Wednesday in the First Week of Advent

It is hard to believe that it is again, the first week in Advent. Again. Just like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, here we are beginning our story, again. Our same age-old story, in a new year, presumably in a new way, and yet, it is not a new story, not even close. For some of us, Advent could easily feel like a rut, like a broken record, like iTunes stuck on repeat until we have heard that same old song…enough already. It’s the sort of perpetual retelling that we lament when we look at whatever the unchanging disappointments are in each of our lives. The diet we just can’t seem to follow. The slack we cannot seem to cut the folks who annoy us. The temper we cannot seem to hold when our blood pressure is in the red zone. For some of us, Advent is just: same sorry story, different day, I think the cleaned up version of the bumper sticker would say. Is that really Advent? The same old unfulfilled promise of peace on earth in a new year?

 I don’t think so. I think rather, that maybe we need to re-vision or re-frame what we expect of Advent. To that end, our Advent theme this year is: Awaiting the New Creation. It is a theme that suggests that we expect, not something entirely different or new, but maybe something we already know something about, something that feels like it has already happened, like it is already true, and at the same time, something that is totally yet to come, completely out of our experience, something that we, as yet, know nothing of. So this year we will try to balance our experience of that which is already here and at the same time, our hope for that which has not quite arrived. We will wait with Creation for the coming of what we know will be a New Creation, a New Creation that has been promised by our God who dared to join us in the flesh.

And if there is one thing that can be said definitively of God, it is that God keeps God's promises.
And God promised in last Sunday's Gospel from Luke: "Jesus told them a parable: Look at the fig tree and all of the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the Kingdom of God is near." I remember those leaves. Don't you? Those leaves of new creation that sprout every year; every year a new chance to bear fresh, plump, nourishing fruit.

For that is how Creation, and the New Creation work. It’s a rhythm, not a replacement. It's an ongoing cycle, not a linear sequence. And so as our preacher Amanda said on Sunday morning, God is not finished. God is never finished with us. As long as there is a growing season ahead, there is hope. As long as we begin the cycle that takes us to Easter, then the New Creation is on its way.
 All of this is to say that our cycle of life that awaits a New Creation cannot measured in ordinary time. And so rather than a prelude of four temporal weeks leading up to the birth of our Savior, maybe Advent is more like a period of refreshment along a continuum of hope. Advent as a reminder that the Kingdom (if I might use that secular word for the divine nirvana) is not yet here, but that it is near; near enough that we would do well to lift our noses from the grindstones of our lives and refresh ourselves and our expectations and our collective dream of a world without poverty and violence and fear.

And so I think we can prepare for the New Creation by remembering how to hope for it. This is the designated time for hope!

Onward!