Advent

IN ADVENT, I remember and am grateful for all the prophets who show us the way of the divine. They invite us to remember and live out God’s command to love each other as much as we love God. I call to mind biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, who passed away this year. He was a mentor, teacher, and colleague to many, including me. He taught us to prophetically reimagine a world where we challenge dominant and oppressive ideologies while compassionately re-envisioning a more just world. His magnanimous presence and prophetic words will be missed.

I also remember the young—led by Mary, the mother of Jesus—who invite us to be prophetic during adversity. With the guidance of Osvaldo D. Vena, we are invited to dream dreams in the joyous playground of God. Grounded in the abundance of God in our lives, I celebrate with Son Kyung Min’s praise song “Grace,” which I highly recommend for personal devotion and corporate worship services. The music grounds me in my faith and prompts me to remember how surrounded I am by God’s love.

As we approach the season of Christmas, let us pay close attention to the needs of our neighbors, especially our international students and immigrant neighbors. Every moment provides an opportunity for us to share the gift of the redemptive love of God.

A LOT OF BEGGING happens at Christmas. There are pleas in the toy aisle and hints left open on laptops. But no one begs to be in labor. Not even a woman who is pregnant. Unless, of course, she is at the bitter end of her pregnancy.

In the language of King James, Luke tells us that Mary is not just pregnant, but she is “great with child” (Luke 2:5). She is on the cusp of birthing, of being the first one to slide her hands up under the armpits of the warm, slippery flesh of God. No one before or after will have God in quite this way.

In Mary, the Word became flesh and was born in the most mundane, most primal human act. This flesh must count for something. The extremely pregnant body of Mary — great with child — reveals the nature of our waiting for Christ and what it might mean to cry out for Jesus’ coming.

POET MARY OLIVER describes the world calling us “like the wild geese, harsh and exciting.” As we approach Advent, Christians ponder words like annunciation, waiting, and hope. Midwife Julie Dotterweich Gunby plumbs the theological depths of expectation and asks if we are truly “ready for Christmas.” Before we celebrate Christ’s birth, we must wade through the consequences of a U.S. election. (This issue went to print before November.) If we zoom too far out, our vision becomes binary — red/blue, us/them, win/lose. If we look more closely, we see active civic engagement, and a robust obligation to protect the democratic process. We also glimpse ties that bind us around the world. Stephen Schneck chronicles Nicaragua’s fall into autocracy, a cautionary tale. Chris Hedges and Mae Elise Cannon take readers to Palestine and Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter, respectively. Liuan Huska travels to Ann Arbor, Mich., to report on a “farm-to-altar” Communion bread project reminding us that we are what we eat. “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,” concludes Oliver, the world is “announcing your place in the family of things.” Welcome. You belong.

My first experiences of Christian sacraments, including baptism and the Eucharist, were mysterious and somewhat confusing. As a Catholic little girl, I didn’t remember my infant baptism and could never quite wrap my head around eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood. What’s more, these solemn events happened within the confines of a giant, cavernous church — a place where I had to be still, quiet, and serious. During weekly Mass, I learned implicitly from the nuns that reverence and fun do not go together.

THE FERVOR AT church during the Advent season is a remarkable sight. Both clergy and laity work like the shepherds, tending to their flocks late into the night. And many move like the wise men, traveling to foreign places and spending extensive resources to celebrate Christ’s arrival with family.

This time of heightened activity makes sense given the story of scripture and the story of our current world. The shepherds could not help but tell others once they learned of the Savior’s birth. And as we now await his return, we shouldwork hard to share the riches of the nativity with a world that is a little more open to matters of faith at this time of year.

But if increased activity is the only melody we pick up from the nativity story told in Matthew and Luke, we neglect a needful counterpoint: the importance of rest. The nativity story is replete with theological, familial, and political lessons about rest that quietly proclaim God’s goodness to this weary world. With exhaustion rampant in the church — perhaps especially so at Christmastime — we would do well to hear notes of rest sounding from the manger.

