Intense Training
The liturgy of Advent…helps us to understand the fullness of the value and meaning of the mystery of Christmas.
It is not just about commemorating the historical event, which occurred some 2,000 years ago in a little village of Judea. Instead, we must understand that our whole life should be an “advent,” in vigilant expectation of Christ’s final coming.
To prepare our hearts to welcome the Lord, who, as we say in the Creed, will come one day to judge the living and the dead, we must learn to recognize his presence in the events of daily life. Advent is then a period of intense training that directs us decisively to the One who has already come, who will come, and who continuously comes.
—Pope John Paul II
I encourage you to look for Jesus today, friends—and tell it on the mountain (or maybe just in the comments) when you see Him.
Photos by >Kimberlee Conway Ireton
– Andy Wade –
Where’s home? Our theme for this Advent is “Coming Home: Uncovering Our Roots in the Advent Story”, but what if you don’t know where home is? I was thinking about a family friend who recently wandered off from home. She has Alzheimers and, for whatever reason, decided to take a walk by herself. Unable to find her way home, she spent the night outside, cold, alone, afraid.
Search teams went door to door that night looking for her. They searched all night along the many local trails and paths until she was finally found the following morning. Fortunately it was summer and the nights were not too cool.
I’ve been thinking about this incident as I’ve reflected on our theme.
Christine speaks of three “comings” in Advent:
- Jesus’ first coming over 2000 years ago
- Jesus’ coming to us today as Emmanuel, God with us, and
- Jesus’ coming again, our anticipation of his return when all things will be made whole.
But here again I wondered, “What if we don’t know where ‘home’ is?”
Advent reminds us clearly of all three of these homecomings, but often we get distracted, disoriented, disconnected. In fact, it’s easy to focus solely on Jesus’ coming as a baby in a manger at Christmas and forget his very real presence with us today… and the future coming we ache for. Like my family friend, we end up wandering trails that seem familiar and yet, try as we might, we can’t seem to find home.
On a personal level, I’m challenged to ask myself:
- Which coming makes me most uncomfortable? Why?
- Which coming do I find most difficult to live into, to express in action and/or to share with others? Why?
These are all very important questions as they challenge me to explore my own assumptions about who Jesus is and why I choose to follow. They also expose my own prejudices about Jesus and might just cause me to re-read the “Christmas Story” with new eyes.
Coming home also has another side
As my friend huddled in the cool night air, she was not really alone. The whole community had mobilized to find her. And this is the other side of the Christmas Story: God became flesh to seek us out, and then called us to embody this love for others. Homecoming assumes community, and the community of Jesus is one that, compelled by love and grace, is ever-expanding:
Scripture reassures us, “No one who trusts God like this—heart and soul—will ever regret it.” It’s exactly the same no matter what a person’s religious background may be: the same God for all of us, acting in the same incredibly generous way to everyone who calls out for help. “Everyone who calls, ‘Help, God!’ gets help.” (Rom. 10:11-13 – Message)
But how can people call for help if they don’t know who to trust? And how can they know who to trust if they haven’t heard of the One who can be trusted? And how can they hear if nobody tells them? And how is anyone going to tell them, unless someone is sent to do it? That’s why Scripture exclaims, A sight to take your breath away! Grand processions of people telling all the good things of God! Romans 10:11-15 (The Message)
So as I consider what it means to come home this Advent season, to “rediscover my roots in the Advent story”, I’m reminded that those roots grow both deep and wide. In fact, I discover that I really cannot come home, not as Jesus calls me to, unless I’m traveling that path home with others, as sojourners both to, and with, Christ.
What do I long for as I “Come Home” through the Advent story?
- I long to come home to a God who loves me, loves us, love the whole creation, so much that God would lay it all aside, become Emmanuel, and embrace us where we are, as we are.
- I long to come home to a God who does not abandon us, but is Emmanuel right here, right now, and calls us, as God’s holy community, to become emmanuel to our neighbors.
- And I long to come home to God’s future; all things reconciled to Christ (Col. 1:19-20), made whole, at peace, cradled in the grace and love of God.
How about you?
Ready for Advent II feast
What is the future you want to come home to?
Tom Sine
During the season of Advent I suspect most of us can call up some of our very best memories of coming home to a place of festivity and welcome by those who love us. Unfortunately that is not true for everyone.
