A Reflection for the First Sunday of Advent

Last updated on: November 29, 2015 at 7:44 am by Anne Kennedy

A Reflection for the First Sunday of Advent 2015-11-29T07:44:14-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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There’s a very pretty and depressing Christmas Carol that we have sometimes sung on Christmas Eve during communion after all the children have been extracted from their costumes and the buzz and excitement have died ever so slightly down. It’s all about Mary holding Jesus and feeling sad as she looks ahead to the crucifixion. She holds his tiny hands and imagines nails being driven into them. If you ever feel like a good irrational cry, this is the carol for you. I would always have to explain to some weeping child later, ‘they did kill him when he was a baby, they waited until he was all grown up’, which doesn’t really help diffuse a sugar laden grief.

That’s the thing about Advent and Christmas, death looms over the horizon. It’s so exciting that God came to be with us, to walk this way, to enter into the grit and grime of humanity. The sparkling and the carols, it’s so lovely and beautiful. But the poverty of his mother and the stable, the sudden desperate flight from Herod, the foreshadowing elements of the reason for his coming are heavy in the narrative. It’s no wonder the non religious person would avert his gaze from the manger and fix it on a Macy’s Santa. Rather than keeping Christ, who walks the way of death, in one’s heart the whole year through, the cheerful-er way is to keep Christmas. Presents and tinsel and chestnuts.

The psalm appointed for today begins this way.
To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul;
my God, I put my trust in you; *
let me not be humiliated,
nor let my enemies triumph over me.
Psalm 25:1

It quite hit me because I’ve just gotten through David’s flight from Jerusalem, up the Mount of Olives and then across the Jordan, in the face of his son, Absolam’s rebellion. This sudden journey is one of the most heartbreaking snapshots of the cross in all of scripture. David goes out of the city, barefoot, his head covered as a sign of mourning. He is cursed. He is rejected by one and accepted by another. He, momentarily, endures the shame of humiliation and yet his only thoughts and care are for the one who is trying to kill him. It’s such a surprising moment in an otherwise ordinary feeling account of his kingship.

So many people who follow Jesus do have to join him in tasting humiliation and defeat. Mary, Joseph, John, Peter, Paul, James, David, Elijah, all the prophets, the list could go on. To follow Jesus is to admit, in your most essential self, defeat and humiliation, to grab on to the cross and it’s death.

Which is why Advent and Christmas are the beginning of the church year, not its culmination. They are the sudden, surprising, alarming moments of the incarnation. They are meant to jar us awake, to cause us to rub our bleary eyes and admit to the truth, to lift up the soul to God and examine carefully who he is and what he is doing. The feast, the joy, the celebration launch us forward to the real business of why Jesus came.

And yes, it was to die, but it was more also to rise again and defeat death forever. The baby Jesus and the Risen Christ produce the same, practically intolerable joy, the true and complete relief of turning on the lights for the first time, of finding that the sentence of death was taken away. Lift up your soul, then, to the one who comes in poverty, put your trust in him who endured everything for the one he loves.

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