1 Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:24-37, Psalm 80:1-7,17-19
Advent is about two things – waiting and preparation. They are closely related. We wait and prepare for the coming of Christ. Two comings are in view. His first coming, which we celebrate at Christmas, and his second coming what we await and for which we prepare.
When Jesus came the first time, the Jews were waiting, expecting God to send his Appointed One, the Messiah, to come and make things right. Jesus came, the expected, awaited Messiah, the incarnation of God, who made things right and set the world up for the culmination of all things on his return.
Like the Jews were then, we are now – waiting for Jesus to come, doing our best to be prepared. Playing our part in preparing ourselves and our world for the culmination of all things. We try to be patient, but remember that patience isn’t just being good at waiting, it’s what you do while you wait. But we’ve talked enough about preparing. Today we consider why Jesus’ return is the good news that it is. We are waiting for the end and we need so much for the end to come. We need it so much because the world is such a dark place.
Advent helps us understand just how the news of the birth of Jesus is so very good. In Advent we see, decisively, how God’s reign marks the breakdown and end of every other reign. What the biblical writers knew, and we still know, is that every human reign is disordered, sinful, full of injustice and oppression. Those who hold power find ways to make their disordered reigns seem normal or even good. But those damaged by such disordered reigns – the silent or silenced ones including the poor, the sick, the dying, the outcast, the hungry and the persecuted, among others – know in their bodies and often carry in their psyches for generations wounds and scars that give a very different testimony.
Advent tunes us in to their voices. Advent reminds us that the good news we seek, indeed the only really good news there is, is precisely for them and those of us among them, and becomes good news for all only in their redemption. Advent lays before us starkly their usually silenced voices, the voices of prophets who speak to them from God, and the assurance that indeed the worlds that try to keep them silenced for their own benefit have only one future – utter destruction and replacement by God’s reign.
As such Advent can, if we let it, disorient us from the dominant culture’s experience and expression of “Christmastime” and its many ways to ignore or domesticate the wild prophet, Jesus, who is the loudspeaker and embodiment of this world’s end and God’s reign coming upon us.
For further comment on this theme I recommend Dave Perry’s blog.