There's not really a way around it. I am a liturgical nerd. I am a plaid jumper/Lisa Frank backpack/penny loafers complete with taped-up-1990's-plastic-rimmed-glasses-before-glasses-were-cool-wearing liturgical nerd. When my teaching pastor, Josh Carney, called out the liturgical nerds last week, he might have just said, Sharyl (and Craig Nash).
Our floating Advent creation. |
I love preaching on the themes of expectation and hope. I love studying 2nd Temple Judaism and all the sociopolitical madness that goes with it. I love to retell the story again and again, the grand meta-narrative, where no one can even begin to foresee what is coming, but the story is barreling ever so slowly towards to Messiah in an unexpected Jesus. Jesus is the climax of a great story.
And yet....
This year, the anxiety of waiting has been magnified by my own fears. After a year and a half of job searching I have no idea where I am headed. The waiting has far surpassed a liturgical season, and I know I am not alone.
I went to my parent's house in Abilene for Thanksgiving. The morning after I returned to Waco I received word that a 19 year old friend of my brother was killed in a car accident. They had played baseball together since they were little. This accident all to eerily mirrored the death of a girl in my youth group and high school, almost 10 years to the day, both coming home from Texas Tech for Thanksgiving.
How do tragedies such as this fit in our narrative? What hope is there for a world that still sees such chaos?
This is the moment that I want to hear theology coming from the developed world the least, unless it's the developed world in crisis. Enter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He writes to his parents from Hitler's Tegel prison camp Advent 1943:
As long as there are people. Christ will walk the earth as your neighbor, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you.That is the great seriousness and great blessedness of the Advent message. Christ is standing at the door; he lives in the form of a human being among us. Do you want to close the door or open it?
Christ is knocking. It's still not Christmas, but it's also still not the great last Advent, the last coming of Christ. Through all the Advents of our life that we celebrate runs the longing for the last Advent, when the word will be "see, I am making all things new" (Rev 21:5).
The Advent season is a season of waiting, but our whole life is an Advent season, that is, a season of waiting for the last Advent, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth.
We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us...
This liturgical nerd can handle the already but not yet, if there is a last Advent, where my purple and pink is void of waiting.