Prelude to New Beginnings

See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them. (Isaiah 40.9)

Rev. Alfred McBride invites us to consider Advent as the season when

Each year, God asks us to shed one more coat of awareness, one more dream state and come alive to the vision of God’s plan for each of us and the world-at-large.

In our coming alive to God’s plan, we are challenged to view Advent’s progress in a singular fashion. It is the prelude to new beginnings, the time we anticipate new life made possible by Christ’s appearance.

Last Sunday, our pastor noted how much of Christmas is laced with nostalgia. We revive favorite carols, decorations, and traditions as a means of hanging onto the past and taking comfort in continuity. And there is value in that. Yet we can't forget this season’s primary focus is newness. God is declaring new things, telling us of them before they spring forth. The Advent shedding Rev. McBride speaks of is how we make room for God's new vision for our lives and our world.

Former things are now behind us. Our Advent journey leads to a fresh start.

For Now

We wait in hope for the LORD; God is our help and our shield. In God our hearts rejoice, for we trust in God’s holy name. (Psalm 33.20-21)

Too often we confuse waiting with idleness. We’re made to believe that things get worse the longer we delay. And often they do. But this is never true in matters of spirit, where God’s timing—not our time—is the governing factor. Our Maker is very comfortable with waiting. Human traditions and to-do lists have never been of any great consequence to God. If the Christmas narrative teaches us anything, it’s that Creator’s vision for us is consistently displayed on a stately scale that cannot be rushed. While we wait, we should rejoice that God is our Help, our Protector, our trustworthy Promise.

In Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas, Jan Richardson offers some down-to-earth advice about Advent’s waiting dilemma:

The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before… What is possible is to not see it, to miss it, to turn just as it brushes past you… So stay. Sit. Linger. Tarry. Ponder. Wait. Behold. Wonder. There will be time enough for running. For rushing. For worrying. For pushing. For now, stay. Wait. Something is on the horizon.

Christmas will get here soon enough—sooner than we’d like, given how much busyness we impose on it. We are waiting on God. How can that not be worth the wait? 

For now, stay. Wait.

Expect the Unexpected

Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. (Luke 21.28)

Back Into Rehearsal

A friend and I were discussing Advent, and he summed it up splendidly as, “waiting and watching for the thing we most hope for.” He didn’t elaborate on what “the thing” was. The conviction in his tone made clear that he meant the Second Coming, which surprised me. He’s an alumnus of one of America’s most famously (or, if you will, infamously) liberal seminaries and forged his career not in the ivied traces of highbrow theology, but in the sciences. Therefore, I assumed he viewed Advent as the season when Christians gain entrance to the wonder of Christmas by revisiting Old Testament prophecies that shaped New Testament accounts of Jesus’s birth. As he talked on, however, it became obvious his Advent focus centered on what many dismiss as a far-fetched possibility, rather than the celebrated event that occurred 2000 years ago.

 “Advent has always felt peculiar to me,” he mused. “It’s like we’re cast in this mammoth production and we rehearse like mad to get ready for it. But nobody can say exactly what we’re preparing for—what it will look like, how it will go, or even when it will happen. Year after year, we go back into rehearsal, thinking, ‘Maybe this time.’ But isn’t that how it went with the first coming? They kept praying and watching and waiting. Then—pow!—there it was. Those who were ready saw it. The rest missed it completely. They couldn’t see God, because Jesus didn’t come the way they expected. That’s how it will be the second time around, too, making Advent all about expecting the unexpected. How do we manage that? That’s the question that falls in our laps every year. And if Advent doesn’t gin up all kinds of conflicted emotions, it seems to me we’re not doing it right.”

Uneasy

Somehow my friend’s uneasiness with Advent—his faith that Christ will come again tempered with uncertainty about how that promise will play out—comforted me. Advent should make us uneasy. If we’re “doing it right,” we should feel deeply conflicted about it, because it asks more of us than we can manage. Each year, we reach for prophets of old and renew acquaintances with those who experienced the Bethlehem miracle as prototypes to emulate. Questions that challenge our belief in the Second Coming are no different than the ones that perplexed them. Our discomfort with hoping in a cosmic event that will somehow alter our reality is no different than Mary’s. When the angel describes the pivotal role she will play in God’s redemptive plan, her first question is, “How will this be?” (Luke 1.34) We ask the same thing when pondering Christ’s return. Expecting the unexpected is no simple task.

It’s not entirely wrong to say that those who awaited and witnessed Christ’s birth had a slight advantage over us. Their prophets were first-rate poets whose vivid imagery transformed everyday objects into extraordinary augurs. This weekend we hear the Promised One described as “a righteous Branch to spring up for David” (Jeremiah 33.15)—tipping off the hopeful that His pedigree would derive from Israel’s most celebrated king. Isaiah’s pages overflow with symbols and metaphors that spell out Messianic events with breathtaking precision. Even the minor prophets arrest us with their clairvoyant eloquence.

