Rolling in Holiness
When I hit adolescence, I found myself getting depressed, and the more I tried to analyze my way out of it, the deeper the hole in my heart got. No doubt some of it had to do with my increasing adult awareness that all was not well in my family. My father and mother couldn't agree on whether my drug-using brother needed tough love or not. In my 16th year, my father had a nervous breakdown four days before Christmas; and only then was it agreed that my brother had to move out of our home. Perhaps because, as the “baby” of the family, my early childhood was very sheltered, it was much harder to come to grips with the harder things of life. And in that new awareness, all the happy faces and tons of toys and tinkling bells around me didn't reflect how I felt as December 25th loomed larger and larger, and the pressure to feel happy got harder and harder to bear.
As an adult Episcopalian, Advent was a divine gift. I wasn't obligated to put up the largest possible Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving. I could wait until the day before Christmas Eve. I didn't have to sing all the Christmas songs until Christmas Day. Unlike much of the world that is exhausted on December 26th, my celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas is just beginning. Unlike much of the world that drags their tree to the curb on January 2nd, Laura and I can keep ours up until the visit of the Wise Men on the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th. Advent has been the cure for my Christmas blues.
But, as the years roll on, I understand better how our Church’s insistence on delaying Christmas can make us look like real killjoys. And it even took me some years to fully comprehend that the reason for not focusing on the cute baby in the crib isn’t just to cure some people’s Christmas blues by stretching out the anticipation of his first coming, in Latin, Adventus. Jesus is coming, but not yet. But which coming are we talking about? As one liturgical year ends and another begins, we’re still talking a lot about Jesus’s second coming. Two weeks ago, after All Saints Sunday, I preached on Mark’s version of what scholars call the little Apocalypse. Today as we begin Year C in our three-year lectionary we hear from Luke’s version. Next year we’ll hear from Matthew. There are differences in the telling but it’s the same story. Jesus predicts the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple by the Romans, of the harassments and persecutions his disciples will have to endure, and finally of his coming in glory.
But is it really Jesus’s second coming that Luke is talking about? “And then they will see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. When these things begin to take place, stand erect, hold your heads high, because your liberation is drawing near.” In Matthew and Mark, it’s clouds. But Luke is the only Gospeler who write a sequel, so that he tells the story of Jesus’s ascension twice, in the Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles. And in the ascension, it is in a cloud that Jesus ascends to Heaven, having promised that the Holy Spirit would come to his disciples, as indeed it came on the Pentecost that only Luke records. As we read through Luke’s Gospel this Year C, we will hear Luke emphasizing to the Church, then and now, that we already have the love and power of Jesus to preach and to heal through the Holy Spirit, even as we still anticipate that second coming in glory when all things shall be made right.
So, here we are, somewhere between Jesus’s first and second advents, staying “alert” as Jesus asks us today, to those signs of his coming that the Holy Spirit wants to show us now. We may not know exactly where we are between those two advents. But we know we’re on the First Sunday of Advent, the first Sunday of a new liturgical year, a new turning of the wheel that our liturgical calendar can be drawn as: a few Sundays of blue or purple, then a couple of Sundays of white, followed by several Sundays of green, then a whole block of purple of Sundays and one week of red before an even larger block of white Easter Sundays, then one bright red Sunday of Pentecost, and then a long green season of living in faith, hope and love.
Broadly speaking, the Church’s liturgical year consists of two halves. In the first half, we re-present or relive the great acts of God for our salvation: the incarnation and nativity, the passion and resurrection, the receiving of the Spirit. In the second half, we take all that we have received in that reliving, and we live and work together to pursue God’s mission for us to “restore all people to unity to God and each other in Christ.” We “pursue” our mission for it is God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit who will ultimately accomplish that mission in that second coming, which is the principal focus of the Advent season, not the first coming of the baby.
Advent is about looking forward to the second coming before we look back to the first. Advent is about restarting that liturgical wheel, year after year, rolling closer and closer to eternity, and each year, growing more in faith, hope, and love, into more and more holiness, step by step, marching together.
The Rev. David P. Kendrick
December 1st, 2024
First Sunday of Advent, Year C