Comfort

This past Sunday marked the first Sunday of Advent. According to the Christian calendar, we have now moved from ordinary time into holy time. This is a season for heightened spiritual sensitivity, for community, for worship and wonder.

Advent means coming, and in this season we prepare our hearts for the spiritual meaning of God’s coming to us, an event that has already happened in history through the life of Jesus, God in a human body. This coming also remains our future hope, for the second meaning of Advent is our hope in the way God will come to us in the culmination of human history. The story we are part of is a hopeful one.

The truth about Advent is that it is a mixture of glory and suffering. There are those moments when we hope we can see things above and beyond us (angel choirs and heavenly stars), what we might call the wonder of this season. But there are also those moments when we realize the stark incompleteness of our lives, and this despite the amazing gift of God in Jesus. Read the Christmas stories as they are presented in the gospels of Matthew and Luke and see if you can pick out these two seemingly contradictory story lines.

In Luke’s gospel (chapters 1-2), the birth story of Jesus is surrounded by human stories of waiting and fulfillment. Elizabeth and Zechariah (1:5-25) are now granted a child after years of waiting. And the twin stories of Simeon and Anna (2:25-38) show how the deepest heart’s desire can be met, though the wait is long . This thread of “the long wait fulfilled” is woven throughout the way Luke tells the Christmas story.

But the Matthew story is somewhat more complicated. For even though the fulfillment motif is also very prominent, the story ends with the holy family having to flee Herod’s wrath and hide for a time in Egypt. In Mathew’s rendition of the story we see how advent is a “now but not yet” reality: while it is true that the long-promised king has been born, it is also true (for a season) that the evil king continues to rule. Fullness (whatever that means) still awaits a future day. Christmas, the first coming, brings to us what we are waiting for (God’s promised king and kingdom), and yet asks us to live in suspension before God brings these things to completion.

This past weekend at Westside King’s Church we sought to address this “other side of Christmas” by noticing and naming some of the issues that make Christmas less than all we hope for. Loneliness, family dysfunction, and loss were three of the ways we chose to address the struggles of our community. We called this special focus a “comfort service”, and if you participated you will know the emotions that were evoked. But these things, these heartbreaks and losses, are also part of Christmas, the reminder that while God has come to us, there is still more we wait for.

This past week I discovered a Jewish prayer which contains a lot of wisdom I think. It is both hopeful and realistic, and does not diminish the struggle we have in waiting: “O Lord, we know you will help us; but will you help us before you help us?” I think that prayer says a lot. May the joys and comfort of Christmas be yours as we wait for God to complete the story.

Bob-O