I adore the Church Calendar, but let's be honest, 2020 has been a bad go of it. Lent was interrupted by a Pandemic. Holy Week and Easter were mediated through screens. Pentecost and Trinity was marked by injustice and violence. The Season after Pentecost was the season of, “Don’t breath on me.” And most recently, the Feast of All Saints was marked by epic political division.
We are technically still in the six month long season of Ordinary Time, but the past many months have felt like a mockery of "Ordinary Time," hasn't it? What is typically known as a season of noticing the nudges of the Holy Spirit, setting things into 'order,' and finding God in the mundane has been instead filled with unanticipated changes, loud sounds, panicked searching, and major upheaval.
All Saints' Day is in the rear view mirror. The tone of Ordinary Time now shifts into a minor key. The Sunday readings become more ominous, eery, and quite uncomfortable. The seatbelt light has just turned on, and the captain's voice is telling us that it's time to begin our descent into Advent. We're given words of prophecy, apocalypse, and longing.
I must warn you, especially those who are about to experience your first year of Advent in an Anglican church. Advent is not Christmas. Christmas is Christmas. Advent is the four weeks before Christmas. We’re not singing Silent Night anytime soon. Advent is when we gaze into the sky and call out, "Oh God, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!" As Rutledge beautifully puts it, it is midnight of the Church Year.
Like I said, it's not Advent quite yet, but the lectionary is kindly preparing our hearts for the significance of this important season. And boy do we need it this year. The familiar game culture will yet again try to play this holiday season is Distraction. They play this because they always win. But we the Church need to step into Advent this year properly and prophetically. We tell the truth. Things are not right —in fact, things are terrible. Things are so terrible that we can't even come close to fixing them ourselves. But, there is a King on the way. He’s the Bridegroom, the Master of the House, the Judge, the Lamb who was Slain. "Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel, and random captive Israel."
