Advent Arrives

November 25, 2009

Several of you have written to me to say you’ve missed our email newsletter. Some of you keep up with us from a distance and we appreciate hearing from you and knowing that our ministry is somehow an encouragement to you where you are. I regret that I let the newsletter slip from my list of priorities. But in keeping with the new (Christian) Year that starts this Sabbath, I’m making a new resolution: I will send a (semi) weekly newsletter.

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We are through the long season of Ordinary Time and this Sabbath we begin the journey anew. Starting again with the narratives about our coming God we enter the story of the saints of old who waited patiently and actively for Messiah. Advent is about hope, expectation, patience, and finally the joy of expectations fulfilled.

But we have the awkward and unclear task of living in between two great moments in history. On the one hand we look back and celebrate the coming of God into our world in the person of Jesus, the Messiah. As a helpless baby, born to a poor, unmarried Palestinian girl, God met the human family at its lowest point and immediately challenged the power structures of the day.

And yet, though Messiah has come, and through his life, death and resurrection has inaugurated a new world, we await the final chapter of this story. As my friend and author, Charles Scriven says in his new book, The Promise of Peace, “we live, all of us, in the space between our dreams and disappointments.”* This is precisely what Advent is about. It is about this “space” and learning to live well in that space, as a witness to the final fulfillment of God’s dream for all creation.

So, we will use this time, over the next four weeks, to learn how to wait well. Starting with this Sabbath, we will discover that God’s Kingdom can’t wait. It is forcing its way into this world. It’s time for us to tune in.

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*Charles Scriven. The Promise of Peace (Pacific Press: Nampa, ID), 2009.