By comparison, Jesus’s Second Coming prophecies seem decidedly mundane and vague. In Mark 13, He talks about wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, and famines as “the beginning of birthpangs” indicating Christ’s imminent return. This week’s Gospel (Luke 21.25-36) predicts bad weather: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (v25-26) What are we to make of this? History has never known a time when there weren’t wars and rumors of war. Every generation is dealt its share of earthquakes and famines. Hurricanes, tsunamis, and atmospheric disturbances are part of planetary life. Yet Jesus points to these inevitabilities—and the tragedies they bring—as signs of hope! “Now when these things begin to take place,” He says in verse 28, “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” It’s here that the conflicted emotions my friend described rear up. How can we know what we’re waiting and watching for if we’re uneasy with what we’re looking at?

Biding Time

The great paradox of Jesus’s Second Coming prophecies is that their veiled randomness makes His message transparently direct. Because the signs He gives us are constant and inescapable, our longing for Christ’s return should also be constant and inescapable. Watching and waiting for the thing we most hope for should become as commonplace to us as turning on the nightly news. Expecting the unexpected should frame how we live out our days. We should believe something bigger is taking shape behind the violence of war, tremors and tragedies born of a groaning planet, disheartening rumors that fill the air, and turmoil roiling above our heads. “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away,” Jesus assures us in verse 33. Troubles that confront us come and go. Yet we remain, constant in hope, steadfast in love, our joy and peace secured by unyielding faith that Christ will come again.

And so we approach Advent’s rehearsal as God’s great biding time. It's the season when we root out our deepest fears and uncertainties—when we realize there is more to this world than what we see, know, and understand. It is when we follow Jesus’s instructions to the letter: we stand up and raise our heads, because our redemption is drawing near. Maybe this time we’ll see the thing we most hope for. It’s possible we won’t. Either way, Advent’s rehearsal prepares us to move forward in faith that something miraculous is moving toward us. By doing the hard work this season asks of us, we’ll be ready and know it when we see it.

Watching and waiting.

Naming Names

The needy shall not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor perish forever. (Psalm 9.18)

Eddy, Terrence, Randy, George, Toloff, Jeff, Steve, Patrice, Brett, Renard, Ivan, two Larrys, Tony, Joey, three Michaels, Eileen, Laird, Dean, two Patricks, five Johns, Eric, two Jameses and a Jimmy, Howard, Keith, Rodney, Charles—the list of hollows that HIV/AIDS has carved in my heart goes on and on. The roster of friends and loved ones living with HIV/AIDS is many times longer. And it would be dishonest to pretend I’m any different from them. But for God’s grace, there’s no reason why I’m not listed among the lost or afflicted. In this, I am not alone. Many of us have behaved recklessly in the past. None of us can explain how or why we’ve been spared.

These days, it’s very rare that we grieve AIDS-related deaths. For that we are truly grateful. Yet not an hour passes without more fatalities added to the list. Today, the lives lost to or afflicted with HIV/AIDS have names like Gulu, Siphiwe, Noé, Toku, Jaspreet, Wang Pinghe. The grotesque horrors we endured in the fast-receding past are constant realities in Africa, India, and Asia. There, it’s much harder to identify HIV/AIDS patient types and focus prevention on at-risk populations. On the other side of the globe, HIV/AIDS is an equal-opportunity destroyer. It sweeps up men, women, children, gays, straights, rich, poor, educated, illiterate, powerful, and powerless with random disregard. It takes its toll in lives, religious and social violence, economic hardship, and decimated families.

With this weekend's observance of World AIDS Day, I invite all of us to bear witness to lives currently afflicted with HIV/AIDS by recounting those we lost so long ago. Naming names is our most powerful means to remind us of the virus’s terrors. Take a moment to open the comments and record the names of people you’ve lost. If it’s one or one hundred, name them. Recall how helpless and angry and betrayed you felt as they slipped away. Now think of hundreds of thousands—many in faraway places, with strange-sounding names—presently experiencing what you went through. Wherever they live, they cannot be forgotten. We cannot allow their hope to perish.

Pray for them. Suffer with them. And offer whatever you can—your money, time, or talent—to help combat this plague and end their pain.

Naming the names of those we’ve lost to HIV/AIDS is how we bear witness to the sufferings of those currently ravaged by the virus.

Not of This World

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked Him, “Are You the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about Me?” (John 18.33-34)

Empire, Supremacy, and Legitimate Rule

This weekend, churches worldwide mark the end of the liturgical year with the feast of Christ the King (also known as “The Reign of Christ”). The official line on its origin holds that Pope Pius XI instituted the feast in 1925 to offset growing secularism among the Faithful, to remind them that Christ is the Sovereign Ruler and Lord of all. But numerous historians have suggested the feast was also born of political expediency. World War One effectively unraveled the last of Europe’s dynastic empires, in one case contributing to the overthrow of a monarch (Russia) and in others (Great Britain, Austro-Hungary, and Germany) reducing royal figures to ceremonial heads of state. As “anointed” rulers of vast lands, they had governed at the behest of their spiritual overseers. This paradigm would be no more. In addition to splintering the Continent into smaller, autonomous nations, the War augured the ascendance of a new world leader, the United States. Although Americans were far less consumed by secularism than their French cousins, both countries passionately upheld the separation of Church and State. There was no mistaking they signaled a wave of the future that would strip Catholic and Protestant prelates of power they’d exercised for centuries.

