Will the world end if the Euro zone collapses? Will it end with rising sea levels and global droughts? Has your world already ended with prolonged unemployment or a foreclosed mortgage? Where do you find hope in a world that seems to be coming apart at the seams?
These are perfect questions for tomorrow, the first Sunday of Advent.
Advent marks the beginning of a new Christian liturgical year. On the first Sunday of this season (“New Year’s Day”) most lectionaries recommend, oddly enough, apocalyptic biblical texts for worship. So the New Year begins not at the beginning but at the End, with the second coming of Christ (not the first) and the end of the world as we know it (cue music from R.E.M.).
So stop shopping (for now), stop stressing over Christmas decorations and ponder the theme for tomorrow that sets the tone for the entire liturgical year to come: hope. What do you hope for? How does your hope shape the way you live? Does it make a difference? Where do you find what you need to replenish your hope?
Let’s be more specific: Should anyone place any hope in the U.S. political system these days? In our financial markets? Do you have any hope of being able to retire? Of having social security checks? Feeding your family? How about the Occupy Wall Street movement? Is that hopeful to you?
Questions like that make it seem far less peculiar to begin a new year with the End. I believe there’s a profound connection to tease out between how Christians navigate the liturgical year and how we think about the world around us. Advent brings this vividly to light.
Tomorrow, the Church will launch again into the great cycle of observances that take us from incarnation to epiphany and on into passion, death, resurrection, and the gift of the Spirit. That cycle takes roughly six months. And tomorrow sets the tone for the whole thing: What, finally, do we hope for from all this?
Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, once described that great cycle like this: “The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us.”
Reading aloud that one sentence in every Christian congregation each Sunday morning for a year (to ensure that every member hears it) would transform the Church more fully into the world-changing community it’s called to be. Why? Because I think most people consider themselves, at best, “tolerable,” maybe loveable (if God is the one loving), but very rarely desirable.
Williams appears to have realized this too and insisted that God’s desire for us means, quite simply and profoundly, that the Church’s job is to ensure that people see themselves as desirable and “occasions for joy.”
If the Church really did that, it would change the world. How could we ever let “desirable occasions for joy” go hungry and homeless in our streets, or turn them away at national borders, or deny them health care? How the Church worships can and should shape how the Church lives in the world.
But what about all that apocalyptic, world-ending stuff that bubbles up in Advent? Actually, all sorts of “worlds” come to an end quite regularly – personal worlds and relationships, the worlds of social institutions (banks!?), economic empires, a computer’s operating software. “Worlds” as we know them are never permanent. It’s really not so surprising that they end.
What is surprising is how people manage to live with hope in those world-ending moments. For me, I can’t do that alone. I need a community and I need regular reminders about where true hope can be found. That’s what Advent is all about.
I find it helpful to remember that the word “apocalypse” (which we usually translate as “revelation”) has its origins in a rather ordinary Greek word that referred to a cover, like the lid on a jar. Put a prefix on the front and a verb ending on the back and you get apocalypto, which ancient Greeks probably used every time they opened something. It just means “to take the lid off.”
I believe revelations happen all the time. I believe the Apocalypse unfolds constantly. I believe the advent of Christ is ongoing, not isolated to a moment 2,000 years ago, nor to a far-distant future we cannot see. Everything about life, our relationships, our struggles, our dreams, and fears can “take the lid off” God in our midst. That’s when hope happens, and it changes us so that we can change the world.
May all of us find ourselves desirable this Advent season and treat one another as occasions for joy.
Desirable occasions for joy. Thank you for that. ECUSA makes this Scottish Episcopalian more proud to be Episcopalian.
Thanks so much, Clare! And of course, the relationship between TEC and the Scottish EC goes WAY back! 🙂
Thank you Jay for the reminder about hope and where it lies, and where it does not. I have happened to have personal dark times going on at the same time that the world has shown its current signs of coming apart at the seams. While this has not been an obvious sign to break out celebratory cheers, I have noticed a few things: In my very limited experience, when trouble comes ’round, and one is left with the most basic things like — Do I have food on my table? Do I have gas in my car (and if not, can I walk)? Do I have family and friends on my side? Are my loved ones basically healthy, or if, as in the case of a really dear friend with cancer right now – is she getting good care and is she comfortable? —- if we strip life down to the very basics –which are so far away from the holiday ads and Christmas media blitz — when staring at the very basics of life – it does pretty much “take the lid off” and give a huge chance for Christ and the Incarnation to come in and put us on the road to resurrection. I visited a predominantly African American church recently and I loved that they regularly say to one another on Sunday morning,” I’m still here!” I think for so many of us, we take that simple premise for granted. We may have not appreciated that we are indeed still here, breathing, and if we would just look – we each have tons of God’s glory to behold. It is so easy to get distracted with all of the sensory overload that we are each exposed to each day simply by waking up in this current world.
I am glad to begin this Advent with the Apocalyptic message that the end is near and that the Incarnation is once again on its way. When I think of these Divine events as happening NOW and not in some far distant time, I have so much to find hope in. I can take hope and joy in the fact that I “am still here,” am desired by God (as are all of us) and I can be sure that the ineffable presence of God is here and that grace and mercy and are both here — and area also abundantly on the way.