of the Iona Community in Scotland, a passionate preacher
and prophetic voice, said the posture of a Christian should always be leaning
into the future. Not backward. Not upright.
But leaning forward in anticipation, with expectation for the coming of
God, looking for God’s arrival, anticipating that God is about to act, to
appear, do a “new thing,” as we hear in Isaiah (43:19). We search for God’s advent,
emerging not from out from the past, but from the future, breaking into time,
our time. And this posture becomes the
foundation for hope. This is what Advent
beautifully articulates, the posture of the Christian who leans forward with
expectation for what God is about to do—not just around Christmas, but always.
And we are drawn
toward that future because, in many respects, we have already been seized by
that future. Something has taken hold of us, someone, has come toward us and is
always coming toward us with a love that compels and captivates us, that won’t
let us go. That was true for John the
Baptist. He caught a glimpse of God’s coming future. It seized him and held him
and then sent him out into the wilderness to be ready.
It was true for
Yahweh’s mysterious agent described in Isaiah 61. “The spirit of the Lord God
is upon me.” The spirit confronted and seized and then showed this agent the
new thing about to take place in the world, coming into existence through him. “The LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to
bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty
to the captives, and release to the prisoners.”
The agent is announcing the new future being given, proclaiming what God
has begun to do and is bringing to completion. We have this remarkable “series
of infinitive verbs to inventory what this empowered agent will do: ‘to bring,
to bind up, to proclaim, to release, to proclaim, to comfort, to provide, to
give’’’ (vvs. 1b-3).[1] We’re not sure who this agent is, but this
one, chosen by God, will minister to the weak, the powerless, and the
marginalized. It is not surprising that
the early followers of Jesus saw these words embodied in him. Indeed, we know from Luke 4, at the very
start of his ministry in Capernaum, Jesus reads these verses of Isaiah and
said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).
Advent might not be
your favorite time of the year. I can
completely understand why we want to run fast toward Christmas, celebrate the
birth of an infant, the promise of a new future for God’s people. Maybe there’s a part of us traumatized by too
many family vacations when we spent endless hours in the backseat of a car,
asking “Are we there yet?” We get tired
of the waiting, expecting, traveling. We get tired of leaning—and our backs get sore.
What if it’s not we
who are traveling toward God, but that God is on the way toward us? Yes, we
need to lean, be expectant. But if you
lean too far forward, you’ll fall flat on your face. Lean in gently and walk, look expectantly
for God who is advent-ing toward you, who is on the way to you. This is why it’s essential for us to maintain
an Advent attitude, not only before Christmas, but throughout the seasons of
our lives. If you think about it, advent is about being BC, Before Christ. “The whole purpose of Advent,” Malcolm Guite
suggests, “is to be for a moment fully and consciously Before Christ. In that place of darkness and waiting, we
look for his coming and do not presume too much that we already know or have
it.”[2] Advent
calls for humility. Without this posture, it’s easy to miss all the times and
places where Christ is coming into our lives today, especially in our day when
given the daily news it’s challenging to know where God is.
Christians live in
a perpetual advent. It’s a gift, a kind
of grace. David Congdon writes, “Every moment is an
opportunity to encounter [the coming] Christ and open oneself to” what
theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) called, “the gift of God’s future.”[3] Christ is coming. Now. And
always. In this moment, every moment,
moving toward us to meet us and seize us and hold us and love us and then send
us.
[1]
Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 44-66
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 213.
[2]
Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany (Canterbury Press, 2015), 19.
[3]
I’m grateful for David W. Congdon’s understanding of Bultmann as a theologian
of Advent, in Rudolf Bultmann: A Companion to His Theology (Cascade Books, 2015), 158. And I’m indebted to
him for the sermon title.
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