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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: The Fullness of Time
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
"Christians believe not just in one coming of Christ, but in three." We tend to think of Advent as the season of anticipation before Christmas—and while it is that, it's also much more. Throughout its history, the church has observed Advent as a preparation not only for the first coming of Christ in his incarnation but also for his second coming at the last day. It's also about a third coming: the coming of Christ to meet us in our present moment, to make us holy by his Word and Sacrament. In this short volume, priest and writer Tish Harrison Warren explores all three of these "comings" of Christ and invites us into a deeper experience of the first season of the Christian year. Each volume in the Fullness of Time series invites readers to engage with the riches of the church year, exploring how its traditions, prayers, Scriptures, and rituals all point us to Jesus.
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To Woody Giles, who has taught us
about waiting with hope and joy.
Beloved friend, let’s wait together.
“En estos dias,
a los abatidos nos toca fijar los ojos
en una gloria palpable, intolerable:
algo capaz de rescatarnos de duras posibilidades
e introducir nuestras almas a la realidad
de una celebración que nunca muere
y un amor no pasajero.”
But we have a promise upon which to base our hope:The promise of his love.So our life can rightly be a waiting in expectation, but waiting
patiently and with a smile. Then, indeed, we shall be really
surprised and full of joy and gratitude when he comes.
Contents
The Fullness of Time
SERIES PREFACE
ESAU MCCAULLEY, SERIES EDITOR
Christians of all traditions are finding a renewed appreciation for the church year. This is evident in the increased number of churches that mark the seasons in their preaching and teaching. It’s evident in the families and small groups looking for ways to recover ancient practices of the Christian faith. This is all very good. To assist in this renewal, we thought Christians might find it beneficial to have an accessible guide to the church year, one that’s more than a devotional but less than an academic tome.
The Fullness of Time project aims to do just that. We have put together a series of short books on the seasons and key events of the church year, including Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. These books are reflections on the moods, themes, rituals, prayers, and Scriptures that mark each season.
These are not, strictly speaking, devotionals. They are theological and spiritual reflections that seek to provide spiritual formation by helping the reader live fully into the practices of each season. We want readers to understand how the church is forming them in the likeness of Christ through the church calendar.
These books are written from the perspective of those who have lived through the seasons many times, and we’ll use personal stories and experiences to explain different aspects of the season that are meaningful to us. In what follows, do not look for comments from historians pointing out minutiae. Instead, look for fellow believers and evangelists using the tool of the church year to preach the gospel and point Christians toward discipleship and spiritual formation. We pray that these books will be useful to individuals, families, and churches seeking a deeper walk with Jesus.
1
Yearning
THREE ADVENTSOF CHRIST
As the calendar year winds down, as the days darken and grow short, as Christmas songs spill from crowded stores and children set about making wish lists for Santa, the church’s year dawns. On the fourth Sunday before Christmas, Advent begins. The first day of Advent is our Christian New Year’s Day. It kicks off the entire cycle of the liturgical calendar, which through each passing week will slowly unfurl the story of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Holy Spirit.
We begin our Christian year in waiting. We do not begin with our own frenetic effort or energy. We do not begin with the merriment of Christmas or the triumph of Easter. We do not begin with the work of the church or the mandate of the Great Commission. Instead, we begin in a place of yearning. We wait for our king to come.
The word advent derives from the Latin adventus, which means “coming.” The liturgical season of Advent is the time in which we prepare for and look forward to the coming of Christ.
Christians, of course, believe that Christ has already come. Jesus has already brought the kingdom of God near. He has already stretched out his hands to heal and to bless. He has already been broken on the cross and defeated death. He has already poured out his Spirit. So why do we reenter a season of waiting each year? What are we waiting for?
We Christians believe, however, not just in one coming of Christ but in three: the coming of Christ in the incarnation (theologians have sometimes called this the adventus redemptionis, the coming of redemption), the coming of Christ in what Scripture terms “the last days” (the adventus glorificamus, the coming in glory), and the coming of Christ in our present moment, through the Holy Spirit’s work and through Word and sacrament (the adventus sanctificationis, the coming of holy things or holiness).1 Advent celebrates and holds together all three “comings” of Christ.
