Waiting for Renewal: Advent for St. Matthew’s
St. John the Baptist. His poverty is our poverty as we await in the wilderness of our lives the coming of the Messiah.
In Advent we await the birth of Christ. We do this, year after year, in the community of Jesus, as a tacit admission that we have not received Christ as fully as we could. We recognize there are places in our personal and communal lives where God is not, wilderness spaces. We also recognize we have no power on our own to make God real in those places. With a kind of helplessness, we sit with all this truth, and we wait for God to come in power to integrate more of who we are into the life that Jesus gives. The beauty of Christmas will be that when God comes in power, God will use the power paradoxically to meet us at the lowest level of our need where we are sitting, and to love us there in to new life.
Never before have I appreciated the wisdom of the Church its Advent readings. In Advent One, we witness the falling apart of our lives and this world because they have not been grounded in God’s way. We call this apocalypse — the great revealing of truth in a great falling apart. In Advent Two we are called by John the Baptist to repent of all the ways we have joined the fallen ways of the world that have caused this falling apart, and been a part in causing the suffering we see about us. In Advent three we are told that one mightier than John is coming, but still we do not know who this is or what this means. We have repented of the Old Way, but do not yet know the New. In Advent Four, we are presented with the mystery of Mary’s pregnancy. Better yet - the perplexity of Mary’s pregnancy. Is this how God comes?
Do you want to wait for the birth of Christ? The Church suggests a pattern of apocalyptic falling apart, repentance and waiting in unknowing, and witnessing the strange new work of God in Mary.
This Advent, as at every Advent, I am praying for the renewal of St. Matthew’s. I pray that we will discover again the power and peculiarity of Christian Faith. I am praying that each of us will understand at a deeper level that our only real rest, our final and fulfilling pleasure, is in sharing Jesus’ love for the Father. The Gospels, Paul’s Epistles, and the mystics and the saints are all clear: in this world we will have suffering. All of us are living unto loss and death. Yet our eternal life can be tasted even now, Jesus’ pleasure in God made into our pleasure, by the inner movement of Jesus’ Spirit. We can discover again the great joy in a life that has discovered this, that God is our only final home and feast and satisfaction. We can discover the freedom it gives for showing up in the world in a way that reveals a little more of God’s presence, serving and loving others. Our community can be a place where the heavenly Word is a little more incarnate — where God is tasted, know, shared, and extended to others. May God make this real among us.