First Sunday of Advent (C)
This year, we begin Advent at the same time that we enter December. The secular Christmas sales machine has been running furiously for some time already. We are not even allowed to pause for one day to give thanks before Black Friday forces itself into our awareness. The stores, decked out in Christmas décor, soothe our harried spirits with holiday muzak. Our TVs show the expected Christmas fare once again.
In all of this, a certain image of ourselves emerges. We – the intended targets of all that advertising – are portrayed as the safe, comfortable ones. We are shown with few – if any – real troubles. We can afford to spread holiday cheer – so they say – near and far. If people with troubles and serious needs are shown, they live far away. They face difficulties we have never known. We are asked to be charitable to them. Even if they live near us, they are usually portrayed as living in a different world – almost invisible to us.
Does that image ring true to us now? Do we see ourselves in all those commercials? If we really are that safe and comfortable, what do we need? What can Advent offer us? Why not just rush to the gift-giving of Christmas? Not only that. If we don’t see ourselves in all that hype, we begin to feel that we are to blame. We are failures. We just aren’t getting it.
In the fall of 1973, country legend Merle Haggard released a Christmas album. The single from that album – a song he wrote – became a big hit for him. It was called “If We Make It Through December”. In it, Haggard gives voice to a man who does not feel safe or comfortable:
Got laid off down at the factory
And there time is not the greatest in the world
Heaven knows I been workin’ hard
I wanted Christmas to be right for daddy’s girl
Now I don’t mean to hate December
It’s meant to be the happy time of year
And my little girl don’t understand
Why daddy can’t afford no Christmas here.
The singer lays out all that is troubling him – his lack of work, the feeling that he will disappoint his daughter on Christmas and that there is no evident reason to be hopeful. Yet, he continues to hope:
If we make it through December
Everything’s gonna be alright I know
The song struck a chord with many people, because they could easily identify with his plight – a plight we rarely see in all the pre-Christmas hype. Here is someone who has no idea how he will make it through December, but he presses on – almost hoping against hope that he and his family can make it.
Now, perhaps, we are in a better space to understand the peculiar way that the Church introduces Advent to us. Our Scripture readings for this Sunday do not speak of a peaceful manger scene where all is comfort and joy. Not yet. Instead, we are invited to identify with a people who, at various times in their history, had no idea how they would make it through their December.
Jeremiah speaks to us from a time when Judah and Jerusalem were about to be – or had already been conquered and largely destroyed by the invading Babylonians in 587 BC. After the conquest, many of the survivors were deported to various places near Babylon. This was almost always a death sentence for any people thus conquered. They had no king, no homeland. They would soon be absorbed into the surrounding population and lose their identity. They would die as a people. They had no reason to hope for any other outcome. No other people had ever survived such a calamity. For the people of Israel, it was even worse. They wondered if God had abandoned them – or, worse, if God was unable to help them. Had God’s promise failed?
Our Gospel reading from Luke speaks to us of a similar time. Jesus has moved from describing the coming destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple – this time, by the Romans – to speaking about what we often call “the end of the world”. Dangers loom all about. People are “dying in fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world”. There seems to be no hope – nothing that anyone can do to save themselves. Is the human story over?
We look at our own world today. In America, we may not fear an invasion from some other nation, but we may fear corrosion from within. We hear of corruption, scandals, mass shootings, and many people who show no signs of faith in God. Like the people of Jesus’ time, we may wonder if we are nearing “the end of the world”. We hear of devastating wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. There is famine, poverty, drought, disease, and terrorism in many places. Some people warn of climate change, pollution, and other potential disasters to come. Is our story coming to an end?
Our readings answer with a resounding “No!” In times where people can see no reason to hope, God insists that his promises will be fulfilled. Hope will not disappoint, even in the face of what looks like certain failure or even death. The Lord, speaking through Jeremiah to a hope-less people, declares that even now:
In our Gospel reading, Jesus likewise declares that, even when faced with such frightening times as he portrays,
But when these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.
When we look at Israel through the centuries, the life of Jesus on earth, and the history of the Church since then, a similar pattern emerges. Just after the very moment when all reason for hope – humanly speaking – is gone, God announces a reason to hope that we could have never achieved on our own. No matter what our December is, we can make it, because we are dying to merely human hope so that we can truly hope in God.
