The Twin Poles of Advent

Advent is inherently paradoxical. It marks the beginning of the liturgical year and comes as the secular year draws to a close. The season of Advent is in many ways a microcosm of the entire year, and it carries within it pressures and burdens in particularly powerful ways. It is a condensed version of the time during which Christ’s followers were swept away among themselves.

There will never be a time (as long as death and decay befall us) that we will not wait for the return of the King. It is fitting, then, that we story-shaped creatures designate a calendar season for the sanctification of remembrance and anticipation, in order to strengthen our vigilance. As we look back, look back, and look back to the present, we know that Christ is coming again, but we find ourselves singing the laments of those who were looking forward to His first coming.

Advent seems to be gaining popularity again, which I’m very grateful for. However, there are some caveats.

The problem is hidden in plain sight. Many Christians focus on the happier valence offered by Advent wreath candles. A relatively novel addition Practicing Advent. Is there any problem since it is relatively new? Absolutely not. I also have nothing against candles, which symbolize hope, peace, joy, and love.

But what I would like to focus on is not just that Advent Sunday is traditional, but what it testifies to. There is a substance here that can feed us now if we pay attention to it. In previous centuries, Advent Sunday was dedicated to the four final things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

Not that I think Advent has anything to do with the values ​​named by the wreath candles. The problem is that when we focus on these four things, we often end up relatively forgetting the other old four things. Grace is inherently dialectical because two seemingly opposite things are twinned to serve God’s love and our needs. Therefore, as I have argued before, death and life entail each other. God’s mercy is given only to those who fail. God, who is above all things, comes to save us from the constraints of the flesh that define us. Grace takes root in the manure of our world. And as we face the realities of death, judgment, heaven, and hell, we are given hope, love, joy, and peace.

But our corrupted and divided subjectivity flattens complexity and occupies one side of the dialectical pair. By focusing on just one note of a chord, we diminish the obscure and diminish the great. This harmony has some dissonance, but it helps the chord progression and propels the song. Look at the candle again. We long for hope, but we shun the death that guarantees it. We long for peace, but we tremble at the judgment that confirms it. We are hungry for joy, but we are reluctant to see the joy of heaven with the Lord of heaven. And although we are hungry for love, we hide from ourselves the hell we have created for ourselves. We say we want help, but we claim that only we know what’s wrong with us. We are shocked by the arrival of grace.

We need the discipline to recognize its arrival because we routinely content ourselves with a vanity that reflects only one side of the pair. We always want to feast and never fast. The commodifying forces are happy to superficially treat human wounds and say “peace, peace” when there is no peace (Jeremiah 6:14). Capitalism makes false promises by providing us with tens of thousands of objects that cannot satisfy our desires or make us whole. Consumer products provide external hooks on which we temporarily hang our self-deceptions. This thing outside of me solidifies the illusion that there is something I can acquire to finally complete me. “You will not die” and “You will be like God,” the video parade promises.

Everywhere our attention is demanded by events that rob us of hope and make us forget our first love. Not only the product, but the completed version of yourself is presented in front of you at the store or on a screen. “Visible hope is not hope,” Paul warns (Romans 8:24). We cannot treat the substance of hope as property, as another commodity that we can buy or produce to show off to others. Hope rooted in the reality of Jesus Christ recognizes the essential and critical lack at the core of our being, a lack that nothing can repair or fill.

Advent is a time of emergency. There’s no time for pretending. Advent is a time for telling the truth. It is the furnace into which we throw the very real problems of life and the larger world. We do not throw them away to deny their existence, but we throw them away in order to kindle the fire of hope, to hone it, and to melt the alternative hopes being peddled around us. In that fire, the pressures that warp our resolve and peace are redirected, and our grief is reforged as a hold on future hope.

Hope is the name of our perseverance rather than the strength we exert. The engine of hope is the patient Jesus, who alone faced and thwarted the inhuman forces that overwhelm us. The power of the devil, the power of the Roman Empire, and the power of Jesus’ conniving compatriots are not far removed from the futile forces that drain us today. There are still Caesars, CEOs, and technologists who crave power and glory at our expense. Such forces, along with the absolute gravity of their existence in a fallen world, poured out their anger on Jesus and in turn exhausted him. So if you want to endure the injustices of this world and endure the fatigue that comes with trying to endure them, you must cling to God.

