We have just done a year or so on the book of Revelation. It may be argued that the main point of that book is the collision between the weight of our past and the glory of God’s future. As it happens, this is also the overarching theme of the Advent/Nativity/Epiphany time in the Christian Year.
It is in these days, inching across the interface between darkness and light, that we are almost violently torn between the two opposed lifestyles that John describes in Revelation. On the one hand the world confronts us with a loud orgy of consumerism permeated with nostalgic sentimentality. On the other hand we hear in church a message both critical and affirming about God’s unlikely yet majestic entrance into our lives.
One story is about the past. In this season we invoke selected childhood memories and a sanitized (and largely invented) history of cultural festivities, all dedicated to only one thing: selling consumer products. Jesus’ birth is also reduced to a distant, irrelevant, historical event. It is oddly out-of-place, and apparently obligatorily woven into the corners of this gaudy tapestry as “the reason for the season.” This is the story we all grew up with. Most people, even most Christians, are unaware that there is another one.
But Christians witness to a very different, even contradictory, story. That concerns the way God’s future breaks into our world with a vision of peace, compassion, justice, grace, and love, in the person of Jesus Christ. He is born in the humblest of circumstances and first greeted by the lowest of society. He offers his life in service, healing, liberation, feeding, and finally in dying to give us life.
Our season of Advent is about this other story, and we Presbyterians have been in the process of recovering it over the last half century or more. Advent, of course, is not about buying or selling anything. It is about an awesome gift: light in our darkness. (That is one of the reasons why the church scheduled the Nativity around the Solstice: to connect with the hemispheric experience of sunlight returning.)
The two main characters of Advent are St. John the Baptist, representing the wall-to-wall critique of the forces who appear to rule in our dark world, and St. Mary, in and through whom the Light emerges into our world as one of us. They show us God’s firm “no” to the-world-as-we-know-it, dominated by destructive, mercenary principalities and powers, and God’s “yes!” to the true world of God’s future, which Christ announces, embodies, and calls us into.
Advent is really important because it sets the tone for the rest of the year, and for our Christian life generally. For we always live in anticipation of the fulfillment of God’s future among and within us. This future has broken into human experience in different ways over time. The Bible is the “unique and authoritative witness” to this. The events described in Scripture are not important as history; their essential importance is found in how they point beyond themselves to God’s Reality. In other words, they are less about the past than they are about the future.
I was taught that human identity is a story we tell ourselves about our past. That may be accurate for our ego-centric, personality-driven identity. But I am coming more to the view that our real, deep, and true identity in Christ is better related as a story we tell about our future. Where we are going is more important than where we have been. Advent is about where we are going. In Scripture we hear stories from the past which serve to inform us about our future. In Advent this is most explicit.
And by “where we are going” I don’t necessarily mean when we die. A. J. Muste once said, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” So it is with the followers of Jesus Christ. There is no way to Christ; Christ is the Way. That’s why the early Christians referred to themselves as the Way. We live now in anticipation of, and participation in, something that is in the process of being fulfilled in us and in our world. To live now according to his teachings and commandments is itself both the destination and the Way.
December is the hardest month to stay with focused on the future Jesus gives us. We are harassed by other voices yelling at us all month long to follow another path. Let’s keep following John’s advice and make our lives a living witness to Jesus Christ. In this season, let’s prove his Presence within and among us, by our service to those in need, our humility, gratitude, and forgiveness, and our peace, joy, and hope in our knowledge of the Truth revealed in him, which is God’s love. That is the future we need to let shine in and through us, into a broken world.
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