We have entered the season of Advent—the four Sundays leading up to Christmas. (This is my favorite liturgical season.) The season begins in darkness, which we interrupt with a single point of light—a tiny candle flickering on our Advent wreath. Over the next few weeks, the symbolic light on our altar builds as we prepare to welcome the Light of the World, about which the Gospel of John says: “The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it”—John 1:5.
To truly appreciate Christmas, however, we need a season to prepare our hearts and minds—and the starting point of that season is darkness. Advent gives us space to acknowledge the hardscrabble reality of our daily lives, to admit that this world can be a dark place at times. We need the freedom to acknowledge that reality as opposed to glossing it over if we are to truly appreciate the gift of Immanuel—God’s Light coming into our darkness to dwell with us. Church attendance tends to swell on Christmas Eve. By then the Light has come, the baby is born and laid in a manger. For that one night: “All is calm, all is bright.” But journeying through Advent helps us better appreciate how badly we need this Light, and the kind of world into which that baby was born.
At the time Jesus was born in Bethlehem (or Nazareth depending on which version of the story you read), the Roman Empire brutally oppressed the Jewish people. Both Matthew and Luke portray the earthly parents of Jesus as refugees. Luke’s birth narrative tells us that Mary and Joseph are forced to move late in Mary’s pregnancy in response a decree of a distant Emperor that: “all the world should be counted.” Matthew’s version of the story puts the focus on the local puppet ruler of Judea, King Herod, whose paranoid fears run wild when he hears about a “newborn king” from some wandering Magi who “followed a star” so they could come and honor him. When the wisemen defy Herod’s order to return to him and report their findings he flies into a rage and vows to eliminate any possible threat to his rule. He orders the slaughter of all boys under two years old. (Yes, that’s infanticide right there in the Christmas Story!) Matthew (writing to a primarily Jewish audience) envisions the Holy Family undergoing a kind of reverse-Exodus as they flee from the Promised Land to Egypt to escape King Herod’s treachery. Laster, after the “evil king” dies, they return to Palestine.
In summary, the world into which Jesus is born is not a particularly safe world for a baby to be born. It’s a very dark and violent place. Does it sound like any other worlds you know?
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| Sam Gamgee at Osgiliath. Credit: Tolkiengateway |
Toward the end of the second movie, “The Two Towers,” Frodo and Sam are exhausted from their journey to date. Frodo is losing hope that he will ever complete his task. The burden of bearing the One Ring has nearly consumed him: "I can't do this, Sam," he says hopelessly to his companion. At that point, Sam stands up and looks out at the ruined city and the Nazgûl flying towards Mordor in the distance. Sam agrees: Rightfully, they shouldn’t even be here… but they are here and they must deal what is as opposed to what they wish was. And then he offers up these inspiring words to his fatigued friend:
“It's like the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it'll shine out the clearer. I know now folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something… That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for!”
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| Advent wreath with four candles lit on the weeks leading up to Christmas. |
The theme of week one of Advent is hope, which hinges on us being able to envision the dawning of this new day—Jeremiah 29:11. Paraphrasing the song lyric, “we believe in the sun, even when it’s not shining,” even when it’s the middle of the night and the sun won’t rise for many hours. Keep in mind the context of the scripture above. The Prophet says the “future with hope” will come only after Israel’s best and brightest spend decades in exile in Babylonia. We’re not speaking of a passive hope where the outcome is in doubt. Rather, it’s active hope, where, as Gandhi would say it, we are to “be the change we want to see in the world.” In other words, we don’t sit back and passively wait for God to bring about the future we dream of, we actively participate in doing our part to make it a reality.
Once we get grounded in God’s desired future—as opposed to our own—then the light of the new day begins to dawn, and we can begin to grapple with rethinking peace, joy, and love in the light of the new day we anticipate. These are the themes of the next three weeks of Advent. We realize that peace is not merely the absence of war and violence, but the reality that God present with us no matter where we go or what we do. We understand that joy is not equated with happiness and or dependent on agreeable circumstances in our lives. Like Paul we can learn the secret of being content (joyful) in all circumstances—Philippians 4:11–12. Then, perhaps hardest of all to embrace is the greatest of all the gifts—love. We learn ever so slowly to practice the agape love of God. We live in a world that tends to love us if we are deemed worthy. We’ve all been well schooled in conditional love, but, as Jedi Master Yoda might council us, “we must unlearn what we have learned.”
At Good Shepherd UMC, we’re using a song during the Advent season called Make Room. A line from the chorus asks us: Is there room in your heart for God to write [God’s] Story? It goes on to “warn” us that:
You can come as you are
But it may set you apart
When you make room in your heart
And trade your dreams for [God’s] glory.
As Christ followers, we follow in the footsteps of the spiritual heroes described in Hebrews 11 who traded their dreams for God’s glory and let God write God’s story on their hearts. Their great acts were inspired by confident hope in a good future—even when they had no visible evidence of that future—Hebrews 11:1. Just like the heroes in Sam’s “great stories,” the folk in Biblical stories had many chances to turn back, only they didn’t. Why? Because despite the darkness, injustice, and chaos they saw running rampant in their world, they were convinced that “there’s good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for!”
Those heroes of our faith took their stand against the forces of darkness of their day as we do in ours. The author of Hebrews reminds us that many of them died never seeing the fullness of the future they worked toward—Hebrews 11:13. The same fate may await us; nevertheless, we are called to persevere as they did. Like them, we acknowledge and confront the darkness, injustice, and chaos of our time but we also believe that the baby born in that manger is none other than the Messiah—the one who comes to save us. As followers of Christ, we base our faith on the belief that the birth of Jesus was the vanguard of a new day for humanity. We live out our lives in the time between the sunset of the old day and the sunrise of the new—but. like Sam, we live with confidence that “in the end it’s only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass.” Eventually, the sunrise will come, and “when the sun shines, it'll shine out the clearer.” That’s the basis of our hope for the future—despite the present darkness, injustice, and chaos in our world—and as Paul reminds us in Romans 5:5, that in the long-run, “hope does not disappoint.”
As we journey toward the Light during this Advent season, may we “make room” for God to write God’s story in our heart, and allow God to weave the threads of our individual tales into the tapestry of One Story can rewrite all the other stories—God’s Story. May our intentional focus on hope, peace, joy, and love, prepare our hearts to receive the gift of Immanuel—God with us—anew this year. May the Familiar Stories of the season connect to your story in a new and transformative ways this Christmas.