I just came back from the bank on a beautiful brisk sunny day. For the first time I sensed that the teller, I will call Tamara, was troubled. She told me today that she is from Syria. Tamara, with evident concern, admitted that she is not sure if her parents are safe or not. I left the bank with a sinking feeling that she has no idea if she will ever come home again or if her parents will survive the ongoing violence.
As we celebrate Advent 2013 there are over 2 million Syrians who are not only refugees but many of them are at risk because of the ongoing war. At least 600,000 Filipinos are homeless this Christmas and countries all over the world are rushing to their aid. 172.000 Haitians are still in temporary shelters after the earthquake that destroyed their homes some time ago. Finally, there are still around 1.5 million Palestinians living in 58 refugee camps on the West Bank, Gaza, Jordon, Lebanon and other countries in the region for decades that have little hope of coming home.
As followers of Jesus how we respond to the urgent needs of our many homeless neighbors will be determined in part by notions of the future we believe Jesus invites us to come home to.
I was not raised in the church. I was converted into an evangelical faith. I was taught that coming home to God’s eternal world was all about my disembodied spirit going up to a non-material world in the clouds. Many people nurtured in this faith are still singing a song that I believe has more to do with the writings of Plato than the teachings of Jesus….”This world is not my home… I am just a passing through.”
Doesn’t popular eschatological literature of escape invite us to imagine going up at the rapture… leaving our clothes behind on airplane seats and leaving all the suffering behind? My first concern with this view of God’s purposes for the human future is that I am convinced it isn’t biblical. My second concern is that people who hold this view often seem to have very little concern for those that are left behind or even for the urgent needs that fill our world today.
Don’t most of the songs that Christians sing about coming home seem to be about us going up instead of Jesus coming down? We urgently need song writers to help us find some new images about coming home to this good world being restored and not destroyed.
In Surprised by Hope NT Wright invites us to re-discover a biblical vision of coming home that is not to a disembodied existence in the clouds. Instead he reminds us that the scripture teaches that that Jesus is coming down, the New Jerusalem is coming down…we are not going up. He argues convincingly from 1st Corinthians 15 that we will come home to a restored creation as a great bodily resurrected intercultural community…real bodies but different bodies just like our risen Leader.
One cannot read the Gospels or the prophets without realizing that God’s loving purposes are not just about changing us spiritually… as important as that is. God in Christ intends to make all things new. I am looking forward to coming home to a future in which the blind see, the deaf hear and lame run. I am looking forward to coming home to a future in which the broken are healed and all the refugees find their way home. I look forward to a future in which justice finally comes for the poor and oppressed and peace comes to the nations. I look forward to coming home to a future in which God’s good creation isn’t destroyed but restored with great celebration.
So Advent for me is always a great celebration of our best memories of coming home. But it is also an anticipatory celebration of the return of Christ when all things are finally made new.
Can I suggest this is not only a season of anticipation and celebration but a season of calling. Aren’t we called during this season of Advent to follow Jesus by making God’s purposes our purposes? Aren’t we called not to seek life but to lose life in service to God and others? Shouldn’t we as followers of Jesus to recommit our lives to God’s loving purposes for a people and a world?
I come to this season looking forward to Christine and I cooking and celebrating with friends old and new. It is my favorite season of the year. I am already planning the meals I plan to prepare.
But this year I feel nudged to find an intentional way to be a bit of God’s good news in my community every week. I made a call before I wrote this blog post to find a place I can make a little difference locally.
How is God inviting you during this season of Advent to not only celebrate the great homecoming but also to give expression to it in your neighborhood or God’s larger world?
Let us hear how you plan to both celebrate God’s great homecoming and seek to more actively advance it where you live.
Have a great celebration of Advent as homecoming with those you love.
Tom Sine is research guy at Mustard Seed Associates and hospitality guy at the Mustard Seed house. He has worked for many years as a consultant in futures research and planning for both Christian and secular organizations. His latest book is The New Conspirators
Today’s post is written by Lynne M Baab. Lynne is the author of numerous books on Christian spiritual practices, including Sabbath Keeping,Fasting, and Joy Together: Spiritual Practices for Your Congregation. She teaches pastoral theology in New Zealand. Her website has numerous articles she’s written about spiritual practices, as well as information about her books.
