Advent Preparation

Advent is a season of spiritual and emotional preparation and promise. It is not a season of fulfillment.

Pastoral types have been challenged by the distinction, probably as long as there has been a complete liturgical calendar. People in the church want to ruch headlong into the fulfillment of Jesus' birth at Christmas. Even the general public, likely motivated by commerce and profit margins, wants to rush to Christmas. If we are to receive Christ Jesus, however, we must prepare for his arrival.

Preparing for Jesus' arrival is not so easy, however.

In Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary, we derive the worship and study themes for most weeks of the liturgical calendar from the Gospel According to Luke. In faithful preparation, we must therefore consider the portrait of Christ Jesus that is painted by that Gospel's author. Two things are certain. Firstly, Luke's portrait of Christ is distinct from the one that is painted by the other Gospels. Secondly, that portrai determines what Jesus says and does, in comparison to the other Gospels. In all honesty, we lose the impact of each story if we attempt to impose the overall, conflated picture of Jesus Christ on any of the Gospels. The same is true of Luke's story.

In Luke's Advent, we are preparing for the coming of one who is savior to all people, not just for the Judaic world, as in Matthew. The salvation of Luke's Christ comes in the form of a superhuman, almost pagan, description. Jesus is born miraculously, like the demi-gods of Hellenistic lore. He can accomplish what other humans only dream of doing. His presence is curiously cosmic, where the divine is at work against the evils of the world.

Among those evils of the world against which the divine fights in Luke's Christ Jesus are inequality, divisiveness, separation, prejudice and disparity. The promise is of one who comes to bring justice, where valleys are lifted up and hills brought low. He exercises radical equality, where Mary receives the annunciation, where the blind and the lame and the lepers represent all who have been excluded. Jesus comes as their savior, every bit as much as he comes as the savior of those who meet in the synagogues of Galilee and Asia Minor. He is the savior especially of the downtrodden, the rejected, the excluded, the red-tented masses of faith.

In the context of Luke's portrait of Jesus, we can imagine one "preparing the way of the Lord, making his paths straight," or singing, "My soul magnifies the Lord, for God has considered the lowly estate of God's own handmaid." The cries come from the economically, politically, culturally deprived, from those who had been victimized by the systems under which they were forced to live. Those same cries had previously fallen on the deaf ears of the powerful, positioned, privileged few, who determined, from their gilded towers, what was good for everyone.

If the Church is to faithfully prepare itself for the coming of this Christ, then it had better become mindful of its own privilege, power, position vis-a-vis the poor and destitute who have been victimized by the ways that we have chosen to live together. It had better take seriously the possibility that it, like the Temple and synagogue, like the Mosque and meeting places of religions the world over, can and do become instruments of discrimination, rejection, exclusion, violence and hatred.

In preparation for Luke's Christ, we have to take seriously the idea that the Church that bears Christ's name, in fact every religious institution and practice, is responsible for the salvation of the lowly, oppressed, secular masses. We are called to swallow the pride that would focus Christ's attention only on us, the good and right ones, widening the scope of our work to include those whom society and culture have ignored.

This is difficult work for those who have believed that their participation and faithfulness sets them apart or makes them better than others. It is difficult as well for those who demand that the Church serve them, instead of serving those who struggle and suffer. To be faithful to Luke's Christ, and in order to practice his form of salvific work, the Church must attend particularly to the needs of the secular world, to societal wrongs and cultural biases.

The preparation is difficult indeed. The benefits of this incarnation of God's will pays dividends which, we are promised, benefit all people and every person. Get ready! Here he comes!