1. Listen to your sleep

God uses sleep as a vehicle for saving Joseph’s family (Matthew 1:18-25). God instructs Joseph to honor his marriage to Mary because her pregnancy was not a sign of infidelity. To the contrary, it was a sign of immense devotion to God. Furthermore, this miracle child would save all his people, including his parents, from their actual sins, as opposed to their alleged ones. In obedience, Joseph listened to the message heard in his sleep and thus participated in God’s saving of his family.

ACROSS THE UNITED STATES, people will soon be preparing for Thanksgiving. We’ll name what we’re grateful for and then, in an ironic turn, let “Black Friday” convince us we need more. “Cyber Monday” will catch all the credit cards that made it, un-maxed, through the weekend. “Giving Tuesday” lets us pay the virtue toll to keep spending guilt-free on the yet-to-be-named following Wednesday. Whew! The consumerist drive in November and December makes the temporality of liturgical living difficult. But let’s try. November marks the end of both Ordinary Time and the church year. Ordinary Time is the day-in, day-out rhythm of everyday life as we await Christ’s second coming. In these final weeks, we’re not quite waiting on Christ, then — as we do during Advent — so much as we’re preparing ourselves to wait.

Come Advent, the scripture readings will be filled with anticipatory hope. But, as the old church year ends, the passages are full of anxiety and dread. The Hebrew Bible selections spotlight the escalating threat of the coming judgment. Paul’s letters pour out end times panic. Or, as songster Leonard Cohen put it, “Everybody knows it’s coming apart.” In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus forces us to ponder which side we are on. It’s not easy to sit with all this. I want to skip over to Advent hope (or even Christmas joy). But I invite us to hospice the old year’s death throes before welcoming new life at the stable door.

I can’t deny the unbridled excitement that this global phenomenon unleashes every four years. And since this year’s tournament is taking place in November (to avoid Qatar’s crushing summer heat), the international fervor coincides with the start of Advent. Somehow, it all feels fitting.

IN THE EIGHTH season of Call the Midwife, set in post-war east London, nuns and nurse midwives of Nonnatus House assist a woman with severe complications from a “backstreet” abortion. Sister Julienne says to a young nurse, “The word ‘midwife’ means ‘with-woman.’ A woman in that situation needs somebody by her side.”

I’m pro-choice, which was an unpopular stance in the Catholic community I grew up in. For my views on reproductive rights, people in youth group called me a “baby killer” and “Pontius Pilate.” During Advent, specifically, I loathed the hollow teachings on Mary and childbirth. We sanitized the Nativity into a cute story — the equivalent of a Disney movie featuring a white family and a manger crowded with men. Only recently did I learn that some scholars believe that midwives attended Jesus’ birth. As reproductive freedom and care are further undermined in the United States, this is an apt time to reclaim a more feminist view of the Nativity and rethink Advent as the season of the midwife.

WE ARE APPROACHING the end of the liturgical year, and the texts have a thread of anticipation running through them. We are deep into the promises conveyed by the prophets and the eschatological vision cast by Jesus. The texts are inviting us to prepare ourselves for something — but what, exactly?

The last Sunday in November, in many traditions, is the Advent Sunday of hope. In biblical Greek, the verb is elpizō (“hope”), which means to wait for salvation with both joy and full confidence. When we hope, we wait not out of boredom or a lack of options but in full confidence that what we are waiting for will arrive. This is the same word used in Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The word “assurance” here can also be translated as “foundation,” as in that of a house. Faith is what anchors our hope into the ground and allows it to stand upright. Faith also often requires that we act before we see. Our hope is first materialized in our faith before it is ever materialized in our reality. Hope pushes us to walk, move, and live as if what we’ve hoped for has already arrived.

Perhaps this moment calls to us to build foundations for the futures we need in defiance of our present realities. Our texts dare us to live into new possibilities, even as our current condition offers far fewer promises.