Advent Hope
FROM THE RECTOR
This Advent, at the recommendation of Episcopal priest and author Fleming Rutledge, I am reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the post-apocalyptic tale of a father and son making their way through what is left of this country after a terrible disaster destroyed most of life as we know it. Barely subsisting on a dwindling supply of canned beans and rancid cornmeal, they journey together toward the hope of a warmer place by the sea, trying to avoid cannibalistic marauders and wrestling with the thought that suicide might be their only escape.
It is a bleak tale, to say the least, but I am drawn to it this year as I prepare to encounter the hope that is given to us at Christmas. As you may have noticed in the Sunday readings throughout Advent, we hear more during these weeks about the end of the world and the need to repent and God’s great reordering of things than we do about the birth of Jesus. Those intimidating warnings are connected theologically with the tender birth of a savior, but we need to pierce through layers of secular holiday culture—and our own relative security—to find it.
As one who lives a charmed life, I usually need a little help remembering that my hope is found not in this world but in the world to come. The challenges I encounter are relatively small and easily traversed. Other people, however, do not need Cormac McCarthy or Toni Morrison or Joseph Conrad or Flannery O’Conner to remind them that this life cannot provide the true healing we seek. Some of us live each day with deep experiences of unending struggle. For them, Advent brings the comforting reminder that one day this world will end and that, when the former things have passed away, God will establish a new heaven and a new earth—a realm in which there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. For them, Advent means more than getting ready for Christmas. It means waiting and watching for the fulfillment of God’s great promise to save us.
This year, as I wait and watch not only for the annual celebration of Jesus’ birth but also for his great coming in glory, I return again and again to the hymn, “Abide with Me.” In that hymn, Henry Frances Lyte comforts us with the unique promise that God has given us in Jesus Christ. As we sing at the end of the first stanza, “When other helpers fail and comforts flee, help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.” Perhaps that hymn, which is often sung at funerals, has been on my mind because, over the last three months, our clergy have personally tended to sixteen deaths. That is an exceptionally high number, even for a church our size. Having encountered life in its most fragile state so many times of late, I find myself needing the consolation that comes not from a God who offers a mere word of encouragement but from the God who promises to help even the helpless.
At Christmas we celebrate more than the birth of a child who will grow up and teach God’s people the way of salvation. In the manger, we behold God’s great and final reordering of all things, already breaking through into this world. Because God came to earth in the birth of Jesus, we know that God will come again and make all things new. In Christ, what has been cannot be separated from what will be. That means we come to Jesus’ birth not only with hope for this moment but expecting to encounter God’s hope for all time. If the only needs we bring to the feast of the nativity are the minor inconveniences of life, we will miss the magnitude of the Christmas miracle, which in the Incarnation is nothing less than the death of our mortality and our own resurrection to the perfect life of God’s reign.
This Sunday in church, we will hear the story of the angel appearing to Joseph in a dream and explaining how the child already growing in the womb of Mary, his betrothed, was from the Holy Spirit. In this final Sunday of Advent, we begin the transition from the message of the prophets to the message of the angels, but we cannot leave the hope of Advent behind. We must bring it with us. During the last three weeks, we have been reminded that God will come and make all things new. We have heard the invitation to forsake our attachments to the ways of the world and embrace instead the ways of God’s reign. Now it is time for us to carry the promise of Advent with us into the season of Christmas. Now it is time for us to recognize that the final renewal promised by God and proclaimed by the prophets has come to the world in the birth of a savior. May the good news of Jesus’ birth fill us with a hope that lasts until the end of time.
Yours Faithfully,
Evan D. Garner