Advent’s Leveling.

Magnificat, Sister Mary Grace Thule

If you care to ponder the heart of God's reconciliation of all things in Christ, what the Old Prophets called that "Great and a Terrible Day," you'd do well to spend some time with Mary's song, The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55).

I grew up thinking about Jesus' apocalyptic return more than most. I recall lying in bed as a child, unable to sleep, afraid Jesus would burst through the sky at any moment. My fear was not of Jesus or punishment but of missing out. I wanted to live a full life—marriage, kids, friends, career, that sort of thing. I completely misunderstood the nature of Jesus' new world. Misguided theology aside, there is still something left of this fear lurking within me to this day. The coming of Jesus means the end of life as I know it.

The Christmas season can fill us to the brim with profound hope. Yet, as ever, when God shows up to a broken world, confrontation is imminent. We see this in humanity's hiding from God in God's post-fruit arrival in the garden, in Isaiah's painful self-awareness in the throne room encounter, and in Herod's maniacal Massacre of the Innocents at the news that God has come as a baby. When God arrives in the dark world, the dark world does not readily and easily receive God. God's coming is confrontational. It not only confronts us with God's presence but also with the new world that accompanies Him.

God brought the first apocalypse with that baby. And with Him the rectification of the world. In Advent, we remember this while looking forward to that final apocalypse with hope.

With an infant's wail darkness was put on notice. The birth of a baby meant the beginning of the end for the powers that be. The world's rulers, authorities, and influencers, and all that propped them up, were ending. The rigged system was about to come crashing down.
This is why Mary sings.

The days are numbered for the powers and systems of oppression and injustices, big and small. All we face, sicknesses, debt, racism, mental illnesses, injustice, and inequality will end. This is the good news of Advent—not just that God has come into the world, but that a new world order comes with Him. Heaven invades creation, and the Light drives the darkness out.

What I feared as a little boy lying in bed at night has already happened. And the arrival of God in my life has put me on notice, daily confronting me. Jesus has come, and life can never be the same. But the thing I fear is really great news.

Jesus' arrival, past, present, and future, confronts us because it will not allow us to go on our merry way and live unaffected by His coming. The world as you know it is gone—passing away as the New Testament writers put it. A new world has come.

This confrontation terrifies us. We fear God's coming because it threatens to take from us the things we suppose give us life: wealth, power, influence, authority, and the like. These are often what we've given our lives to, and they are at risk.

God's coming means everything you depend on and are so proud of—all you have likely lived for—will be stripped away. The proud will be scattered, the powerful toppled, and the rich sent away empty-handed.
I fear being leveled.

It's easy to stand in judgment of the counterfeit imitations of peace, joy, and hope that are passed around this time of year. Drink a Coke, and there will be peace on earth. It's so obviously laughable and yet works so effectively. Madison Avenue understands something about humanity's deep-seated longing for something more.

Maybe this deep ache of our soul is why we get so excited about Christmas each year. And maybe it's why we are so often miserable come January. We long for something more.

The season of Advent highlights this longing. We, a people claimed by and set apart by God, continue to exist in a place of sin, darkness, and death. We have every reason to rejoice and to mourn all at once. We are infused with God's presence but long for it still. We are healed but broken, alive but dying, righteous but sinful—making God's coming and confrontation of us a daily reality. We are exiles, and as such we are dissatisfied.

We face two temptations in this state: deny the darkness or submit to it. 

Advent helps us avoid these temptations by asking us to stretch our imaginations back to all that God has done for us as a people while confronting the shadows stretching across our world, our lives, and our hearts. As exiles, we can look back and long for God's presence to manifest itself in a powerful and meaningful way. The memory moves us to resist the darkness. We rail against the night, insisting darkness is not all there is. We yearn for deliverance, for God's arrival. It is a season of sorrow and joy mingled into longing and hope.

As much as Advent reminds us of the darkness surrounding us, it is also a season of moving towards the light. The hope we have is not optimism—the fantasy that things are not as bad as they seem.

