Advent Leftovers

One of my Baby's First Christmas ornaments. Awwww...so cute!

Mmmm...a warmed over post! Doesn't that sound tasty? In all honesty, I had some very specific things that I wanted to pontificate on from the Christmas season, and since it passed in such a whirl, and then I had to share my New Year's Guiding Directions, well, I'm just getting to it now. But! They are still important and were really meaningful to me. Also, over the Advent season, I was reading a collection of devotionals entitled Watch for the Light, from all different writers throughout all seasons of church history. I don't know that I will actually reference anything specific, but pretty much all of these revelations came while reading that book, so I feel like it deserves some kind of co-authorship credit.

The thing that I am trying not to launch into right now is my soapbox speech about how the church has lost its liturgical calendar and, therefore I feel, loses nuances in its seasons of celebration. Really, you have no idea the restraint I am exercising in not saying more than that. My fingers are cramping with my exertion at holding them back from saying all that is in my head. But I will say this: Advent and Christmas are not the same thing. Advent is the season of preparation, Christmas is the celebration of Christ's birth, and in the church calendar it doesn't start until Christmas Day! They are separate. And one of the nuances of their separation is that the season of Advent is a penitential season. I never knew this. That's why one of the central figures of Advent is John the Baptist, whose message is repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near. I would now like to go on a tangent to say how much I love John the Baptist. I feel like in the heavenly family, you had the responsible, mature kids who grew up to be lawyers and doctors and made their families proud, and then there was John. John the embarrassment, who lived in the desert, wore what was always depicted in my bible story books as an ill fitting camel's hair onesie, and ate bugs. And yet this wild, crazy dude was the one God sent, the one maybe nobody felt like they could take seriously with a message nobody wanted to hear, but there he was. And he keeps coming back, every year. I want to listen to him.

The second thing that I was reflecting on is the revolutionary nature of Advent. If you look at the Magnificat, Mary's Song, beyond the first three or four oft quoted verses, you see a song of revolution, a song of inversions, in which the proud are scattered, the mighty brought down from their thrones and the humble are exalted, in which the poor are filled with good things and the rich sent empty away. I've never heard anyone preach on those verses of the Magnificat. I wonder if this might be because in contemporary mainline churches, we might identify more with the mighty, the proud, and the rich, and we don't feel that we can quite handle what this song seems to be saying about us and what the coming of Messiah means for people in our class. But maybe that just takes us right back up to point number one?

Last point: I was struck this year by the radical nature of the Incarnation. Let me back up. I feel like when we imagine Jesus coming to earth as a human, we put him in full Jesusness right into a baby's body, like a hand slipping into a glove in which the hand remains unaltered, only the outer form changes. He would have lived out his life knowing all along about the cross, following his father's will perfectly, utterly self-aware of his Jesusness every instant he was here, more wearing a costume than becoming one of us. (First of all, if you believe this, you are a Platonist! Confess!) But I believe that Jesus became fully human, which would mean, initially, fully baby. Knowing only what babies know, both about himself and the world around him. Jesus had to learn object permanence, that when his mother or his favorite toy was out of sight, that didn't mean it was gone forever. He had to learn to walk and talk. He had to learn how to discern and follow the will of God, which I guess he did perfectly, but not equipped with any extraordinary tools beyond what normal humans have. That's what I think, anyway, and in my experience, it changes Christmas, makes it even crazier to think of God coming to earth, not to float through with the ease of perfect understanding and self-conception, but with real human struggles and questions. This is not a systematic theology, so I can't cover all the implications of this assertion (and they are multifarious and variegated, as I'm sure you can guess). But my goal is more wonder than explication, so I hope I might have achieved that, at least in some small measure.

Okay, that's it. This is a long post. Merry Christmas! (Oh wait, Christmas is over. Like, way over. Can you tell I'm having a hard time letting go?)

S.