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Advent Two: Peace

12/8/2013

Sometimes (often times) someone else has already said it so well ... and very often, for me, that someone is Frederick Buechner. I have spent a lot of time this past week thinking on this passage:

PEACE HAS COME to mean the time when there aren't any wars or even when there aren't any major wars. Beggars can't be choosers; we'd most of us settle for that. But in Hebrew peace, shalom, means fullness, means having everything you need to be wholly and happily yourself.

One of the titles by which Jesus is known is Prince of Peace, and he used the word himself in what seem at first glance to be two radically contradictory utterances. On one occasion he said to the disciples, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). And later on, the last time they ate together, he said to them, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you" (John 14:27). The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle but the presence of love.

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Oh, come, O come, Emmanuel…

It’s the first week of the new liturgical year. The first week of our time of waiting … but waiting, of course, is not something we do very well as a culture. There isn’t anything to celebrate yet but, by golly, we want the party now!

I admit I tend to be crotchety about by-passing Advent. We leap straight into Christmas from Halloween – and by the time we actually arrive at the day of Jesus’ birth we are fed up with tinsel and sick to death of carols. I’ve seen Christmas trees, stripped of their trimmings, sitting forlornly at the curbside awaiting pick-up the morning after Christmas, as if the homeowners had barely contained themselves before getting rid of the whole mess! The poor young mother is still exhausted from childbirth and we’re already bored with this kid!

If all we are celebrating is a Winter Festival then I guess we can do it anytime we like. But if we claim to be celebrating a birth -- the birth of the One who would change the world -- it does seem we might actually wait for that birth!

The church of my childhood knew how to do Advent. No music, no candles, no poinsettias – just a quiet anticipation, building toward something yet to come – and then at midnight on Christmas everything broke loose in wild celebration -- the bells pealed, the front of the sanctuary became a blaze of candles, and the organ and the choir burst forth in Glorias! Christ is born! Rejoice!

I know – it’s easy to idealize childhood memories – and not everyone needs to like the same worship I do – I get it. And yet, Advent exists in our church calendars for a reason. And Christmas should mean so much more than just the ending of the party season.

People, look east, the time is near
of the crowning of the year.
Make your house fair as you are able,
trim the hearth and set the table.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the Guest, is on the way.

(Eleanor Farjeon,1928)

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Advent Two: Peace

ADVENT WAITING

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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