How do you get ready for something that has already happened?
People love Christmas. And who can blame us? Christmas means God is present and at work in the world. We love getting ready for Christmas.
We love getting ready for it as if it had not already happened, as if this was the first time.
Advent is a funny time of year, between the feast of Christ the King and Christmas Eve. Christ the King was all about the fulfillment of the promise, the completion of what was begun in the Nativity of our Lord. Christ the King we proclaimed: there is no other like him.
We will not be fooled. We will not take counterfeits. Whatever, whoever, claims our first allegiance, there is one prior, greater, and first in line.
Frankly I don’t know what it would be like to live under a king. I’m an American and this is where I’ve always lived. I’ve seen one or two royal persons from a distance, but they weren’t my royalty, just visitors.
So when I hear of the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God, I don’t have anybody in the way. Except everybody and everything that puts itself, or that I put, in between me and God.
But God does not allow that. God does not accept that anything or anyone should come between us and God. All other allegiances, all other kings, come second. God in Christ comes first.
How do you get ready for something that has already happened? The love of God is already at work.
While we are waiting for the arrival of the Messiah, of Christ on Christmas, we already know that God is at work. Because this Christmas is a reminder that in the arrival of God into our world, in the Holy Spirit, in Creation, and in Christ, we know that we are not separate from grace.
We may think of Holy Week, of Good Friday and Easter, as the time when we remember that we are redeemed, saved, made whole again from what was broken; that it was then that the eternity of God’s love was revealed.
But the good news in Christmas, and anticipated in Advent, is that Love has already come into our world.
When we think of advent we may think of joyful preparation, and the need to get our house in order to make room to welcome Jesus. We may think “prepare the way” - and we’d be right. But we would also be right to recall that God was there first, in the world from the beginning, and is only now in the new day that Christ has made, redeeming the promise of ages: God with us, Emmanuel.
In Christ the fullness of God was pleased to live, and we are called into the fullness of living by that gift. That gift that opens before us on Christmas.
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And while we prepare for it, in self-examination and repentance and fasting, or decorating the church with greens, or reconsidering our yuletide gifts, we get ready. We get ready while we watch a Christmas movie - though it’s too early! and sing a song of welcome to the one who is coming.
There are many forces bearing on us, attractions and distractions pulling on us. But we get ready when we set aside all distraction and turn to the Christ-child once again, in confidence and poverty, in wealth of grace and gift and gladness and gravity, in expectation and hope of a renewal once more, once again, of what really matters in our lives to come to the fore.
And once again, as if meeting the Christ-child for the first time, we await one little baby in whom the hope of the world is contained. As if you can contain a little child: for from him comes the explosion of grace and joy and hope that we call Christmas. Here it comes. Get ready, church. Get ready, world.
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Preachers tell us we need prophets. Prophets tell us what is really going on. They are not primarily people who predict the future. They tell us what is going on right now in our present situation and what it means in the light of the sovereignty of God. Sometimes what they have to say lasts beyond their own time. Isaiah and Baruch, for example. John the Baptist, for another. And Zechariah, John's father.
A more modern prophet lived in the last century. He was a German Lutheran theologian, and he spent most of his life in Berlin. Most of his life. He visited Spain, New York City, England, and Sweden. And at the end of his life he was not in Berlin, he was in a concentration camp.
What had he done to earn that? From the beginning of his country's turn to national socialism, he had spoken out to his fellow Christians about what it meant. What it ultimately meant.
To some of them, it meant good times ahead. What could be better than a strong leader who would clean house and bring church and state together to strengthen the nation?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for that was his name, saw differently. He was not alone, but he did not, at the end, have many friends. There were family members who were much more, or much less, implicated in resistance to the national socialist regime that took over their country.
What he did at first and for many years was simply to point out what it meant for the church to merge its identity into a national project. What it meant for the church not to be an independent voice, for justice, for the poor, for the person on the edge of society, and for the person pushed there by politics. What it would mean if it was. And so he was among those who raised that voice.
During the war he became involved in working for military intelligence, but while he worked there he was also a courier for the resistance movement, trying to build bridges for democracy with people in other countries. And his clandestine work included raising money to allow Jews to seek safe haven in Switzerland. The Gestapo arrested him in April 1943.
He was famously involved, but only peripherally, in a plot to kill Hitler. That plot failed in July 1944 and gradually the conspirators were rounded up.
But that is not the end of the story. In prison he was able to write to friends and family, and continue to develop his understanding of what was going on. He continued to be a prophet.
One thing he said that I have been thinking about puts a different spin on Advent.
Advent we rightly hold to be a time of preparation, of repentance and renewal, in anticipation of the arrival of Christ at Christmas.
It is a time of hope, hope that bridges the distance between faith and love, between what we hold to be true and how we put it into action.
That bridge of hope is what got Dietrich Bonhoeffer into trouble. Most pastors just went along with what was going on - or took quieter ways to resist.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer had taught something important to think about. God is already active in the world. From the beginning of the world through Christ to the consummation of time, God is at work. Responding to God’s love by placing our trust and primary allegiance in his hands, and faithfully participating in God’s work of redemptive love, will carry us through the toughest time.
What Christmas means to us, Christmas that is coming, is hope. It means the arrival of God in our world, bringing peace on earth. The good news is even better: Christmas means that he is already here.
God is already active in the world. How can we not love a season that invites us to begin to live like that? We are invited this pre-season, as every season pre- Savior, to look at ourselves and others, and see what God sees in us: not mortal sinners but eternally beloved children.
We see the love of parent and stranger, community and chorus of angels, shining the love of God on one child. But not only him.
Children in the Holy Land today, in places torn by war, civil strife, or natural disaster, children desperately crossing waste places through the desert to hoped-for new homes of safety, children placed in foster homes or cherished by grandparents, children safe and embraced by loving families, all these have the light of the love of God shone on them.
And when they grow up, they may not be as cuddly, but they are still children of God's grace. They are beloved of God. Each of them, all of them. We are with them.
We know we need Advent. Four Sundays are short notice to get ready. To begin to see the impact of God's present - since the beginning - in the world.
We know we want Advent. We want wreaths and glory to the king and simmering cider and cookies and greetings from strangers and all the rest. The chance to give to relieve the suffering and brighten the days of the lonely. The chance to give and the chance to receive. For we have all received, before we have had a chance to give, God's love.
Hope is the struggle of the soul,
breaking loose from what is perishable,
and attesting her eternity.
-Herman Melville 1819-1891