“Home” has been a hugely contested, even painful, term for me. My father was an air force pilot and we moved 12 times in my first 15 years. We spent five of those years in Europe. I’ve never felt at home in the U.S., and I have never really felt at home anywhere. The word “home” has often made me feel uneasy and sad. My husband, who lived in one small town from birth until high school graduation, would often say to me, “Our true home is in heaven.” I can give cognitive assent to that truth, but somehow it never helped me.
All this began to change in early 2011 when I read Crossings and Dwellings: A Theory of Religion. In it, Thomas A. Tweed argues that religion helps us create homes in four arenas: our bodies, the house we live in, our country, and the cosmos. He also says that religion helps us move between these homes.
My first personal response to Tweed’s theory was focused on my body. I’ve struggled with weight all my life and have often felt as if my body betrays me by wanting foods that are not good for me. In recent years my weight has been more stable and closer to normal, and I have become more “at home” in my body. While reading Crossings and Dwellings, I began to see that the first “home” I need to nurture is my own body. And I could see ways I’d done that in recent years, without using that language to describe it.
Advent is a great time to think about feeling at home in our bodies. Of course we know that God made our bodies, but that can feel a bit distant. God, way off in heaven, made this earth and each of us. The coming of Christ tells us that God is not far off in heaven but right here with us. In fact, God is right here with us in Jesus, who lived in a physical body just as we do. The New Testament gives us no hint that Jesus felt estranged from his body in any way. Instead, he seems to have felt at home in his body and this physical world, just as he felt at home in heaven and longed to return there.
The second personal application of Tweed’s theory came later in 2011 when I had a six-month sabbatical from my teaching position in New Zealand. I split that time between Seattle, where I spent 30 years of my adult life, and Europe, where I had spent time in childhood. In those months of moving between past places where I’d lived, I realized that I have several homes, and that’s okay. Seattle will always feel like home in one sense because I lived there longest. But my current hometown Dunedin, New Zealand, is wonderful, and I love many things about my house, my town and my adopted country. Dunedin feels like home now, in a way it didn’t before 2011. And a part of my sense of earthly home will always be in Europe because of my childhood there.
For the first time in my life, in 2011 I felt at home in all these places, rather than feeling at home in none of them. My faith in God, who became flesh and lived on this earth, enables me to move between homes because Jesus through the Holy Spirit is present in all my homes. Because the Holy Spirit dwells inside me, and because my body is the home that I take with me wherever I go, God is present with me in every place creating a home for me. But actually, God is present in those places before I get there and after I leave. I can watch for his fingerprints everywhere I go, and he will enable me to feel at home there.
Immanuel, God with us, who we anticipate throughout Advent and celebrate at Christmas, has changed my life in the past three years by helping me begin to feel at home in my body and by enabling me to experience various places as homes. My husband is right that our true home is in heaven, but in Advent we remember that Jesus brought that true home to earth in his flesh, and we are invited to dwell with him and let him dwell with us, truly at home in him, in our bodies, and in our houses and homelands.
As I write this, the sky outside is getting dark; ominous black clouds gathering, the harbinger of a coming tropical monsoon storm. Parts of my country Malaysia is submersed in the annual floods that plague this country in the monsoon period. The darkness of the gathering storm reflects the darkness of my soul. No, I did not have a bad year. In fact, 2013 will be considered by many to be a very successful year for me. I have received accolades for my medical work and medical teaching. I achieved the pinnacle in my academic development. I have presented a theological paper in an international conference, taught well received courses in theological seminaries, preached numerous sermons and led a couple of retreats. And many have been blessed by these. Yet, I feel empty. I feel a longing for something or someone. I feel homesick. C.S. Lewis has expressed what I am feeling well when he described that feeling he had as if hearing a familiar music from behind a door of a party you have not been invited to. The music invoking a sense of longing, a sense of homesickness of a home you have never seen before.
Advent, the season which leads to Christmas offers me this opportunity to express my homesickness. Christmas is the day we celebrate the birth of the Christ, God incarnate who took on human flesh. The almighty that became vulnerable as a newborn baby in Mary’s arms. The Messiah has come to take on the sins of the world so that all may be reconcile to the Holy Father. The Christ event has made possible my ticket home. This ticket was offered to me free by God’s loving grace. Like a person with amnesia, I may not remember what this home is like but I know that it will be a good place. This home will be where there is space for me to be me; with no pretensions or deceptions. Where I am loved for who I am, not what I do. Home is a space where I feel wanted and am comfortable in. Not an alien resident or squatter in a foreign land. This space is where I belong and am being part of. Coming to this home will be like I have never left. While I am here in this world, this home is still in me and will always be part of me.
