Month: December 2011

“The Force has invaded the Dark Side, and the Dark Side has lost . . . ” (John 1:5, sorta) 

Come, Thou long expected Jesus
Born to set Thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us,
Let us find our rest in Thee.

Advent is the breaking-in of the promises of God into the world. But it isn’t simply God as an attachment. Hope isn’t an option tacked on as an afterthought available for whoever feels like applying it to their lives. Advent is the ushering in of a new creation – a transformative reality that allows us not simply to have hope but to live in hope. It is the establishment of an utterly new way of being in the world that grants us the opportunity to become the very people we were created to be.

It is in accepting that vocation that we find our rest in God.

There are so many ways to think about resting in God. We take Sabbaths from work, we let go of the need to fix the world by ourselves, we stop placing systems of busyness, ritual, and performance between us and our worship of God – but I’m slowly coming to believe that all of those ways find their roots in our accepting who God made us to be. It is hard to live a façade, to pretend to be something we are not. Our frantic schedules, our pursuit of success, our masquerades of worship are all us trying to live up to expectations of our own creation. And it’s exhausting. But in this world transformed by hope, learning to be comfortable in our own skin and pursuing the passions God has placed on our hearts feeds our souls because we are doing the very things God intends for us to be doing. Replenishment is rest – it is the revitalization of who we are.

Resting in God doesn’t mean doing nothing. To do nothing means I have forgotten who I am, I have stopped living into the hope of the new creation. To do nothing is to say no to all expectations regarding who I am – even the very ones that will give me life to the full. Finding our rest in God means being exactly who we are at our core. It isn’t a rejection of all compulsions, merely those that divert us from our path of fulfillment. We stop trying to be something we are not, but we are still at work spreading the transformative way of hope by living into our callings. Rest is never static; it is rather the active pursuit of our God-given place in the world.

So during this season of Advent as we are encouraged to pause from the busyness of life in order to anticipate and hope, I wish the message we would hear would not be simply “do less” (although that is often needed) but a more revitalizing and hopeful “do what is fitting.” Stop pretending. Stop exhausting ourselves with the false expectations of life. But instead fit – perfectly and restfully – into our own lives as we accept the transformative advent of the new creation.

Come thou long expected Jesus, Born to set thy people free; From our fears and sins release us…

Living into the expectation of the incarnation is not a passive endeavor. Anticipating Advent is not about quietistic waiting but living into promised hope and freedom. It is letting the breaking in of Christ into our world release us from systems of fear that entrap us and patterns of sin that deny the very hope of the incarnation. Traditionally in the Western church Advent was a time of prayer, fasting, and acts of service (it still is in the Eastern Church). One did not wait simply to wait; one prepared oneself to meet the coming Christ by disciplining oneself in the very liberating ways of Christ. The advent of Christ in the past and the promised reconciling advent of Christ in the future are remembered and anticipated by living into the advent of Christ in the present through these acts of discipleship. Christ suffered so that we could have this freedom and hope, so we therefore accept this freedom from fear and sin by disciplining ourselves into becoming ever more Christ-like. It is not a tedious waiting around, but an embodied anticipation that consumes every moment of our lives.

So it is curious that during this time of year that instead of anticipating Christ by accepting our freedom from fear and sin by imitating Christ and doing likewise for others, we instead use our freedom to create systems of fear for others. Advent is less about preparation and discipline these days as it is forcing others to live in fear of Christians. For some their freedom in Christ has become justification for insisting that all people orient their lives around catering to them. A culture of fear is created where their freedom is upheld at all costs, even at the expense of the freedom of others. Freedom becomes for some less about Christ’s redeeming and reconciling work and more about ensuring their freedom by insisting that everyone else become exactly like them. Christ’s offer is therefore repeatedly cheapened each time they insist that their freedom isn’t real unless, for instance, atheists, Jews, Muslims, and commercial centers fearfully sacrifice their freedoms and acknowledge a certain interpretation of Jesus as the reason for the season.

