An Invitation to An Honest Advent

So what do you think: has the world gotten BETTER this year?

As I consider that question, it strikes me that to live as a Christian is to embrace a profound and constant tension.  On the one hand, we believe that God was born into human flesh in Jesus, that He died on a cross, rose from the dead, and will come back again at the end of all things to destroy sin, end evil, wipe every tear from every eye, and make the whole world new again.  So to be a Christian is to live always with a profound assurance of hope. 

But Jesus hasn’t come back yet.  And we live in a world full of pain, violence, racism, slavery, abuse, poverty, and disorder.  A 24 hour global news cycle allows us to see even more of the brokenness rampant in our world.  Every year, I seem to have more and more friends and family fighting personal battles of depression, anxiety, and loneliness.  I fight many of those battles within myself.  I daily face up to the reality that I am not the husband, father, man, neighbor, son, brother, our pastor I want to be.  The world is deeply broken.  Our hearts are deeply broken.  And our faith as followers of Jesus calls us to be honest about that brokenness, and to lament the devastation in our world and in our hearts.  Things are NOT as they should be.  NOT as Jesus desires them to be.  NOT as we believe and hope they WILL be.

So how do we live faithfully in the midst of this tension?  How do we honestly reckon with the devastation all around us while continuing to hold onto and even to rejoice in our hope in Christ?

The church season of Advent offers us a venue for exploring and wrestling with this tension.  Advent is the Christian New Year, a pentitential season Christians throughout history and across the world today observe in the 4 weeks leading up to Christmas.  In Advent, we enter into the story of Israel after the exile: the 500 years between the last prophets and the coming of John the Baptist when God’s voice was silent and Israel waited for God to send His promised Messiah to deliver them.  In Advent, we enter into Israel’s waiting, their longing, their expectancy.  We sit with their sadness over God’s felt absence.  Their sorrow over their individual and corporate sin that led to their exile, their honesty over the sorrow and suffering they experience all around them in the world. 

Yet thousands of years later Christians know that the Christ child born in the manger was God’s answer to Israel’s longing.  The Messiah HAS come into Israel’s waiting!  But Christians throughout history and us today are—like Israel!—waiting for Jesus to come again!  We too live in a world where God’s voice often seems silent.  Where we feel sorrow over our personal and systemic sin.  Where we lament and weep over the pain and brokenness around us and in our own lives.  We too wait for God to do what He’s promised: for Jesus to come back and reveal His Kingdom in full. 

In Advent we reckon with devastation even as we rejoice in hope.  There is darkness in this season and there is light.  We actually PRACTICE waiting.  We PRAY for our world: we name and lament sources of devastation and invite Jesus to come, not just generally but specifically into those places and needs.  We examine our own lives and confess the sins that have laid hidden in our lives.  We invite the power of the Holy Spirit to help us repent: that Jesus might make US new, even as we invite Him to make our world new.  We are generous to the needs of the poor and we rest from the constant chasing of idols we’ve made that has promised us salvation but has run us ragged.  In short, we LIVE the tension: reckoning with devastation even as we remember and rejoice in our sure and certain hope in Christ.

And we do all of this together! 

As Tish Harrison Warren reminds us in her book on Advent, the story and practices of this season take place within a community: the church!  We will never be as effective in embracing the tension of our faith alone.  We need brothers and sisters to pray with us, to lament with us, to persist in hope with us!  And God gives us this Advent family through His people in the Body of Christ.

If you are looking for a community with which to live out the tension between hope and devastation this Advent, I’d love to invite you to join us during this season at The Mission Cincinnati!  We’ll gather for worship on Sundays 12/3, 12/10, and 12/17 at 10 AM at 2221 Slane Ave. Cincinnati OH 45212, and for our Christmas Eve service and celebration on Sunday 12/24 at 4 PM.  We can’t wait to welcome you with us as we lean into an Honest Advent of reckoning with devastation and rejoicing in hope together!