Advent: Live

 Such a curious word.  So versatile.

An adjective, as in a live show, filmed before a studio audience.

A verb, we live. Life is a smorgasbord with so much to learn, so much to do, so many people to meet, so many books to read.

An imperative: Live. The Wheel of Fortune is always in spin, and better days may yet come.

Advent: Righteous

What's the one thing God desires above all else?

"Justice! Justice you shall pursue," writes the law-giver. In Micah 6:8: "He has shown you, O man, what is good .What does the LORD require of you, but to act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?"

We think of justice as a social value and righteousness, so it may surprise that the Greek word used in the Christian Scriptures is the same. Translators render it according to context. Is the author talking about a virtue, or about a social value.

God makes no distinction.

Don't be duped into thinking God's desire is for us to be personally virtuous while the world around us goes to hell. Advent is about awaiting the arrival of a king who shelters the vulnerable from the mob who believes that in seeking a death sentence they are doing God's will. Advent is about waiting for a priest who asks a scorned woman for the favor of a drink but who never seeks a conference with the governor.

Advent is about waiting for a troublemaker who is going to be marked an enemy of the people and become another faceless victim of calls for law and order.

Advent is a promise that justice is coming.

"Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness."

Advent: Justice

 
We think of justice as a social value and righteousness as a personal virtue, so it may surprise that the Greek word used in the Christian Scriptures is the same. Translators render it according to context.
 
Don't be duped by thinking God's desire is for us to be personally virtuous while the world around us goes to hell. Advent is about awaiting the arrival of a king whose dream is to dance with a transgirl at Homecoming and let her know that he has her back, to stand against police brutality and to defend women from sexual predators in high places.
 
Be someone who hungers and thirsts for justice for the powerless.

Advent: Time

Imeant to post this earlier, but time got away from me.

Time does that a lot, not with events too large for life, with dramatic close-ups and string orchestras that swell with violins but in tedious paperwork, numbing commutes, missed connections and a loneliness of being that slowly drains color, hope, dreams, life, all.

Time is a father who devours his own children. Time is a woman who gives birth astride above the grave. We see the sun only for an instant, and then it is gone and night falls.

Fill every second of the unforgiving minute. Make each one count so that the Angel of Death is ashamed to tell you when your time is up.

Advent: Fulfill

I think we often consider fulfillment a once-and-done sort of thing. Once a prediction is fulfilled, that's all she wrote, with nothing more to see.

But fulfillment is a many-layered thing. An employee doesn't do a job for one day and consider their obligation fulfilled. A person doesn't commit before God to love, honor and cherish their partner for a couple weeks and then wander off. Commitments, like promises, are fulfilled not in single moments but in long arcs.

How much moreso the promises of God. Christmas comes at the end of a long period, and yet the strains of that ancient longing remain. Christ's coming marked the end of injustice, but our next president is a rapist, a bigot and a convicted con man elected with the overwhelming support of white evangelicals. The Resurrection has begun, but people die by the millions every day, often of things we could prevent.

The Kingdom of God, it is said, exists in a liminal space: here and not yet. By faith, we celebrate the "here" even as we ache amid "not yet."

Advent: Promise

A promise, it may be said, is a bridge to the future. Assurances like "We'll get through this together" and "You're going to be OK" can convey us safely across some of the deepest chasms and over the most treacherous seas. The best promises aren't conditional or based on the merit of the recipient. They draw their strength from the integrity of the one who makes them.