Pius XI’s declaration of Christ’s sovereignty over all nations and peoples was an easy purchase for Protestant bishops who typically ignored Vatican edicts. Few questioned its theological urgency. Rapid shifts in thought had thrown the balance of religion and politics off-kilter. Christianity’s role as Western civilization’s voice of justice and compassion was failing; God’s kingdom was losing ground. As so often has happened in Church history, there was more to the Feast of Christ the King than met the eye: the assertion of Christ’s Lordship doubled as reassertion of ecclesiastical influence. And its tension between religious and political power is instructive, since the same issues—empire, supremacy, and legitimate rule—bubble up in Sunday’s Gospel. (John 18.33-17) This time, however, belief threatens politics. A new wave of thought is taking hold, one that insists a Higher Authority trumps the power structure cobbled together by an uneasy alliance between Rome and Judaism. A new kingdom—mysteriously described as “not of this world”—is on the rise. And its Herald, the renegade Rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, is called to account for allegedly treasonous ideology that could (and ultimately does) overturn the status quo.

Pilate on Trial

Familiarity with the scene—Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus—offers no help with deciphering its riddles. The bluntness of their exchange is deceptive, as each man harbors doubts about about the other’s legitimacy. Jesus is charged with heresy, a matter of no concern to Rome beyond its potential to destabilize the fragile balance of power the Empire has struck with the Temple establishment. Yet the high priests are reluctant to rule against Jesus, fearing a populist backlash that would demonstrate they’ve lost control of their people and render them useless to Rome. With acute cunning, they shift the burden to Pilate, accusing Jesus of professing to be King of the Jews, which qualifies Him as an insurgent worthy of death at Roman hands.

When Jesus stands before him, Pilate doesn't mince words. “Are you the King of the Jews?” he asks, to which Jesus responds, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about Me?” (v33-34) With that, the tables turn. Jesus puts Pilate on trial. Has the Roman summoned Him because he wonders if Jesus is indeed the King of the Jews? (This possibility isn’t lost on either of them, since Pilate’s boss is also a self-avowed divine monarch.) Or is this merely a pro forma hearing to get to the bottom of baseless gossip? Neither option pleases Pilate. Genuine curiosity about Jesus’s identity would belie his faith in Caesar; investigating religious rumors would make him a puppet of the Temple elite. So Pilate deftly distances himself from the situation, admitting, “I’m not a Jew. I shouldn’t be expected to understand this stuff.”

The deflection opens the door for Jesus to assert divine authority. “My kingdom is not from this world,” He says. With daring sarcasm that brings a smile to the alert reader’s face, Jesus validates His otherworldly claim: “If my kingdom were from this world, My followers would be fighting to keep Me from being handed over to the Jews.” (v36) Since this obviously isn’t happening, the argument makes sense to Pilate. Still, its elusive nature doesn’t settle the matter. “So are you a king?” he asks again, dropping the Jewish reference. Jesus replies, “You say I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” (v37; emphasis added)

Power to Seek the Truth

The Feast of Christ the King invites us to witness the truth of Christ’s Lordship—to embrace faith in a divine kingdom that supersedes human authority. Yet accepting this belief cannot happen by taking prelates and pastors’ word for it. We can only discover the truth by listening to Christ’s voice. And I’m persuaded this realization springs from the first question Jesus puts to Pilate: “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about Me?”

Our confidence that Christ reigns supreme begins with profoundly personal questions about Who Jesus really is—and how much real power we’re willing to cede to His Lordship. As it was in Pilate’s court, so it is in our lives. Faith in Christ’s kingdom demands humility born of understanding its mysteries can never be fully understood. It’s impossible to equate Christ’s sovereign rule with earthly powers, as the kingdom of God seeks no earthly power; it summons authority by granting us power to seek the truth of Who God and Jesus really are, who we really are, and the roles we play in a kingdom unlike any ever known. Pilate’s small-mindedness is exposed in his dismissal of Jesus’s challenge. He wants an admission of power that has nothing to do with the truth of Christ’s kingdom. Clearly, he’s not listening. And we benefit from his deafness, because it opens our minds to recognize the truth of Christ’s Lordship can never be told. To experience its majesty, it must be heard. Amid all the regal adjectives tossed around in this weekend’s liturgies, hymns, and sermons, I trust we’ll hear the voice of Jesus. Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about Me?

Seen through the prism of Pilate’s interrogation, the truth of Christ’s Lordship emerges as thing that cannot be told. It must be heard to be understood.