Dear UCG,
Advent is one of the few traditional Christian seasons we mark here in our theologically and spiritually diverse community. We have other “high holy days,” of course: Gathering of the Waters and Church on the Prairie; Graduate Sunday and Children’s Sabbath and Work Tour Sunday. And even in the ways we engage this season’s myriad and sometimes ancient practices, we are forever interpreting, creating, and growing in surprising and wonderful directions.
There aren’t a lot of churches like ours, but Advent has long been widely practiced as a time of creative response to what has come before. A small group started a study of Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1: 39-56) the other night, and one participant noted that she has always marveled at a young Palestinian woman’s response to a heavenly visitor announcing an impending pregnancy. “I would have been terrified.” And — yes. 100%. I shared an image of a “biblically accurate angel” and it is not as comforting as so much Christian art would have us believe. (I do not know the artist of this particular image, but I did really like that the guy in it reminded me of Roy Kent from Ted Lasso.) But I am also always reminding myself that Mary would have been steeped in Jewish scripture, tradition and practice. She would have known about Messianic hope — the words of the prophets naming the brokenness and pain so widespread in the world, the presence of God in the world nevertheless, and the promise that things would someday be different. That our redemption — as a people, as humanity, as a world, was still to come.
She would have recognized the promise, and perhaps that might have impacted her response. This is an old story — so many world religious and spiritual traditions tell of saviors born to young, holy mothers. Her faithful and courageous response to the angel — Let it be with me according to your word — is a means of participating in, celebrating and transforming generations of her community’s story.
People are forever doing this — it’s one of my favorite things about us. James Baldwin once said, “The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it. … If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write.” The gospel writers and the prophets before them loved the world, could see God’s presence and work and hopes for justice and goodness, and we do, too. But we can also still see the abundant need around us for change. Folks often speak of this tension as the “already/not yet” of God’s reign and the Advent season. Jesus has been celebrated for centuries, and yet we spend a season in preparation and waiting. He is already and not yet among us. There is so much joy already in the world, and still our joy is not yet complete.
This year these tensions, alongside the intersecting traditions and histories of so many cultures and people over the years, are all the more fraught as we watch the violence and tentative moments of peace in Israel and Gaza. Your ministers are always careful — full of care — as we engage our historical texts and ancient narratives alongside the recognition that these texts have been — and are still — used for harm; in the knowledge that these lands and peoples we sing about as settings for these narratives are home to people with their own complex histories and identities. But this year, everything is heavier, and our need for care and humility is all the greater.
We sing of peace and good will for all on a starry hillside long ago, repent of the ways we (as a nation and otherwise) have been complicit in violence throughout the centuries, and hope for an ever more complete realization of God’s reign of peace on earth.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and I am so grateful to be traveling through this season together.
Bromleigh