It is a deeply paradoxical season, at once past, present, and future. Ancient yet urgent.
When we enter into the waiting of Advent, we do so not primarily as individuals but with all people of faith throughout time and around the globe. When we worship together each week, we join our voices, as the Anglican liturgy says, “with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven.”2 Because of this, the church calendar as a whole—and Advent specifically—is a way to reach toward timelessness through time itself. It is a season marked by days and weeks, yet through it we enter into the eternal story of God and God’s work on earth.
THE COMINGOF CHRISTINTHE INCARNATION
In Advent we intentionally join our brothers and sisters in the Old Testament who waited faithfully for the Messiah to come. We seek to enter their perspective and take on their posture. Of course, we live our lives in AD, in the year of our Lord, not BC. But “Advent itself is always BC!” writes Malcolm Guite. “The whole purpose of Advent is to be for a moment fully and consciously Before Christ.”3
We know that Christ has come, and yet the season of Advent calls us out of our time-bound moment to remember and perform the whole drama of Scripture. Through the liturgical calendar we don’t merely retell the story of the gospel; we enter it. In this way the church calendar is like immersive theater.4
In immersive theater, no one is simply a spectator watching a play. The distinction between actors and audience is broken down and everyone becomes a character in the story. In the same way, in Advent we join the people of Israel waiting for the coming Messiah. We reenact their yearning for and anticipation of the coming king. Though we now know the story of Christmas—the story of Jesus’ first coming—we imaginatively enter into the confusion, longing, frustration, and sense of dreams deferred that the people of Israel felt year after year, generation after generation. We prepare for the joy of Christmas by waiting on the dark streets of Bethlehem, our eyes straining to glimpse the dawning of that everlasting light.
In the book of Luke, Jesus has a strange exchange with the Sadducees where he points out that Moses called the Lord “the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Jesus says, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive” (Luke 20:37-38). Because “to him all are alive,” the God we worship is still the God of Abraham, still the God of Isaac, still the God of Jacob. So even though we live two thousand years after Jesus’ birth, it is appropriate—even vital—for us to join in the ache of these Old Testament saints, not only in our imaginations but through the mysterious reality of the communion of saints across time. When we participate in the season of Advent we are taking part in the corporate longing of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rahab, Moses, Miriam, Isaiah, and Ruth. We are bearing their burdens and their stories.
In the medieval church, as the season of Advent was taking shape, Christians developed a pattern of praying together seven prayers that reference descriptions of the Messiah from the Old Testament. These prayers are poetry, telling us what Christ is like through metaphor without saying the name of Jesus directly. Instead they call to Jesus using other names given in Scripture: “O Wisdom!” “O Adonai!” “O Root!” “O Key!” “O Light!” “O King of the Nations!” “O Emmanuel!”
These are called the “O Antiphons” because the church sang these prayers antiphonally, back and forth, by call and response. They are now sung by some churches on the seven days leading up to Christmas Eve. Many churches, however, have lost this ancient practice, but an echo of the tradition remains in the beloved Advent hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” which is taken from the final O Antiphon.
These poetic prayers reverberate with longing and hope. They tell us we need a rescuer and a ransom. They remind us that, even if we had never heard the name of Jesus, we would still need all he came to give. We need “wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High.” We need Adonai—the Lord—to “come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.” We need the root of Jesse to nourish us. We need the key of David to unlock the chains that imprison us. We need the rising dawn, “the radiance of the Light eternal and Sun of Justice.” We need the king of the nations, the deepest “desire of all.” And we need Immanuel, God with us.5
The O Antiphons remind us that the first coming of Christ should not be taken for granted, nor should its significance be consigned to the past. All the groaning of creation, all the tragedies and miseries of history, all the confusion and ignorance that characterized humanity before Christ remain with us now, even in the age of our Lord. There are billions of people today who, like those in the Old Testament, have never heard the story of Jesus. And we who have heard and believed the good news often find ourselves mired in fear, unbelief, sin, and sorrow. Because of this, we not only recall those who waited for Christ; we join with them each year to tell of the one who answers the yearning of every human heart and the desire of every nation.
