Advent: going ’round again?

Advent is the season of expectation and anticipation. It is about ‘the coming of the Lord’? Actually, it is about trying to understand what we mean by ‘the coming of the Lord’. In short, it is far more than the story of Christmas, the birth of Christ.

Advent invites us to think on a much larger scale still. It is a time of reflection, inviting us to take our bearings: what is going on, in the whole round of each year and every year and all of human history. How is God involved in all of this?

Last week I heard a senior leader say to a gathering that we would now be entering Advent, and then Christmas, Epiphany, and so on into another church year—and we would ‘go around the whole thing again’. That manner of expression caused me to reflect on the idea of going ’round again.

There is a very important sense in which we do go around again and again. The Church Year has this lovely cycle of seasons, which invite reflection upon the fundamentals of our faith. We can find our life and its meaning within these cycles. I think at different times in life or during different experiences we may find one season especially meaningful and helpful, and then at another time we may find a different season has that special significance or even challenge for us.

Furthermore, there is good biblical warrant for the sense that we are ‘going ’round again’. Athol Gill, one of my New Testament teachers and an expert on Mark’s Gospel, used to say that the original ‘short’ ending of Mark—where the disciples are sent back to Galilee, to meet the risen Jesus there—signifies that they are to go back to where it all started, and perhaps this time they will learn to hear, to understand and to follow him, as they had failed to do first time around. It is grace that invites us to go ’round again’. And again …

But does this mean that our life is a continuous repetition, cycles upon cycles, more or less repeating itself? Is there no progress or resolution?

How does this relate to the announcement of the Gospel, that the reign of God is at hand?

I think the first thing we need to say in response is simply to acknowledge the failure of the modern ideal of historical progress. At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a genuine belief that the world would see the coming in human history of the promised new creation, a world order of justice and peace, food and shelter for all. This was the belief of many utopian groups, not least various Christian groups.

The First World War cut all that down. Then again the Great Depression and another World War.

What then can we expect—from and in history? And from God?

Next it is important to say that we have indeed made much progress. For one thing, life with antibiotics is so much more to be preferred than a world without them!

In other matters, the world is in serious peril, and as I write a major international conference is wrestling with the genuine possibility that human actions may not only make the earth unliveable for humans, but possibly for all life as we know it.

Advent is a season of reflection in hope: facing the truth of our life in history and yet also reaching out in hope and anticipation. Advent ‘lights a candle against the night’.

What this means is that history as we see it is not the ultimate, defining story or reality. That is not to say that history is not immensely important, as if the life of faith or spirituality is a kind of escape from history, life in the world (as if that were possible).

No, Advent values our life in the world and asserts that there is more meaning to it all than appears immediately to us.

But we do not find that meaning by looking away from time and space, history and the world. That is why we need to keep looking, keep telling the stories, living the seasons of the Church Year.

It is within history that this meaning emerges, in a sense re-making or recasting what that history seems to be about.

Christ is the presence of the divine, within humanity. He is not some other kind of super-person. He is a person, limited in time and space, gender, race and personality like all of us.

It is within the particularity of personhood that this divine possibility appears. And our faith says to us that this is so even in death: he dies, and yet there is ‘more’. Life reaches a new dimension, not by escaping death but through death.

Advent is a hint of this ‘more’.

It calls us to re-member: to put back together at least some of what has been pulled apart and broken down in the ways of our lives, some of it just busyness, some of it good things,  and some of it indulgent forgetfulness.

Advent is also about re-minding, bringing to mind again those better thoughts, values and hopes to which we aspire, not just as individuals, but which we share with each other, in human community.

Advent is a time of re-orienting, a call to the future and to the past, but most of all a call to the present, to the Presence within the present, a reality that allows us to live in hope, even as we go ’round again.