It begins, I believe, with that challenging story of Abraham being called to sacrifice Isaac, his own son. People usually ask how God could ask such a thing of Abraham at all, even if God spares Isaac in the end. I believe that this story is intended to be a prophetic action. God intends us to see, in it, the pattern of our history. Abraham’s descendants – both Israel and the Church – would, over and over again, find themselves in a seemingly hopeless situation. Death would feel imminent and inescapable. No merely human effort could save them. Yet, at that very moment, God’s own promise would be rediscovered, and people would find, once again, the true reason for hope. God will bring us through December. Only God can.
Israel learned this again and again. As slaves in Egypt. Conquered and seemingly about to be erased by the Babylonians. Persecuted and martyred by Greek rulers for their faith. Losing Jerusalem to the Romans. The Holocaust.
Jesus himself took up this pattern and made it the center of his life by his willingness to die on a cross – rejected by his people and seemingly abandoned and cursed by God – and then having that seeming, utter failure become the great sign of victory and hope for all who would believe in him.
The Church, as well, has lived this cycle, again and again. G.K. Chesterton, in his book The Everlasting Man, writes of the “Five Deaths of the Church” in history – five moments when it seemed that the Church was dying or even dead, without hope, and yet how the Church survived through the grace of God. (As an aside, if Chesterton were alive now, would he describe our own time as a sixth “Death of the Church”?)
If we examine our own lives in this light, we will see that we have more in common with the people in our readings – as well as with the man in Merle Haggard’s song – then we may have thought. Over and over again, we face challenges and crises that seem to overwhelm us. We see and feel no reason for hope. Our faith seems to have left us, or at least to have taken a long winter’s nap. Other people might write us off – as individuals, as families, as communities, as a Church. Whatever the Christmas ads may say, we feel more like Isaac on the altar, or the people of Jerusalem in the teeth of the Babylonian attack, than like any cheerful, comfortable family on those ads. We may feel like we are with Jesus at Gethsemane, sweating our very lifeblood through our pores and asking God to take this cup from us. It’s too much.
Now we are ready for Advent. Now we are ready to see the real hope that it brings. Now we are ready to understand why the Church chooses the readings it offers us this Sunday. No matter who we may think we are – or want others to see in us – we are more like Merle Haggard’s laid-off worker than we want to admit. Hope, on a merely human level, is hard to come by. But now – at this very point of near-desperation – Advent speaks to us. God speaks to us. “The days are coming…”, the Lord insists. “Stand erect and raise your heads, for your redemption is near at hand”. “What you cannot possibly do for yourselves”, the Lord says, “I will do for you. I will bring hope out of despair, life out of death, light out of darkness.”
The days are coming. Like Jesus at Gethsemane, we can now say, “Your will be done”. Like Mary at the Annunciation, we can say, “Let it be done to me according to your will”. But the days aren’t here yet. What do we do in the meantime? Listen to Paul in our second reading:
Finally, brothers and sisters, we earnestly ask and exhort you in the Lord Jesus that, as you received from us how you should conduct yourselves to please God —and as you are conducting yourselves— you do so even more. For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus.
We who have faith in the Lord do not wait for him by merely sitting around. No. Our calling is also to encourage one another in that same faith, and to draw others to it. We do this, primarily, by living in harmony with the Lord’s teaching and example which we find in Scripture and the living Tradition of the Church. We can do this only because the Holy Spirit empowers us for this very thing. We can do this only when we have been led to set aside every hope that comes only from our own efforts and learned to place that hope squarely on the promises of the Lord to us. If we are faithful in this way – and only if we are – we can then “stand erect and raise our heads, for our redemption is at hand”. At the very moment when we are brought to what looks like our end, God opens our eyes to see the new beginning that he offers us.
Yes, we can make it through our December. Not by literally moving to “a warmer town come summer time”, but by moving our hope to the Lord who is the source of all warmth, light and life. We know well that the ache in our hearts, the desire for justice, love and peace, will be fulfilled by God. In fact, as we hope in God, these desires already begin to be fulfilled in our hearts in a way that leads us to desire them even more and to look forward to the End.
Stand erect and raise your heads, for your redemption is at hand!
Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!