Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Advent: "Let's Make This Thing Good Again"






Typically when we think of prophecy, we assume it has to deal with someone telling the future or predicting future events. And in most cases, this is probably true.

But the Hebrew prophets were a little different.

There is an entire array of writings in the Hebrew Bible grouped together as 'prophets' and they really don't have a whole lot to do with 'predicting the future'. Because these prophets weren't worried about what was out 'there', they were worried about now. They might of talked about future implications every now and then, but it always came back to living a particular way of life now. So with the Jewish people, what you see isn't someone going around telling everyone what is going to happen down the road. What you actually see is someone going around and confronting their own people about the kind of lives they are living today. You see someone challenging the world around them to stop going in the wrong direction and to get caught up with what God was doing in the universe.

This was the prophets job.

To wake people up.

One of these prophecies is a writing called "Isaiah". Now, Isaiah probably has several authors that span quite a bit of time and tell several different stories about waking the Hebrew people up, but essentially the message is quite simple: "You've forgotten God, God is doing a new thing in the world, so starting getting caught up in it."

And at one point, Isaiah begins talking about this new thing God is doing in the world and in the midst of that, he mentions an "Emmanuel" figure. Which technically is a name, but the prophet is actually using the name to make a point. By saying "Emmanuel" is going to show up, Isaiah is essentially saying, "God is going to be with us," because that is what "Emmanuel" means. The Jewish people would have been very aware of what Isaiah was saying.

Which would have been quite a big deal.

Because at this point in Israel's history, there was no "Emmanuel".

The story of Israel was supposed to be about prominence and liberation and God using this nation as a people to act in the world. Instead, the story had become about exile. It was a story of oppression and suffering and injustice.

Which is what Isaiah is confronting.

Because when this particular part of Isaiah was being written, Israel no longer had a 'home'. They had been given a 'promised land', but, now, they had been exiled out of it and this grand story of deliverance that they used to know no longer felt like their story. They had once been liberated from slavery in Egypt. But now they just found themselves in a different kind of Egypt doing a different kind of slavery.

The powerful story of liberation had just been replaced by the same old story of pain, weakness, and exile.

First, there was the Assyrians, but then Assyria collapsed and the Hebrews were released back to Israel only to be taken over again by Babylon where almost the entire nation was once again deported into exile. Then, once the Hebrews were released from there, they were taken over by the Persians, then the Greeks, then the Syrians. Centuries and centuries of one foreign power controlling them after another. And then when Rome began taking over the world, around 63 BCE, they came and captured Israel, resulting in yet another foreign power ruling over them.

So if you're whole story is, "We are God's chosen people liberated in order to go and bless the rest of the world," at some point in the midst of all this you stop believing that story. At some point, while finding yourself in more and more oppression and slavery and being at the bottom, your story simply becomes, "God? What God?"

For hundreds of years this was the world of the Jews.

Poverty in a land that used to flourish, no political power, and captives of pagan rulers in the very land God had supposedly given them.

Instead of working to bless the world, you were being dominated by it.

But occasionally in the back of your mind the thought might sometimes surface:

"Whatever happened to Emmanuel?"

Whatever happened to what God was doing in the world? There was still this distant hope that things would change. That you would be liberated again. That God would show up and makes things right and good and beautiful like they were before all of this exile started.

Yet every day that seemed more and more futile and as the world got darker and darker, the thought just seemed increasingly hopeless.

For the Jewish people, they were just engulfed with this sort of experience.

The experience where there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

You had all these prophecies of being God's people and that God was going to change the world and that, despite your situation, God is up to something...but at this point, it was all starting to feel like a lie.

"Emmanuel" just wasn't true. God wasn't with you and it didn't look like that was going to be changing anytime soon.

This was the world of the Jewish people.


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Advent is all about rediscovering that world.

Part of the church calendar is this season that comes around in the winter every year and it is called 'Advent'. It comes from a latin word that literally means "coming" and so during this season we anticipate the "coming" of Jesus.

And we have to realize that this is more than just a countdown to Christmas. Rather, Advent is a preparation for Christmas. It is entering into darkness and chaos and suffering and oppression and remembering that helpless and futile expectation that was stirring in the hearts of the Hebrew people. We empathize with them and put ourselves in their shoes and feel what it was like to be where they were. We open up our souls to feel with the depths of our being all the ways the world isn't like it is supposed to be. We get real honest about the disconnection and brokenness and God's apparent absence in the midst of it all.

Which rightfully sounds like a pretty depressing picture of the Christmas season.

But that is what Advent is. It is anticipating the "coming".

And in order to experience a "coming" we have to make space for God to come into. You can't celebrate God coming into the world if you haven't give him anywhere to come.

So we enter into the apparent absence and we wait for God to invade.

We sit in the presence of great darkness waiting just like the Jewish people waited. We feel the captivity and oppression and injustice and pain and powerlessness and we stare it in the face and just wait with this giant looming expectation that maybe God will show up and do something.

