The First Sunday of Advent, Year B, December 3, 2023

With Advent begins the Christian year.  The liturgical year is intended to transform time.  Time is, as Plato said, “the moving image of eternity.”  It is cyclical with the seasons.  It is also forward moving with the uniqueness of each moment and the long march of history. Perhaps the Christian understanding of time is more like a spiral or ellipse joining the horizontal and vertical and the cyclical and the linear.  Time repeats itself in tradition and memory and time is novel in the moment by moment and longitudinal process of creative transformation.

Advent is the season, celebrated yearly in the cycle of time, that leans forward the future.  It is eschatology in action. “The hopes and fears of all the years” are gathered during the Advent season.  The hope for a Messiah, who will change history, transforming the ambiguity of history into the reflection of God’s Shalom. While there may be no final end or absolute goal of history, Advent inspires hopefulness that history will be healed, justice come, and Christ come into our world and lives. Yet, we fear that history will dissolve into chaos and we will miss our moment.

From a process viewpoint, of course, Christ is always here but the birth of Jesus in our hearts and in the world is not fully realized and inspires us forward.  The teleology of the universe is aimed at beauty and the teleology of history, Advent says, is at the coming Christ both in Bethlehem and in the fulfillment of history.

“When is Jesus coming again in glory?” to resolve the ambiguities of history and our lives, Advent asks even as it scorns literalistic and unimaginative visions of the Second Coming in which Christ is more of a destroyer than creator.  Still, we look for moments of decision that reveal what is here all along: God is with us, God is in us, and God has a vision for our lives that is larger than we can imagine and will ask much of us.  History can be transformed, we can be better people, the swords can be beaten into plowshares, and peace and justice come to earth.

The theology of Isaiah 64 is challenging.  The author cites God as the source of the peoples’ struggles and suffering. God has put the nation in turmoil by choosing to be absent.  The passage, from process-relational perspective, is much more subtle than a literal reading of divine absence.  The passage is an existential report, reflecting Isaiah’s disappointment in his nation’s morality and hope that it will not lead to destruction.  God is not willingly absent, nor the cause of the nation’s turmoil or waywardness, but God’s absence is not accidental.  A process view does not attribute the absence of God to God’s choice to punish.  But to our turning away.  The best for the impasse may be bad, as Whitehead says, when creatures willingly turn from their destiny as transparent agents of divine love.  While the world lives by the incarnation of God, again from Whitehead, our choices can either enhance or lessen the scope of divine possibility. The nation that turns away from God to injustice, racism, nationalism, and incivility – the church that blesses dictators and dishonesty, becomes dead to divine possibility and limits what God can do. We see this in the history of nations, including our own present turmoil, in which many Christians have chosen the love of power over the power of love. The call is to open to God, to let God in, and to choose to partner with God in the creation of a positive world.  As we open to God, new possibilities of growth and creativity, of unity, emerge.

The Psalmist is in a similar quandary as the author of Isaiah. The Psalmist begs for God to hear the nation’s – and their – prayers and respond to the current turmoil. The Psalmist wonders if the divine distance and absence is out of anger or our neglect? At the end of the day, God’s apparent absence is the call of repentance, turning back to God, letting God’s way emerge.

The Psalmist pleads: “Restore us, let your light shine” with the awareness that God’s light guides us to paths of righteousness.  We are no longer lost in self-interest.  We are open to divine purpose and vision and grow as persons and as a people.  God has agency and so do we.  The nation that follows God’s path to the future experiences new possibilities and blessings.  Restoration is not a backward movement to the past, as many American Christians believe, but the anticipation of a glorious future in partnership with God’s new creation.

