QUARANTINE BLOG # 258

December 13, 2020

The Second Sunday in Advent

The What and the When of the Christ Child

“To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul.  O my God, in you I trust; do not let me be put to shame; do not let my enemies exult over me.  Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame; let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.  Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths.  Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long” (Psalm 25:1-5).

People like us have careful work to do in Advent, to weave our way between two big dangers. On the one hand, there are dangerous people floating around the church who specialize in times and dates and schedules, who know with precision the time of Christ’s coming and who speak confidently of millennia and pre-millennia and post-millennia. They know too much and reduce God’s freedom to the timetable of their ideology.

On the other hand, there are dangerous people floating around the church who are offended by those people and who in reaction are in love with their comfortable affluence, imagine that it will not get any better than this, and expect no gospel arrival at any time ever. 

People like us live in that awkward place amid those who know too much and those who expect nothing. We occupy a different posture about Advent as we ready for Christmas. We are the ones who know what is coming but do not know when.

The what for which we wait at Christmas and for which we prepare in Advent is that God’s rule of starchy justice and generous mercy will arise in the earth, and all that seek to negate abundant life will be overruled and nullified. That is how we pray every time we are together. We pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” We pray that God would show himself so that the power of chaos and death, of greed and brutality, of selfishness and hate would end, for such negators cannot stay when God comes among us. We pray always in confidence, for we end and say, “For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory” ... it belongs to no one else.

But we do not know the when. We do not know when because the coming of God is not our doing. God’s way is a mystery that has not been entrusted to us. It is hard for us to imagine that the regime of violent death will finally not prevail, and we do not know when or how it will end, because we trust all of that to God.

At times we know too much, shrinking your possibility to fit our narrow imaginings. At times we expect nothing new, wrapping ourselves in despair to fend off your newness.  But this Advent season, may we think deeply and face passionately the “what” of your way, 0 God, without any anxiety about the “when.”  Amen.

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