Advent and Christmas promise new beginnings. Being at the end of December it is the closing of the year and a new year beckons. Many new journeys begin from home. We strike out from our safe comfortable homes on new quests of discoveries. Advent is coming back to base, rest and equip for another year ahead. Advent is homecoming. Christmas is home base. Then living forward to another quest; another year ahead of discovering the transcendent and immanent God in our daily lives.
Finally, Advent is coming home to another Christ event, that of His second coming. The return of the king will bring to an end the tremendous suffering of this groaning creation, and the billions of human souls on it. It will be an end to pain, suffering, loneliness and loss. The shalom of the Garden of Eden, the original perfect creation will be restored. And we will all come home, only to discover as T.S Eliot notes, it is where we all have began from.
Bio
Alex Tang lives in Malaysia, He is a paediatrician, associate professor of Paediatrics, practical theologian, and spiritual director. Please visit his website Kairos Spiritual Formation www.kairos2.com
The following is an excerpt from a post that I wrote for Shelovesmagazine.com The topic for the month is joy which is of course what the season is meant to be all about.
Tis the season of joy, or is it? As we move towards Christmas and the celebration of Christ’s coming, most of us are anything but joyful. One of my friends told me recently that she hates Christmas because she always eats too much, spends too much and commits to too much.
My friend is not alone.
The Christmas consumer frenzy focuses us away from the things that really matter and strips us of our joy. What we as individuals have come to see as important – individualism, status, and competition – diminishes rather than improves our happiness.
Consumption, not relationship, is the goal of society. Wealth, not happiness, is the measure of success.
Wait. Hope. See.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in God’s word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning
more than those who watch for the morning.
—Psalm 130:5-6
Advent. The season of waiting and preparing for the birth of Christ. But it’s not just about Baby Jesus, sweet and mild. Certainly we wait for Christmas and the celebration of Christ’s birth in history past, but we also wait for the risen Christ to come again.
In fact, the Gospel passage for the first Sunday of Advent—the first Sunday of the church year— is not the story of Jesus’ birth, not the story of the Annunciation or of Mary’s response to the angel’s startling proclamation, nor the story of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem. Rather, it is part of Jesus’ speech about the signs of the end of the age, when we will see “the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory” (Luke 21:27).
The Church’s choice of this passage speaks of the larger significance of Advent. Yes, Advent is a time of waiting and preparation leading up to Christmas—the celebration of Jesus’ birth in history—but ultimately, we are not waiting for Christmas; we are waiting for Christ’s return.
In English, the word “wait” tends to imply passivity, maybe even boredom. But this is not the implication that Jesus would have had in mind when he spoke of his disciples waiting for his return. In Hebrew, the word for “wait” is also the word for “hope.” Thus translators can render “Wait for the Lord” as “Hope in the Lord” with equal accuracy.
This linguistic equation of “wait” with “hope” means that for Jesus, immersed as he was in the language of the Hebrew Bible, there is no conceptual differentiation between waiting and hoping. They are one and the same activity. This melding is especially apropos during Advent, when we wait in hopeful expectation for the return of Christ. Henri Nouwen calls this “active waiting.”
Active waiting, he says, “means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment.”
One of the traditions I find most helpful in cultivating this attitude of mindful—and hopeful—attention during Advent is our family’s nightly lighting of the Advent wreath.
Each week during Advent, we light an additional candle, proclaiming as we do so, “Jesus Christ is the Light of the world, the Light no darkness can overcome.”
The progressive lighting of the candles reminds us to wait with attentiveness through the darkness of December, because the Light who is coming into the world already shines in the darkness—if only we will watch and see.
I invite you to pay attention this Advent as you wait with hope for Christ to come—because the truth is, Christ has already come. We are waiting for something that has already happened! Jesus Christ is the Light of the world—right here, right now—the light no darkness can overcome.
So look up, look around: where is the light of Christ breaking through the darkness of the world?
And, please, do share a few of those God-sightings with others (maybe in the comments?). Let’s help one another see the light as we wait for the Light.
—an edited excerpt from The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year
Bio
Today’s post is by Kimberlee Conway Ireton. Kimberlee is the mother of four children, an avid reader, and the author of The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year and a recently released memoir, Cracking Up: A Postpartum Faith Crisis. She and her family worship at Bethany Presbyterian Church in Seattle.
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