Advent 1: The Promise of Truth
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Advent is my favorite season of the church year. It has a different feel to it than the other seasons. There is a sense of yearning in Advent. A sense of anticipation. It is a time of watching and waiting. A time to remind ourselves that there are forces at work beyond our control.
Also, Advent is a season for feeling out of kilter.
It is a period of waiting in the darkness. It is a season in which we are caught between joyful expectation and the harsh realities of the present condition while we wait for the promise to be fulfilled. And this season puts the church at odds with contemporary American culture, in which the holiday season consists of bright lights and celebrations and packages tied with neat bows. There is no room for darkness and little patience for prayerful expectation when holiday carols blare from every speaker and the neighborhood is glowing with displays of lights. Yet ironically, this experience of being out of sync with our surroundings may attune us more deeply to the nature of Advent. In Advent, we live in the unsettling tension between what is and what will be. The prophet Jeremiah speaks to a community that is acutely aware of this tension.(Ann Steward, Working Preacher)
And biblical prophets, like Jeremiah-- never shy away from hard truths. They hold a mirror up so people can see the brokenness, the pain, and the suffering that they witness. Jeremiah noticed the ways that the world was not as it would be, not as it should be. He saw the world through tears. Jeremiah has been named “the weeping prophet” because of the nature of his message and the grief he expressed for his people. Jeremiah was a prophet who knew the harsh reality of the human experience. He writes from prison (Jer 32:1-2), living in the aftermath of Babylon’s destruction of Jerusalem around the year 587 (1:10). Jeremiah offers a dose of reality and lament.
Yet he also saw something hopeful shining through.
Long before the birth of Christ, Jeremiah predicted his coming, and he told everyone: “The days are coming…they are coming” when someone will come whose very name means truth and justice and love and compassion and peace and safety and righteousness to make all things right.
Fast forward over 500 years, and enter a baby born to usher in a new creation, a new hope, a new truth—a truth that the world would one day be restored. This is the very promise of God that began in creation and is now being fulfilled in the person of Jesus. And perhaps this is what the season of Advent invites us to bear witness to. Yet that doesn’t mean we can’t tell the whole truth about what we are experiencing in the here and now. –Just like the prophets.
It takes courage to wrap our minds around the truths, the difficult truths, the complicated truths all around us.
God has made us for truth-telling, to have eyes that glimpse through tears at the already-and-not-yet that we live in. And at the same time, these same eyes are trained on Jesus, who embodies the compassion, restoration, and justice we long for.
We need truths that can stand the test of time because we live in the already-but-not-yet. Like Abraham being shown the stars in the sky that will outnumber his offspring or God declaring creation good, or Jesus declaring the mighty reversals of the Kingdom of God we are given a portrait of the work God is doing in the world, but we don’t experience it fully.
As New Testament theologian N.T. Wright says, “Sometimes there is no answer but lament”— Right? There is so much truth in that statement. Jeremiah and N.T. Wright remind us that sometimes, all we can do is to acknowledge how wrong and unfair things seem and weep with one another before we can move our attention toward hope.
This is why Jeremiah reminds God’s people “the days are coming” and to trust the redemptive work of God. For the days are coming when we will see all of God’s promises fulfilled. And until then, we must hold onto hope for the future even while we live in the already-but-not-yet world. (Kate Bowler, A Weary World Rejoices Advent Commentary).
Advent may be a season we feel off kilter. But that is not a bad thing! Perhaps is helps us to see the truth in a different way. Perhaps this advent we are invited to see the world as it really is while still hoping for a future we can only sometimes glimpse. And this Sunday let’s give thanks for the prophets of old and now who about to tell us the truth. Amen