Which is why "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" is not a Christmas song...it is an Advent song. It brings us face to face with what it felt like being in the world of the Israelites. It captures this season where the driving question is, "God, where are you? I thought you were gonna do something here?"

And it is this very experience of absence that makes Christmas possible.

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There are four accounts of Jesus' story in what we call the New Testament and each author knew exactly what this kind of world felt like. Which means they also assumed that their readers knew this world, too, because underlying what they are writing about is the experience of the Jewish people.

The story of Jesus isn't some detached fairytale with no context. It comes out of the very Jewish world that we are supposed to be experiencing during this season.

This is why Advent is so important. Before we can understand the story of Jesus and capture why it was so monumental, we have to experience that world that these Jewish people knew so well. We have to be able to see what is happening through their eyes.

So it makes sense that as each writing begins, the first thing the author does is remind us of what that world was like and how Jesus fits into it.

For example, in Matthew, the author starts by giving this seemingly irrelevant genealogy of this man named Jesus. But throughout the entire list of names, it is essentially the author saying that this Jesus is a King. As you would be reading through each name you would have just heard, "King, Messiah, Son of God. King, Messiah, Son of God...it is finally happening...God is finally doing it!" Matthew is trying to tell us that the whole "Emmanuel" thing is finally happening.

This would have been a big deal for you.

There is another writing named Mark and the way Mark chooses to begin
his version is by saying,

"The beginning of the good news of Jesus the Messiah as it
was written in the prophet Isaiah..."

For Mark, he is telling his audience that the good news of Jesus
actually started back in Isaiah.

Which means what if you are a Jew during this time?

Emmanuel.

The divine entrance of liberation into the world. God acting to bring his world here again.

It is finally happening.

Or there is another account of Jesus' story titled John where the author
begins his picture of Jesus with:

"In the beginning..."

In the Jewish culture, there is another rather prominent
writing that begins with this exact same phrase.

The creation poem of Genesis.

The only way John sees fit to begin this story about Jesus is to parallel it with the creation story. Which makes Jesus' coming into the world a bit like a new creation. This is what John is wanting us to pick up on; that through Jesus, God is making the world new again.

Because there was a way God created the world to be...but it is gone. We don't see that world anymore. We live in a world not like the one God created.

Because in the beginning, God created a world of shalom. A world that was good and beautiful where everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be. Where everything was flourishing. But that shalom of God's world isn't what we see and feel and experience every day. Rather, for us, shalom is gone. It has been abandoned.

But what these authors all seem to be trying to show us is that now, God is bringing it back.

That Jesus entering into the world is God's way of restoring shalom back to this place.

Which is why in Luke's version of the story, it hinges on the phrase, "Peace on Earth." Which is something that we hear all the time during the Christmas season and has become rather cliche. But Luke is pointing at something larger here. Because the word 'peace' would have been the word 'shalom'.

Luke is essentially saying: "Hey this baby is born and guess what? Shalom is back. I know it looked like it was going to be gone forever, I know the world had become miserably hopeless, but it is all going to change because God is up to something again. God is finally bringing his world back."

Which is exactly what Isaiah was pointing towards with the whole "Emmanuel" thing.


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This is what this season is all about.

This child is born and it is God finally showing up and doing something about all the ways the world is not what it is supposed to be.

God is no longer 'absent', but is with us again. God is "Emmanuel."

Essentially, Christmas is God entering into a broken, disconnected, and suffering world and he is making everything new. God is taking this messed up way the world works and he is restoring it back to what he created it to be.

To a world of shalom.

To the beautiful, connected wholeness that we see back in the garden.

God finally shows up and starts putting the world back together.
And it all starts with a baby.

Maybe we could put it this way:

Christmas is simply God saying, "Let's make this thing good again."

But the only way to properly understand what that means and what that feels like is by first going through the journey of Advent. The only way to capture the importance and the magnitude of what it means for shalom to be on Earth again, for a new creation to begin exploding forth in this dead and dark world, for a King and Messiah to be here among us. The only way to properly see what it means for God to finally be doing this is to enter into the absence and start experiencing the silent, broken, and hopeless world of Israel. It is the only way to truly feel what exactly is happening here.

This is the season of Advent.

We start by remembering the darkness; by feeling the emptiness.

But we slowly begin to move towards this new world that God is repairing right in the midst of this one.

We experience the world in all of its rawness, we participate in the very helpless struggle that the Israelites lived in for centuries.

But then we move to Christmas and the distant "Emmanuel" actually comes to life. God begins restoring the world and reversing the darkness back into shalom it is supposed to be.

Advent is a picture showing us that God hasn't given up on this world.

And it all comes back to this baby being born.


May you experience this movement of Advent, entering into the darkness so that you can
find the much hoped for light.

And in the cry of this small, newborn child, may you hear the voice of
God calling out to his broken and shattered world saying:


                  "Let's make this thing good again!"