Today is the first day of Advent, the period constituted by the four Sundays preceding Christmas Day. The early church developed it as a liturgical counter-balance of sorts to Easter and Lent (the six weeks before Easter). In fact Christmas was first known or understood as the “little Lent.” The latter was were the emphasis was put in Christian practice and communal life. Of course, as we know today, it’s not as good for the bottom line of financials at the end of the year, and least easily marketed. Hence our super-emphasis upon Christmas in modern Western (and now global culture).
But I digress. Both Advent and Lent were and are intended to be periods of preparation for paramount feast days – celebrating the promise, potential and practice of resurrection; as well as that of incarnation (God taking on flesh, becoming like us). The word “advent” comes from the Latin “adventus” meaning coming as it is the Latin translation of the Greek word “parousia” which is the term for the Second Coming of Christ. And so the season is punctuated with different liturgical and ritual signs and symbols, developed historically through the church’s interpretation and practice of living scripture in community. A wreath. Calendars. The liturgical color of the season is purple – mirroring that of Lent – and also reflecting the idea of divinity and kingship; for purple, being the most expensive dye to create in the ancient world, was usually only worn by royalty. The four Sundays are also organized in such as way as to further our own contemplation, preparation and action around the theological elements of the larger Christmas story (the first coming of Christ) as well as the promise of the Parousia [or second-coming] of Christ to complete and perfect what has been started and is continually unfolding. So it’s a season of both looking backwards to remember, and looking forward in anticipation. Both movements are interdependent. For there can be no future without a past, and no past without the future it yearns for.
The scriptures suggested as liturgically organized readings [this is called the Lectionary – a structure for reading through the Bible in public worship over a repeating three year cycle] for this first Sunday are:
This first Sunday is often called the HOPE Sunday, as the unifying emphasis of the scriptures points to our hope that God has not finished what has been begun yet in both creation and the salvation story of Jesus. Jewish tradition recalls the 7 days of creation, a cycle that repeats until creation will be freed from the structure of time. It’s on that Day of the Lord, that future point, hoped for moment, when creation will be freed to enter a new sabbath, a sabbath of sabbaths, a perfected time, space and place of God’s presence: the eighth day. Our Christian lexicon talks of this as heaven, or the coming Kingdom of God, the reign of God begun in Jesus which is both already and not yet perfected. I’m struggling to name this. It’s something beyond language, convention and even our imagination (another trait you’ll see in the scriptures for the day).
Rabbi Heschel wrote about this existence and encounter of the Divine, naming it a mysterious truth that is both beyond us, and something that we can grasp or “get.”
“In any case, this perception of the sublime [the seeing of God which always fosters human dignity] involves an awareness of mystery, for “what smites us with unquenchable amazement is not that which we grasp and are able to covey but that which lies without our reach but beyond our grasp. Standing face-to-face with the grandeur of the world we are overcome with the realization that the world is something we apprehend but cannot comprehend, that the world is itself hiddenness; its essence is a mystery. And the transcendent meaning to which the sublime alludes is a meaning wrapped in mystery.”
– Approaching God: The Way of Abraham Joshua Heschel
In this season of Advent preparation, how do you hunger for this mysterious truth, this transcendent hope, this hard-to-put-into-words energy that creates, motivates and perfects life?