Inside-out Advent

 

I keep seeing posts and blogs that are trying to bring comfort, hope, reassurance, and encouragement; full of suggestions that we look at things from a different perspective. The thing is, most of them aren’t very comforting, not really.

Advent is traditionally a penitential season, and yet no-one seems to want to go there. The feeling seems to be that hard times are supposed to have a shelf-life, and we are getting impatient for the current hard times to be over and done with. Hmm.

I just read a blog post that a friend shared on Facebook which talks about the longing of Advent— “for things to be made right.” It talked about Christ as the Overcomer— “who would take all shame, hurt, and pain on a cross and put it to rest to set things right.”

It talked about a whole host of angels calling to the shepherds, and the author described those shepherds of Christ’s time as being equivalent to those of us today who are “forgotten, marginalized, unseen.” People like health-care workers, janitors, technicians, families who’ve suffered a loved-one’s death, single moms, clergy who’ve left their churches, and families on the brink of poverty….

(I’m sorry but I can’t help seeing some pretty entrenched classism here. I know, I verge on cynical in my skepticism, but hear me out.)

I want to turn it all inside out:

The shepherds were probably literally the dregs of society in Christ’s day, which would make them the modern equivalent of drug addicts and criminals. They would be the drug-dealers, the gang members, the scary people who follow women walking alone at night. They would be the con artists and the phone scammers who try to cheat you out of your life savings. They would be the untrustworthy ones; the suspicious people up to no good, sneaking around your backyard at night looking to break in. They would be the disreputable ones; the ones that we good, law-abiding folks have no use for. They would be the day-laborers without proper I.D.’s lined up outside Home Depot waiting to be hired. Yup, I mean it!

So the whole host of angels came to talk to those people, but I don’t think it’s important to pay attention to the people the angels came to. I think it’s more useful to pay attention to who the angels didn’t come to. The angels didn’t come to people who weren’t going to listen. They didn’t come to people whose ideas and expectations would get in the way of hearing what the angels had to say. They didn’t come to those folks who already thought they knew what needed to happen “to make things right.” They didn’t even try to talk to people who thought they had a God-given right to be happy, or who believed that “shame, hurt, and pain” should be done away with forever.  I think that the angels would have wanted to come to those entitled folks, except that those folks’ cherished ideas made it impossible for them to even hear the angels, or see their light above. Literally impossible!

Besides, I don’t think that Christ is the Overcomer at all! Christ didn’t come to “set everything right.” Christ didn’t come to make pain and fear, grief and hardship, go away! God didn’t become human 2,000 years ago. Christ (God) has always been Human from before time, eternally— “Loved (by God) before the creation of the world.” (John 17:24)

I don’t know how a person can miss the message:

Everything is already all right. The realm of God is here; among us, within us; all around us.

How can we say that God-in-Christ set all things right, when the story is so clear? God suffers right along with us: all the pain, the grief, the poverty, the weariness, the uncertainty, the loneliness, the fear. It’s all part of the deal. We can’t be separated from God, because “in God we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)

There’s nothing to overcome. We’re all in it together. The ones who can hear the angels are the ones who manage to live without expectations; the ones who hope without hope. “But if we see what we hope for, it isn’t hope — after all, who hopes for what he already sees?” (Romans 8:24-25)

I keep coming back around to the simple idea that what really makes life worthwhile is simply for us to find ways to be useful. Useful to God; useful to each other. If we decide to hope for impossibilities like the end of all shame, hurt, and pain; if we create a mental image of what life would be like if we never had to suffer, and then we persuade ourselves that Christ’s mission is somehow incomplete or inadequate because we are still suffering….  I don’t know, that just seems sort of recalcitrant, even obstinate, to me. Christ didn’t pay for our sins so we didn’t have to; Christ suffered our sins along with us so that we could have perfect evidence that life isn’t defined by suffering, any more than it’s defined by happiness.

Christ is the embodiment of eternity; the manifestation of hope without hope.

I remember a friend asking me if I believed in “life after death,” and I could only answer with a question: I asked her if she was alive right now, and she said that she was indeed alive right now. I asked her if there has ever been, or ever will be, a time that is not ‘right now,’ and she said that no, there would never be such a time. Then I asked this question: “Then how can we possibly die?”

 

It’s the same for us, as it is for God.

 

We are eternal beings: with hope and without it; in grief and in joy; in confusion and in confidence; in comfort and in distress; in death and in life.

We have no existence outside of God, and because that is true and real in the most absolute way, we have nothing to do other than simply get on with things; suffering when we suffer, and joyful when we’re joyful.

 

That’s all there is to it.