Paul writes to a struggling community vying over power, economic issues, orthodoxy, and preferential relationship to God.  Paul may recognize that their antagonism is, in part, a reflection of their personal and congregational insecurity.  In their apparent weakness and uncertainty, the various factions want to claim a special relationship to God that privileges them over others.  This is not a sign of confidence but uncertainty in the truths they hold and the gifts they have.  I suspect many of the most vociferous voices on the American religious and political scenes reflect attitudes of fear and potential loss.  With the emergence of new voices, diversity, and the process of rapid change, the old way is in doubt both culturally and existentially.  On the wrong side of history and knowing it, they shout louder.  Knowing their guilt and complicity in undermining democracy and rule of law, they attack any ideas that differ whether in terms of sexual diversity, law, or books.  Banning books and singling out drag queens is a sign of faithlessness not deep faith. Fear not confidence in God.

Paul assures the Corinthians – and us – that we have everything we need to be fulfilled and prosper in the faith.  As persons and communities – congregations – we have enough. We have gifts.  We have possibilities. We can face the challenges of the time because in the body of Christ, we have all we need to grow, reach out, and produce a harvest of righteousness. This is God’s message to a post-COVID struggling church. Even a humble mustard seed can give birth to a great plant that blesses the world. Even a small church, whose “best days” are behind it, can flourish and shape the community, healing and bringing joy and justice.

Mark’s apocalypse needs to be addressed and reinterpreted. The pastor needs to address Second Coming theology that still emerges in datable hopes for the end of the world and political policy in the Middle East.  God is the source of dramatic destruction and judgment, and we are part of God’s retribution, so say the doomsayers and prevaricating politicians. While we cannot deny judgment or the possibility of a radical change in history.  We see such dramatic changes that define the course of history on 9/11, 1/6, or the possible collapse of an eco-system, but these are the result of our waywardness and not divine intervention.

No one knows that time of destruction and recreation. Dating the Second Coming or waiting for God to solve our problems is futile.  Jesus calls for a woke theology of agency and not passivity, of perception and not denial. A new age may upon us – although any first century calculation and two thousand years of “prophesy” have been proven wrong – but we must live for today in our individual lives and lives as citizens.

Now is the time of the coming of God.  Now is the time of Jesus’ coming.  It happens every moment, but decisive moments may occur.  We need to be awake for the decisive and also the moment-by-moment presence of God.  The call is to stay awake to divine possibilities in our personal lives, relationships, congregations, and the nation and planet. The call is to be “woke” to God’s Shalom and act accordingly.  To be signs of hope and not destruction, healing and not death, and to live each moment fully aware that God is here and meets us in our companions and in the least of these.

A woke church is a church of agency and empowerment. Humble in articulating and employing its vision, it nevertheless acts boldly on what it knows – God is here, God is in the least of these, God needs our companionship and action, and God’s moral and spiritual arcs aim at justice, healing, community, and care for the earth and all its creatures.  That is Advent enough. Something to hope for and something to inspire our hearts, hands, and heads.

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Bruce Epperly is a pastor, professor, spiritual guide, and author of over seventy books, including JESUS – MYSTIC, HEALER, AND PROPHET; THE ELEPHANT IS RUNNING: PROCESS AND OPEN AND RELATIONAL THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM; PROPHETIC HEALING: HOWARD THURMAN’S VISION OF CONTEMPLATIVE ACTIVISM; MYSTIC’S IN ACTION: TWELVE SAINTS FOR TODAY; WALKING WITH SAINT FRANCIS: FROM PRIVILEGE TO ACTIVISM; MESSY INCARNATION: MEDITATIONS ON PROCESS CHRISTOLOGY, FROM COSMOS TO CRADLE: MEDITATIONS ON THE INCARNATION, and THE PROPHET AMOS SPEAKS TO AMERICA.  His most recent books are PROCESS THEOLOGY AND THE REVIVAL WE NEED, TAKING A WALK WITH WHITEHEAD: MEDITATIONS WITH PROCESS-RELATIONAL THEOLOGY, and SIMPLICITY, SPIRITUALITY AND SERVICE: THE TIMELESS WISDOM OF FRANCIS, CLARE, AND BONAVENTURE. He can be reached at drbruceepperly@gmail.com.