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[Transcript of video]
On the first Sunday of Advent each year, worlds collide. The gospel’s seemingly-frightening imagery is a beautiful and delicious beginning to this season of Advent, this season of anticipation, emergence. Advent apocalypse seems at first incongruous, but I think it is perfect for a week of hope. The text this year and each year is always a striking and frightening vision of what happens when the current regime encounters the perfect eternal reign. It seems frightening, at first, because it seems like a threat to us to imagine the sun no longer shines, to imagine the stars falling from the sky and the moon going dark. It helps, though, to shift the angle of our thought and to imagine not ourselves as under attack, but the dominant hierarchies of power that are threatened. When the-world-as-it-is collides with the-world-that-can-be, the-world-that-should-be, everything we thought was solid and fixed – like the shining sun and moon, like the stars in their constellations – these things that we thought were our pillars and our poles, these statues and monuments to injustice are pulled down and crash down with booming thunder and sparks of lightening.
This first week of Advent is the critical beginning of the anticipation, the inauguration of the weeks of becoming to come. It’s a kind of cosmic controlled brushfire. It’s a divine cutting down and sweeping away – so that a voice then can cry out from (or to) that newly cleared wilderness space, so that a Baptizer can then call us to repent and reject the hierarchies of power, so that we can be called then along with Mary to conceive of and bring forth a new being and a new Way of being.
Without the whirling cataclysm of this first week of Advent, the peaceful nativity is premature. We can’t get to Christmas without going through the apocalypse. We cannot reach Easter without going through Good Friday. We cannot skip to racial reconciliation without doing the work of repair. As we begin this season of bringing-into-being, our task and our hope is to participate in a whirling cataclysm of upheaval. To spend these days letting go, tearing down old values and assumptions, and then taking each of the next steps of Advent opening our lives and values and practices to a new way, and repenting, and giving birth to justice.
Some people think love is a noun. Some people think Emmanuel is a person. But apocalyptic hope means to live as though Emmanuel, “God with us,” is a verb. We are not to wait for the reign to happen to us, we must help bring it about. We are the incarnation of that good reign. Heaven has no body but ours, no hands, no feet but ours. Ours are the feet the eternal walks on, our hands bless the world.
Peace
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