Instead of accepting the freedom Christ offered through his suffering by accepting a life that embraces even suffering (or simply the mild inconvenience of exposure to the other) in order to do the same for others, Christians are insisting that others suffer for them. But insisting that others proclaim what should be the liberating and reconciling name of Christ by threatening to boycott their businesses or bringing lawsuits against them isn’t to live into the expectation of the incarnation. Can one truly have witnessed to hope and embraced release from fear and sin if one’s visible response to such is to in turn force others into a place of fear devoid of hope? As in the parable Jesus tells of the unforgiving servant, it does not represent the kingdom of God to accept ones freedom and forgiveness by then turning around and oppressing others.

The breaking in of Christ into the world changed everything. We actively await the advent of Christ by accepting the gift of Christ’s first advent. But what Christ offered was the gift of a new identity, of new creation. Living into that identity takes work; it takes discipline. New creations do not repeat the fearful patterns of this world by pushing them off onto others while hoarding the supposed blessings of freedom for themselves. To anticipate the gift of advent requires radical change of those that wait. As Jürgen Moltmann wrote of this promise of advent past, present, and future,

Every gift involves change. When unjust men and women are justified, the consequence is that they are sent out to work for more social justice. When peaceless men and women are reconciled, the consequence is that they are sent out to make peace in the conflicts of this society. There can be no other response for Christians to their experience of God.

If we expect God we have to respond to God as God calls us to respond. Releasing us from our fears and sins is never a call for us to bind others with the same. Waiting for the breaking in of Christ in this world is not a sanctioning of actions that oppose the very way of Christ. Maybe it would therefore be helpful to return to Advent as a disciplined period of prayer, fasting, and good works. Perhaps then we could anticipate the incarnation by actually incarnating Christ in the world.

Come thou long expected Jesus, Born to set Thy people free.

Advent heralds the arrival of a new way of being in the world. The Divine has broken into our world, shattering the boundaries of the limits we assumed defined our existence. Hope was incarnate in the most unexpected of guises – giving testimony in its very form to the freedom it delivered. Freedom from the fear that this is all there is – that the patterns of this world hold the only answers available to the questions of our souls. Freedom from the oppressive lie that in a world of scarcity all we can do is secure whatever we can for ourselves by whatever means necessary. Freedom to have hope that there is a light shining in the darkness.

This Advent of hope ushers in a life-affirming freedom that is ours to live into. And yet we continue to act as if we are afraid to claim that freedom – or more precisely to allow others to claim access to this limitless way of life. Even the very proclamation and remembrance of the incarnation of hope gets subjected to our fearful limits, forcefully sheltered from being transformed by the very boundary-breaking hope that it is. We await the precious birth and then promptly place Jesus in prisons of our own making – ostensibly to serve him, but in truth to ensure that we can control his message and dictate who is allowed access to it. Therefore it becomes hard to think of Advent without also recalling to mind the words of Frances Croake Frank’s poem “Did the Woman Say?” –

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
“This is my body, this is my blood”?

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hilltop,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
“This is my body, this is my blood”?

Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
Brocaded robes belying barrenness
Ordain that she not say it for him now.

It is far easier to turn the woman into a spiritual metaphor of ideal submission than to let her be free to physically participate in the life of Christ (then and now). The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness refuses to open its eyes and let it chase the shadows away. But Jesus came to set his people free.

Paul Ricoeur defines freedom as “the capacity to live according to the paradoxical law of superabundance,” or in other words, to embrace the surplus of meaning in the already and not yet of the eschatological event of the new creation. Hope broke into the world and redefined everything. We are no longer bound by the limits of scarcity which persuade us that to share our food or power with another is to deprive ourselves in some way. Hope opens up the possibility of living into the Kingdom of God, of letting go of limits in order to embrace abundant life. It is the living hopefully into the much more promise of Romans 5:15 – “For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.”

Advent is about abounding grace at work setting people free to live into this limitless hope. It is about agreeing with Mary that already in the past, present, and future I AM that I AM has “brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” It is about recognizing the upside-down sense of a King being born in a stable. It is about letting go of the fearful power-plays we have imposed upon the breaking of bread. It is about realizing that it is only once we share what we have (be that our resources or even the space where our voice gets heard) that we find there is a surplus leftover even after we have all had our fill.

Advent is about expectantly anticipating the freedom Christ promises by living into that very freedom now. It is about shattering the constraints we have shored up around ourselves in order to let the light in.