Advent and a Different Rhythm for Life

Thanks to a dear friend, I’ve been on a Diana Butler Bass kick for a moment. This friend gifted me the book, Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks, last week and I haven’t had a chance to start because of an unusually busy Advent season personally, professionally and in my responsibilities at church. I hope to write a review soon into the new year. But speaking of Advent, Bass’s book, A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom, and Perseverance, has got me thinking about the way our liturgical calendar is more than a schedule of events, it’s a call to live a life separate from the entire militaristic, consumerist and generally unneighborly culture we are planted within. The liturgical calendar contributes to what Walter Bruggemann called the counterscript of our faith.

How can something as simple as a church calendar become a counterscript against greed, oppression and empire? Bass points out that the modern calendar we live by is centered around an imperial worldview even though we fail to recognize it today thanks to our own casual familiarity. Our months are mostly named for tyrannical emperors and gods, and I don’t mean El, Adonai, Jesus or Sophia. In America especially, we’ve turned the calendar into a map of civic ritual that turns holy seasons into shopping sprees. Our calendar valorizes military power and national pride. I’m not saying it’s sinful to recognize the sacrifice of our veterans, celebrate our independence and raise our flag occasionally. I just want you to recognize that our national calendar comes with its own worldview and looking around right now I don’t think that worldview can sustain our hope.

Our calendar in America is oriented to get us to work hard and shop faster. This year, even in conservative Woodmoor, Colorado, many of the homes seemed to decorate as much for Halloween as for Christmas. It would be easy to blame Trump’s caustic corrosion of our values and his destruction of our economy – I mean really, who can afford to put up lights this year? But the truth is that we’ve embraced this consumerist view of culture where a kid’s holiday for dress up has become a Home Depot bonanza featuring animatronic witches, billowing inflatables and colassal skeletons.

Our culture’s calendar teaches us some dumb, harmful things. Faster is better. Owning things is success. Creating a miniature public spectacle in our front yard is a path to meaning. The church’s liturgical calendar stands in defiance to these cultural values. It offers a cyclical counterscript that calls us to slow down, pay attention, listen to God’s spirit and live into a different rhythm.

It’s interesting that many Christians seem generally unaware of the season of Advent. Perhaps it seems a little Catholicized for their tastes. We want to start decorating and singing carols by Thanksgiving if not All Saints. I also decorate my house on the Friday after Thanksgiving. My two tall boys are home from college, still fine in feather as their old man continues to age, so it is practical to knock it all out together and be done. Some people in church feel the same way about decorating. To wait seems to dampen some joy we all desperately need right now. Yet, if we simply treat Advent like, “pre-Christmas,” we are letting our consumerist culture define our practices. We risk losing the formative power of the season of darkness and imminent light. We miss out on the critical elements of faith that have always involved waiting, repentance, solidarity with the lonely, low and meek, and most importantly, the expectancy of hope. We trade it in for the hurry of Walmart.

Our historic faith marks time differently and with purpose. We begin in Advent and on toward Easter and Pentecost rather than mark our time with emperors, harvests and consumption. This rhythm forms faith with recurring calls to silence, repentance and celebration. We should be proud of conflicting with society’s calendar. Stay quiet and dark while the mall overstimulates. Fast when Cadbury is pushing their Easter eggs. Tell a story that is very different from your newspaper’s circular ads.

That story is about waiting and hope, not instant gratification. It’s about preparation where we can examine the mangers of our own hearts to receive the Christ child. And it’s about seeing light in the darkness, because the world will always be dark until the end of time but Christ’s light shines through our hope and imagination amid our longest winters.

We worship a God in Jesus Christ who has turned the value of the world upside down. Our church rhythms remind of us of that call. God didn’t become a little child to follow the rhythms of emperors and false gods. Christ walked a very strange and unexpected path, free from human opinions and plans. The disciples spend so much time being confused in the gospels that it borders on humor. The Christ child doesn’t fit into our pattern; He is uniquely free and sovereign. The holy infant may not be so tender and mild after all, choosing to sleep in the lowliest of all places where all our reason objects. There is nothing tender and mild in the image of God as a swaddled baby asleep in a dirty feeding trough. God chooses to break into our darkness by irritating our pride, nagging at our sensibilities, overturning our greed, upending our power structures.

Following this kind of God is difficult work that I might keep putting off if not for seasons like Advent. We must cultivate humility to earn some jollification. And we’re reminded that what we rejoice is not some kind of Platonist vision of our soul eventually escaping this earth to drift off into the clouds of Heaven. We rejoice God joining us in the filthy muck. We rejoice that our God is free and dangerous and wild, working miracles amid darkness and despair, writing symbols in the dirty ground, raising the small and joining the overlooked people of creation. God loves the lowly and has entered the lowest most broken places where we least expect Him. In a way, we’re always in Advent, never knowing when the Christ child appears to us in the form of the homeless man, the aging widow, the struggling immigrant, the unfed school child and the mentally challenged bag boy. Our waiting, our patience, prepares us to meet this child where He wants to be met in the most staggering, assumption-shattering, awkward and even embarrassing places we can go. That child is a rascal.

So, let’s not leap too quickly to large and loud celebrations where we might fall to dependence on human wisdom instead of Christ’s scandalous truth. Let’s wait in silence and darkness, savoring the anticipation for that little baby that turned the world upside down.