Advent is Not Christmas – and it’s a Good Thing Too! (3rd Advent, Year C)

“Advent creates people, new people.”
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas)

Zephaniah 3:14-20/Isaiah 12:2-6/Philippians 4:4-7/Luke 3:7-18

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Advent

The “waiting which hastens” is a key scriptural text for Advent we have discovered. Bonhoeffer helps us better understand this when he says, “Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespected hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them (God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas). Waiting (for the fruit of Advent to ripen) hastens the coming of the day of the Lord (because it matures us) to practice Christmas as we should.

And how is that? Bonhoeffer again: “Who among us will celebrate Christmas correctly? Whoever finally lays down all power, all honor, all reputation, all vanity, all arrogance, all individualism beside the manger; whoever remains lowly and lets God alone be high; whoever looks at the child in the manger and sees the glory of God precisely in his lowliness” (God Is In the Manger).

There you have a template of the kinds of things God does in us and to us in Advent that we may truly wait and hasten the coming of the day of the Lord. Listen to them again:

-lay down all power;

-all honor;

-all reputation;

-all vanity;

-all arrogance;

-all individualism;

-remain lowly and let God alone be high; and

-look at the child in the manger and see the glory of God in his lowliness.

In an “0utline for a Book” he did not live to write Bonhoeffer gives another version for us to reflect on:

“The church must participate in the worldly tasks of life in the community—not dominating but helping and serving. It must tell people in every calling . . . what a life with Christ is, what it means ‘to be there for others.’ In particular, our church will have to confront the vices of hubris, the worship of power, envy, and illusionism as the roots of all evil. It will have to speak of moderation, authenticity, trust, faithfulness, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, modesty, contentment” (Letters and Papers from Prison: DBW 8: 14360-14366).

These two lists from Bonhoeffer give a clear and comprehensive sense of his view of the kind of maturity God desires and we need to be maturing followers of Jesus. When he says “Advent creates people, new people,” this is what he has in mind, our Advent agenda.

The Horizon of Advent

We have had occasion to note what I have called God’s “Big Picture,” his final plan to have a world full of people to share life with in communication, communion, and community throughout eternity. Advent prepares and (according to Bonhoeffer) makes us that kind of people in the here and now and not simply in the then and there. Will Willimon describes this well:

“Our lives are eschatologically stretched between the sneak preview of the new world being born among us in the church, and the old world where the principalities and powers are reluctant to give way. In the meantime, which is the only time the church has ever known, we live as those who know something about the fate of the world that the world does not yet know. And that makes us different” (Conversion in the Wesleyan Tradition).

I like that imagery of being “stretched,” though not the reality so much. That’s an excellent picture – stretched between who God calls us to be and the world he is creating anew and the old world that has parodied itself in rebellious ingratitude and unceasing grasping and is passing away in decay and destruction. Pushed and pulled by this “in-between” setting, tempted and treated by its allures and blandishments, vulnerable to all manner of obfuscation and rationalizations, nearly overwhelmed by the darkness masquerading as light or its sheer ugliness as darkness, new birth as God’s people is a difficult passage.

John the Baptist in the gospel reading for this Sunday (Luke 3:7-18) is Advent personified. He addresses Israel - God’s people, the church – and hammers them with the darkness they are mired in and admonishes them to change in the strongest terms. This call to change entails the possibility of change. The people hear this possibility and wonder if John himself might be the messiah. He denies it and promises one will come after him who will enact God’s good news (signaled in our readings from Zephaniah and Isaiah). But till then, John’s brief is to announce and warn about the darkness threatening Israel. Like I said, he’s Advent personified.

Our Advent journey toward the new people God desires and intends us to be begins as we have seen in darkness with only glimmers of hope to sustain us. We pray and live in this mode in Advent. Brian Volck typifies this kind of prayer.

