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The Challenge of Advent and Christmas
from December 2020
Gò0dNews from the Pastor’s Desk
The Challenge of Advent and Christmas
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by Dr. Julius McCarter
After my first Advent/Christmas at my first congregation, I noted that sermons during this season frequently received negative responses from some in the congregation. What’s the problem? Is not this a prelude to one of the Christian year’s most joyous seasons?
One person emerged after I had preached at the Advent service and accused me of “promoting irresponsible passivity” in my sermon. “You should remind us,” he said, “We are educated, responsible people who have been given the gifts to make the world a better place.”
Yet what was I to preach, stuck as I was with the repeated Advent Gospel assertion that God really has come in Jesus Christ to do for us what we could not do for ourselves? How could I calibrate the Hebrew Scriptures’ prophetic announcement that history had again become interesting not because we had at last gotten organized but because God was moving among us? In short, my critic had gotten more than a whiff of eschatology and found its odor distinctly offensive to his activist, educated, progressive sensibilities. He, like most of us, would rather get better than be born again. He, like most of us, wants a world improved rather than made new.
Advent is the season of “the last (Greek: eschatos) things,” a time of winter, death in nature, and the ending of another year. Yet it is also the beginning of the church year, a time of birth at Bethlehem, a time when we know not whether to name what is happening among us as “ending” or “beginning” because it feels both as if something old is dying and something new is being born.
Christian eschatology, like Jewish eschatology before it, makes a claim about the future in which the Creator of the world at the beginning is fully revealed as the world’s Redeemer at the end. Eschatology is more a matter of Who? than When? “The end” is not so much a matter of chronology (When?) but rather a debate over who, in the end, is in charge. The hope for the coming of Christ in fullness has nothing to do with the hope engendered by wishful thinking, a positive mental attitude, or creative social programming. The good news of Advent and Christmas is that we are being met and reconstructed by a God who intends to make all things new. 6 // December 2020
More than likely, Advent eschatology offends us for more mundane reasons. I am at church seeking personal advice for how to have a happy marriage or how to get along with the boss next week only to have Advent wrench my gaze in our subjectivity in its insistence that whatever God is about in the Advent of Jesus, it is something quite large, quite cosmic, quite strange and humanly unmanageable, and something more significant than me. I am not the master of history.
So let us begin with the honest admission that our real problem with these Advent/Christmas texts is largely political and economic. Tell me, “This world is ending. God has little vested interest in the present order,” and I shall hear it as bad news.
However, for a mother in a barrio in Mexico City who has lost four of her six children to starvation to hear, “This present world is not what God had in mind. God is not finished, and indeed is now moving, to break down and to rebuild in Jesus,” I presume that would sound something like Gospel. For her, the Advent/Christmas message presages a revolutionary conflagration.
A great deal depends, in regard to our receptivity to these texts, on where we happen to be standing at the time when we get the news, “God is coming.”
It’s Advent. Let the revolution begin.
About The Author
Dr. Julius McCarter is a husband to Kendra, a friend to some, a teacher to many and a follower of Christ. Julius has been a pastor and teacher for over 20 years. A lover of good books and music most of his life. His most recent book is Pastoralia: Reflections after 20 Years in Ministry.
