has just begun an Advent-themed blog series which he calls Advent(ures) in Incarnation with a post titled . Towards the end of the post, Kester encourages us to
see this season as the opening lines to the most tremendous joke. It is a joke in which roles are subverted and words are twisted. It is a joke which is shocking in the extreme -- with God impregnating a girl. It is a joke in which something actually happens. A joke in which the apparent tragedy of human history suddenly takes a comic turn.
One of the reasons I was so captured by his thoughts is that I recently read Frederick Buechner's on a spiritual retreat. But before we go any further, keep in mind that when we talk about tragedy and comedy we're talking about them in the classical sense -- to generalize, "the terms comedy and tragedy commonly refer to the ways in which dramatic conflicts are resolved"; tragedy has a sad ending and comedy has a happy ending.1
But I like the way Buechner defines it: "The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable."2 Comedy is like the person slipping on the banana peel or Wile E. Coyote riding a malfunctioning ACME rocket into the side of a cliff. They didn't even see it coming.
And just when things seem inevitable for Israel -- the people of the Covenant -- God enters into the tragedy of human existence and transforms it into an uproarious comedy in the form of a New Covenant. How unforeseeable is that?
How unforeseeable is it that when Israel was expecting a David-like king who would rule with power and might, restoring God's people to their former glory, God sent a child who lived a perfectly normal existence for 30 years before not only prophesying against power, but opening God's story to Jew and Gentile alike?
How unforeseeable is it that the poor are the blessed ones? That the prodigal is welcomed home? That the least of these matter? That kingdom is actually like a little mustard seed? That the dead would be raised to life? Are you starting to get the joke?
Buechner continues:
Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvelous joke that you really hear it at all? Heard as anything else, the Gospel is the church's thing, the preacher's thing, the lecturer's thing. Heard as a joke -- high and unbidden and ringing with laughter, it can only be God's thing.3
Advent, then, is a time when we place ourselves in the center of the tragedy. We wait, we hope, and we pray. What for? For "God's thing," the New Beginning of God's story. For the comedic turn of events that is Jesus Christ. During Advent, let us remember that, as Buechner says, "The Gospel is bad news before it is good news."
