When I was younger, an advent calendar was all about the countdown to Christmas. This was an especially exciting sort of countdown on the occasions where your advent calendar promised extra chocolate for when you reached the final door on 24 December.
But increasingly I experience an internal countdown of excitement to the beginning of advent. Christmas has expectations and requirements and to do lists. Advent has only paradox (paradox of waiting and hastening, suffering and joy, judgment and deliverance, woe and hope); it will welcome you in whatever state of being you find yourself.
This year I am reading Advent, a collection of sermons by Fleming Rutledge, of whom it was once said, “She should be called St. Fleming of Advent!”. (I consider this frankly aspirational, and I am greatly enjoying sharing in Rutledge’s own reverence for the season.)
In the Episcopal tradition of which Rutledge is a part, it is tradition not to sing Christmas hymns and carols until Christmas Eve. Advent doesn’t build towards the birth of Christ but the expectation of Christ’s return. The subheading of Rutledge’s book is ‘the once and future coming of Jesus Christ’.
In this way, advent is apocalyptic – an unveiling. More than just celebrating God’s incarnation, God-with-us, advent is about the in-breaking of the sublime. The central revelation is the action of God. God has revealed Jesus as the One who has come to reclaim and redeem the territory now occupied by the Enemy. Advent marks the time between Ages: the coming of Christ inaugurates a wholesale change of regime.
Talking about the Enemy is a good way to make people uncomfortable, but Christian thinking takes a clear position on the existence of radical evil as an active and personified agency in the world.
The singer Sinead O’Connor, who died earlier this year, once said, “Live with the devil and you find there’s a God”. She is absolutely right. Those who collude with and fall victim to radical evil will more readily attest to the power and authority of the name of Jesus Christ.
For the most part, we find denying the spiritual dimension and reality of life to be more manageable and containable than acknowledging it. We are too proud to feel awe and too fearful to feel terror.
We are too proud to feel awe and too fearful to feel terror.
But at a time when the headline on BBC News reads “Half of Gaza’s population is starving”, terror is honest. The people of Gaza wait for doom or deliverance.
Now is the time, in the words of Rutledge, to take “an unflinching inventory of darkness”. To remember the anguish written into scripture in Matthew 2, the screams of mothers mourning their children as Herod gives genocidal orders.
Advent. Terror and awe. Waiting and hastening. Darkness and light. The once and future coming of Jesus Christ, who delivers us from evil.
thejoyofrachel 