There are many sources that promise relief from this feeling of fatigue. but “Aggressive investment in new products, new industries, new factories, new science, and big leaps forward.“It won’t be supplied. We can’t invest in perfection, we can’t manufacture it. Reels won’t bring us the relief we’re hungry for. New shoes, Stanleys, strong drinks (or fours) won’t bring us. We don’t ‘need’ these things. Vice is not a coping mechanism: it is debilitating. You cannot give anything that has been eroded by acid.

This is why it is necessary to prepare oil for the lamp (Matthew 25:1-13). We are creatures with limits. We get tired in the best of circumstances, but we get even more tired in our current pressure cooker lives. We are used to settling for fake hopes sold to us by influencers. This is because they think they are seeing the results they are getting for their money. Some part of us knows this, but when we feel that life is too much of a burden, we ignore it. We are like children playing with matches when we light a candle of hope and peace and then go home and live out the wine mom cliché, or retreat into our man caves, or become numb to the humiliation and hurt that makes modern life so difficult.

If you are alive, you are a pilgrim heading somewhere. Therefore, it is beneficial to be careful about the path you are on and change course if you see that the stars are wrong and you are not approaching your destination. Of course, you may become convinced that you have reached where you think you should reach. No one in our social circles or broader culture lacks a voice to assure us, “You’ve got this, King!” or “You lack nothing, Queen!” kill!“When we are actually wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked (Revelation 3:17).

We always promote ourselves as more than we actually are. We pretend not only to the world but to ourselves in our posts and profile pictures. We project boastful words and images as if we are something, even though we are often characterized as nothing. There is a light that periodically breaks through this darkness and it someday makes all sad things untrue, but the source of that light is not brave enough for us to see it. and we definitely not light. we do not have What we were waiting for.

Each of us has a life within ourselves. We are a mystery even to ourselves. We are all constantly hanging in the abyss of nothingness. Our existence is a gift from God who embraces us above nothingness. We all need our paths set in motion and continually reevaluated by the One who has no needs, no possibilities waiting to be realized, and no need for adjustment from anyone else. This person not only knows the way; teeth road.

We feel the desperation crackling through various afflictions, from deadlines and quotas to polarization and war. Each of these are tears of hurt in our world, proof that this is not the way things should be. We feel in them the precipice on which our lives depend.

We feel how different this is from the empty time sequences we are used to. Time pervades our lives. In relentless, relentless flight over seconds, minutes, hours, and days, we demand output as products, as billable services, as spreadsheet entries that translate into materials used and dollars spent.

But that is not what we feel as Advent approaches. Kronos but Kairosa dense time of gravity and judgment, a revelation of what is truly real. The time we feel right involves a choice between meaning and emptiness, wholeness and sacrilege. There is “Kairos “selection” behind and within individual “selections”Kronos This season is also a time of truth in Hallmark movies, where returning home is an apocalyptic event that reveals the truth of life, and calling that boy or girl or seeking out a long-estranged friend may actually represent a lifelong choice to become the person you were meant to be.

We may not realize it, but we need and crave judgment because death, heaven, and hell are real. Because they are more real than the problems that trouble us, more real than the trivial things that we try to replace with these things. So when we pick up the hymn, “Come, Come, Immanuel,” let your imagination run wild about the Son of God who has come, is coming, and is coming again.

Living in the misery of exile, we beseech You to hasten and rescue us from the spiral of hell, to lighten our gloom, and to make us flee the living death. Lord, touch our wounds and remove our fears. Open to us new horizons, free from doubt and sorrow and insensible and sinful foolishness. Close forever the doorway to the dark self we never want to be and regret having become. Make safe the way that brings us to you. Key of David, set us free to become what you have created us to be. We ask this question now and in the future until the world heals. Amen.