“I am, by disposition, a hopeful pessimist, searching for occasions of grace while not expecting to find any, like a lost hiker scouring the woods for campfires in the deepening twilight. You’d think I’d have learned by now to be grateful for what I have and stop looking. Instead, I grumble through unhelpful conversations others wisely quit, reluctantly ante up for the next hand though I can’t trust the dealer, and tend a guttering candle of loyalty for institutions that have long since proven themselves corrupt. As a colleague once described his second marriage, ‘I’m the embodied triumph of hope over experience.’

“As a straight white male, however, I realize this places me at the bullseye of intersectionality, that analytic lens used to expose interlocking systems of power keeping the boots of the privileged (that would be me) on the necks of the marginalized. I’m called coward, enabler, guilty bystander. No doubt that’s truer than I care to admit, and neither my explicit critiques of institutionalized inequality nor my meager attempts at redress have bent the arc of history a micron towards its promised rendezvous with justice. I trust I will be judged accordingly. Perhaps I’m doomed to remain the dirty rotten system’s dupe, shill, and knowing collaborator until I die. Perhaps I’m feeling the mounting weight of my years. 

“On top of this baseline bourgeois regret, there’s a deeper melancholy that slithers from its cage to bite me as autumn goes by. This December finds me already in what promises to be a long winter of discontent, with no sun of York on stage to make it glorious summer. (If you’re fumbling for the reference, it’s the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III, and you’ll remember how that turned out.) The irritant nodes of my chronic unease are largely the same, but their sins loom larger, their festering wounds harder to ignore . . . 

“Yet here I stand, less sure than usual that I can do no other . . . I know once-committed Catholics who’ve . . . shook the misogynist and clericalist dust from their sandals . . . but it’s not my time. Not yet. Nor is it clear where I would go and what I might do with other institutions in my life that are equally broken. 

“I remain, for instance, a US citizen. Having been raised American, and thoroughly catechized by teachers, books, and electronic entertainment, it took me years to unlearn dogmas like national exceptionalism and myths like the rugged individual bootstrapping himself toward the American Dream . . .

Over the past three decades, I’ve worked off and on with Native American children in various capacities. I’ve served as an indigenous child health advocate on committees, site visits, international meetings, and in Capitol Hill offices and committee rooms. Along the way, I have received infinitely more from my Native friends, families, and patients than I could ever give. 

But those gifts come at a cost. The more I saw, learned, and read, the further my faith in America crumbled away. I thought I knew the long, ugly history of US-indigenous relations. I imagined reconciliation and restitution would require living up to America’s core ideals of liberty, justice, and equality. I learned instead that that ugliness reflected other, carefully effaced core national values as yet unacknowledged. Indeed, there are powerful reasons for people like me to not acknowledge them. As for the much harder work of truth and conciliation (“reconciliation” implies our peoples were at one time a concilium, a gathering of friends), I increasingly doubt Americans share the necessary moral resources. Yet here I am, still signing petitions and voting, not out of faith in the system, but as attempts at harm reduction and in solidarity with those that system leaves out.    

I could say much more on that, but this is not the time. We have, after all, entered the season of Advent: . . .  the Church’s recurring winter of discontent, marked by . . . a “longing for absent things” (Augustine) . . . To desire something requires its absence – whether actual or perceived – and our first, most important desire is for God. As worthy desires follow from that perceived absence, the road to God is paved with discontent, failure, and dashed expectations. Augustine sums it up in Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Nothing short of God will satisfy.  

I don’t know how things will go for my broken Church and divided country. I doubt I’ll live long enough to get even a provisional answer. This, however, I can do: mourn for the grievously wounded, search for campfires in the appalling darkness, and learn, perhaps, in this season of Advent to light candles of my own.  

https://imagejournal.org/2018/12/10/searching-for-campfires/?fbclid=IwAR0sGEnXFCXHrVrCac0Cmoi5rUPVs_z86UQPnLmtVMbMPq0IneDU4cW7pSM