Readings Meditation Continued…
Advent is a time of waiting, filled with hope, for the One who is to come. When we live in love and act in hope, when we gather again and again at the table to remember what Jesus did and to know that Jesus is with us once again, we are people of Advent hope. We tend to think of the month of December as the Christmas season, and the secular world ironically reinforces that premature celebration, if only to entice us to early and excessive spending. But Advent is a different kind of time, just as we in the church are on a different “calendar” from the rest of the world. Deborah Block claims that this “alternative New Year’s Day affirms time as God’s home and workplace, not as a calendar of accumulating years but as a movement toward fulfillment, not a day for self-improvement resolutions but for community reaffirmation of trust in God’s promises, past, present, and future” (Feasting on the Word Year C, Vol. 1). Our task, then, here, on the near edge of Advent, is to give our lives each day to God’s own dream of compassion and peace, and to persist in living our lives in hope.
If we would stop during this Advent, not Christmas, season, and look around at our communities, where would we see justice and righteousness? How easy is it to miss the people who awaken each day not in safety but in fear for their lives? While we fear violence ourselves from terrorists, are we missing the “slow-motion violence” of economic injustice that visits injury, pain, loneliness and hunger upon those who suffer the effects of greed and negligence, day in and day out? What is the deepest longing of our hearts this Advent, and are those longings in line with the longings of the heart of God?
May you have a blessed Advent.