The True Meaning of Advent 


Jim knits up the raveled sleeve of care about Advent. 

Ok, it's nearly done. We had our Fourth Sunday in Advent service, as it happened, we celebrated Rose Sunday today in honor of Mary the Mother of God. We hung up the greens and put out the poinsettias over eggnog and baklava. And I, faithful and true to my promise, am here to dispense Advent wisdom. Oh, I know I'm talking to myself, but let's pretend that you haven't closed the window yet.

Thirty three years as an academic tempted me for just a second to approach this last epistle as if I knew something, quoting Bible scholars and tracing long reasoned arguments from proposition to proposition to THE ONLY conclusion possible. But I just don't have the credentials, and it would be preposterously pretentious of me to try to set up that appearance.

This is, after all, only a journal, a web log, and I must put down my thoughts and feelings honestly, even if not cogently. So, for what it's worth, after four plus weeks of contemplation, reflection and study, this is what still makes sense to me.

You know, it still looks pretty damn bleak here in this manger. Unfortunately, it is filled with garbage. Once treasured approaches to God now decay and spoil the stable.

Take our Hebrew Scripture reading for the day: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16. God tells the prophet Nathan to inform David that God establishes forever the throne of David and his heirs. Centuries later, we find two of the gospels, Luke and Matthew, establishing the genealogy of Jesus. Matthew starts with Abraham and works forward to Joseph, while Luke starts with Jesus and works backward through Joseph's father-in law (Mary's father) to God. Thus presumably, if Jesus is to establish a new eternal kingdom, it would have to trace back (through male ancestry) to David so that the Biblical prophesy could be fulfilled.

If this approach is taken literally, I believe that it actually undermines the coming of the Kingdom of God. We're not going to get to Christ's Kingdom by kowtowing to phony patriarchal pretensions. Part of the problem that we deal with today is that every Sunday along with the Lord's truth, we get several spoonfuls of male superiority. A lot of people say that it doesn't bother them, but that worries me even more. In my vision of Christ's Kingdom, the patriarchs know their place around the peaceful campfire. The scales have been lifted from their eyes, and they know that they are not special by reason of being male progenitors, they are special because they have a humble human heart. Ditto the matriarchs and lesbiarchs and gayarchs. Ok, sure, I could have just overlooked this bit about patriarchy and focused on the promise of God's salvation of Israel. I DID get it, I just got ALL of it.

Or take the famous Canticle 15: The Song of Mary, the Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55. Yes, this canticle is about Mary's joy as the bearer of this Holy Son, about her blessedness and her humility. However this event occurred—be it Mary's report of her dream, a tale she constructed, or the story of a Jewish rabbi illustrating the fruit of God's promise—it WOULD be a joyous and awesome event. We can appreciate that.

What we cannot appreciate are the vengeful images which quickly fall the one on top of the other: scattering the proud, kickin' kings butts, scorning the rich, helping only Israel, promising only the dads and the kids. People, these are very violent images. We hear a lot about hidden messages in the media. Well, God, the kick-ass dude, is certainly a not-so-hidden message here. And if you think I am being disrespectful, or even sacrilegious, I guess it's because I pray to a more peaceful God than you do. I want this PEACEFUL God to come, first in our minds, and then in our hearts, and then in the world. It won't happen the other way: first in the world, and then in our hearts, and then in our minds.

I'm going to skip over the Psalm (89:1-4, 19-26) and the Epistle (Romans 16:25-27). But I do need to address the Gospel reading carefully. Still, claiming to be a Christian, after a lifetime of seeking, decades of faithful church attendance, and years of Bible study, this is what I think.

Luke is the only Gospel (1:26-28) that tells of the visitation to the virgin, Mary, of the angel Gabriel to tell of her of God's favor for her. She will bear God's Holy Son. Gabriel even tells her what to call her child: Jesus. God, through the Holy Spirit, is the real father here, just as he is of the son of her relative, Elizabeth, in her old age and until now barren. This story is not literally true.

First remember that most scholars think that Mark was written about 3+ decades after Jesus' death, Matthew and Luke, about 45 years after His death, and John, maybe 7 decades after our Lord's death. Mark, the earliest gospel, does not tell this story. Matthew, possibly writing contemporaneously with Luke, does not tell this story, although he does tell a story about the shepherds visitation by angels and the visit of the wise men. John, having decided that Jesus Christ was the Original Word of God, does not have to prove his divinity by talking about miraculous births or visitations by angels to make his point.

But surely, whoever wrote these gospels would not simply make it up! Well, EVERYTHING is made up at some level. Did Luke have evidence? What counted as evidence in those days? My contention is that Luke (or whoever wrote that gospel) had all the evidence he thought he needed to conclude that surely the virgin birth MUST HAVE HAPPENED. After all, there were all the apostle's stories about miraculous healings, castings out of demons, and raisings from the dead. The apostles had SEEN these things. And there was the PASSION. The EMPTY TOMB. Or so the stories, told by trustworthy sources, said. Remember that Jewish midrash is not a scientific process of proving hypotheses. Jewish midrash is a process of inventing language to express what we already know to be true: that God is faithful to his wayward people. And the Jews that became Christians also believed that Jesus Christ was the Messiah.

So here I am at the end of Advent. Maybe the angels visited the shepherds. Maybe the Magi visited the Christ Child. Maybe Mary was a virgin visited by the Holy Spirit. I don't think so, but maybe these things were true.

On Christmas Eve I won't be able to enter into that childhood fantasy in the way that some others may be able to. The words to the hymns may paint pictures of cold and barren landscapes which I may imaginatively be able to enter into. The bells may recall medieval images of chubby seraphim flapping their silent wings above my head. But I'll know that THIS is NOT the true meaning of Christmas.

It is a miracle that Jesus Christ was born at all, given the vagaries of this wayward world. It's even more of a miracle that He survived to adulthood and taught the lessons and did the works that He did. And most of all, it's a miracle that He left us a Way to bring God into the world. I'll get much closer to the King when the eucharist is shared. I don't know how He got here, but I do know that Jesus Christ is here. I have a clear enough picture of His amazing life here on earth to know that somehow His Life did make it back here. And that's something to ring a bell about. 

Posted: Sun - December 18, 2005 at 02:45 PM          

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