The longing of Advent begins in the first pages of the Bible. In Genesis we watch with horror as sin enters the world through the rebellion of Adam and Eve. Poison is poured into the stream of humanity and death breaks loose on the earth. The wreckage is devastating and pervasive. Because of the fall there is brokenness in our bodies, in our interior lives, in our relationships with each other, in nature, in culture, and in societal systems. Our desires have become disordered and discordant, and we are now at odds with others and with God himself.
Then, in Genesis 3:15, there is the first whisper of hope:
I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.
Theologians calls this the protevangelion, the first gospel, which foreshadows the good news to come. It is the first hint that, though everything seems shattered beyond repair, God has not left us. Help is on the way. Generation after generation, through the promises of Abraham, the enslavement of the Jewish people, the deliverance of the exodus, through prophets and psalms, through the establishment and destruction of the temple, through exile and return, the people of God waited for God’s anointed.
Slowly—painfully slowly—promises were unveiled to God’s people of one who was coming whose kingdom would have no end. And slowly the people of Israel realized that these promises were not only for their own rescue but for all nations, ethnicities, and people groups. They waited and hoped, not knowing what was to come, unable to skip to the end of the book, unable to see what lay ahead.
Advent is a time to ready ourselves for the celebration of the incarnation, and this is no small task. The way we celebrate Christmas can easily become sentimental and trite. We are so familiar with the story—the little lambs and the shepherds, the Christmas star and the stockings—that we fail to notice the depth of pain, chaos, and danger of the world into which Jesus was born.6 Christmas with its compulsory jollification and insistence on being the “hap-hap-happiest season of all” devolves into saccharine escapism if we do not first take note of the darkness in the world and in our own lives.
Part of why we observe Advent is to make Christmas weird again, to allow the shock of the incarnation to take us aback once more. The movie Talladega Nights has a famous scene in which Will Ferrell’s character prays to the “eight-pound, six-ounce, newborn infant Jesus.” It’s his “favorite Jesus.” This kind of laughable mawkishness springs from our casual overfamiliarity with the Christmas story divorced from the larger story of the fall of the world and God’s redemption through Israel.
We rush too quickly to carols and bells and a sweet little “eight-pound, six-ounce, newborn infant Jesus” and lose sight of Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah—the one who is wisdom, Adonai, root, key, light, king, and Immanuel.
By entering into the larger story of redemptive history, we begin to feel our need of a deliverer again. We wipe away the fake snow and tinsel, the felt-board shepherds and friendly beasts, and lean into the ache of the cosmos, the sorrow and struggle of all creation.
Just as we are tempted to skip over the devastation of Good Friday and rush ahead to the good news of Easter, we can hurry to the hope of the incarnation and refuse to glimpse the depth of confusion and pain of the oppressed people of Israel, longing for God’s shalom in a world devoid of peace. But in the same way that ignoring the horror of the cross inevitably belittles the resurrection, when we overlook the captivity and yearning of Israel, we end up missing the glory of that holy night in Bethlehem.
In the church calendar, every season of celebration is preceded by a season of preparation. In Advent, we prepare our hearts, minds, and bodies to receive the good news that awaits us in the twelve days of Christmas.
I did not grow up observing Advent—I didn’t even really know what it was. Like many Americans, my family began celebrating Christmas the day after Thanksgiving. When I started attending an Anglican church in my late twenties, Advent drew me in. With its quiet beauty and doleful hymns, this season made intuitive emotional sense to me. Before we celebrate the birth of Christ, we remember the pain of labor—we wait with this whole longing world, with all of creation, groaning for redemption to be born. We face the darkness before we celebrate the dawn.
We prepare for Christmas not only with shopping lists and decorations but by making space for mourning. We join with Israel in lamentation. We wait, as the hymn says, “in lowly exile here, until the Son of God appears.”