There needs to be more clarity these days between hope and optimism. It is a common misconception to understand hope as an adjustment to your mindset, a shift in your perspective. Just stay positive. But Fleming Rutledge tells us optimism "arises out of denial of the real facts" while hope "persists in spite of the clearly recognized facts." Optimism depends on you. Hope looks outside of yourself. It is "Anchored in something beyond," Rutledge says.

And therein lies the difference. Optimism lives in denial and turns within. Hope tells the truth and searches beyond. Optimism denies the darkness. Hope denies darkness is all there is. Christian hope maintains that the God of Light has come and will come again, and both arrivals plunder the darkness, taking back and restoring all that belongs to the Light. Hope tells the truth about the world.

The trap we easily fall into a few weeks before Christmas is once again returning to false hope—looking to those things within our reach and control we so often believe will give us life. We look forward to bonuses, promotions, or even food and drink to satiate our longing hearts. The discontent stirred by Advent's reminder grows stale. This, too, is darkness. The subtle ploy lulls us into a sense of false contentment. We forget for a moment how shattered the world around us is.

Yet, Advent speaks to our indifference to God's coming and redirects us to hope. We can feel the numbness and cry, "How long, O' Lord?! Will you forget me forever?! How long will you hide your face from me?!" The distractions let us down like they always do, and the return of deep longing follows the sudden surge of superficial delight. Our numbness wakes us up to our need for God to show up. 

We do not deny the darkness.
We do not submit to the darkness.
We hope.

Our eggnog and tinsel are not the problem. The Christmas season pulls the curtain back, exposing all we think might deliver us from this ruptured world. Things that are good but cannot bear the weight of our hope.

Mary's song directs our attention to God's coming reign, and we gaze upon a dirty trough in a stall dug into the side of a hill where a baby lay. There is our hope, among the refuse, poverty, inhospitality, and injustice of the fractured cosmos. There is our hope, in that tiny, helpless, weak infant, anointed with the aroma of manure, rotting hay, poverty, and rejection. There is our hope in the darkness. At once, that weak, small, helpless child calls every allegiance we have into question.
And we are confronted.
It is terrifying.

Skipping Christmas and all its trappings is not the answer. That merely slaps a self-righteous bandaid on the deeper problem the God-babe pries from our hearts by His presence. More confrontation.

In Christ's presence, we quickly realize how weak and needy we are—how addicted we are to looking for lasting life in trivial things. When we know life can't be found here. We discover that our fate, our lives, our hopes, and our dreams are not really in our hands at all. This, too, is terrifying. 

And so Advent asks us to be brave enough to look beyond, to admit all is not well with us or our world. It asks us to face and name the darkness within and around us while holding out hope that God is bringing real, lasting redemption from outside us.

Advent tears us in two. We live in the paradox of already and not yet as we experience suffering and joy, lament and praise, discontentment and peace, and judgment and deliverance. We are caught between who we are and who God invites us to be, what is and what should be.

And we hope. Christmas reminds us that God has not abandoned us. Recovering this reality allows us to fully enter the celebratory fray with zeal and gusto, embracing any and all joy and delight we experience as foretastes of the fullness to come. The beyond has drawn near to us.

Our fears can blossom into hope. As we acknowledge the painful truth echoed in W. H. Auden's Christmas Oratio,"Nothing can save us that is possible: we who must die demand a miracle," Mary's words are transfigured from a harbinger of doom to a spring of hope. If we allow ourselves the humiliation, we come to see that we are not, in fact, the rich and the powerful that we think we are. We are the needy and impoverished ones in desperate need beyond ourselves. God's confrontation has leveled us, brought us low, and sent us away empty so we might see things clearly. From this place of poverty, we can now open ourselves up to allowing God to give us what we've been trying to earn for ourselves all along. In God's grace and righteousness, we find the life we've been aching for. The coming of God's reign, which I so often find myself fearing, is the deep longing of my heart.

And in this impoverished place, I realize I am in the darkness, and God is with me here.

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