Advent explorations: The tragedy of Advent
December 1st, 2009 | 
Kester Brewin has just begun an Advent-themed blog series which he calls Advent(ures) in Incarnation with a post titled Incarnation as A Comic God Making a Tremendous Joke. 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 Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale 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.”
- Source. ↩
- Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977. 57. ↩
- Ibid., 68. ↩
Advent explorations: Martin Luther on Advent
“He is your king, the king promised to you, whose own you are. He and no other shall rule over you, but in spirit and not after worldly rule. This is he for whom you longed from the beginning. This is he for whom your dear ancestors were yearning and crying with heartfelt desire. From all the things that until now have burdened, oppressed, and imprisoned you, he will redeem you and will set you free.”
From Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent, 1522.
Advent explorations: Luther Seminary’s free Advent devotional
During Advent several years ago, I signed up to receive a daily devotional email from Luther Seminary. These “God Pause” devotions are provided daily throughout the entire year, but special attention is given to the Advent series. This year’s devotional is titled My Soul Proclaims Your Greatness.
If you’re looking for a brief, daily meditation this Advent, this is the way to go. Not only are the devotions keen and concise, but Luther Seminary graciously (and wisely) provides several means of consumption. You can subscribe (as I do) to a daily email,1 subscribe to the RSS feed, or download a pretty PDF of all the devotions through Christmas.
Happy devotion-ing!
Oh, and what other free Advent devotion-type resources should I know about? What do you use? Let me know!
- If you want to do this, make sure that “God Pause Daily Devotions” is the only box checked. ↩
Advent explorations
“The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” – Jeremiah 33:14
Today, the first Sunday of Advent, marks the beginning of the Christian liturgical year. I have grown to love Advent over the past several years, yet somehow most of my affection for this expectant season seems to be predominantly based on intuition. I know I like Advent, but I’m not entirely certain why.
So this year I plan to devote myself to an informal but purposeful study of Advent, a season pregnant with beauty and profundity. As such, I’ll be blogging semi-regularly on the topic throughout the next month.
In the book Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God (ht: Thom Turner), the Advent devotionals are prefaced with these words:
We start a new liturgical year by entering this complex season of mystery. We turn once again to the beginning of the great Story but with its glorious end very much in mind. With ancient Israel, we long for the one who will come to set us free. We try to get ready. We watch for his arrival with expectancy. We let hope gestate within us. Something good is happening to us and to our world. The days are dark but the light is growing. Sometimes we sing, sometimes we groan. We resist the cultural frenzy with chosen restraint and moments of retreat. That’s how we remain alert, how we stay open to God’s presence. We wait for Christ to come, and in our waiting, we are enlarged.1
The last line is a reference to Eugene Peterson’s beautiful translation of Romans 8:22-25 in The Message:
All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.
Already you can see that there is a lot to unpack and explore, and I hope to do that in the coming weeks. But here’s the deal: For those of us who spend a significant amount of our time in front of a screen — computer, cell phone, television, etc. — our attention spans are pretty much being shot to hell. So in order for us to truly embody the season of Advent, a time defined by waiting, we must turn against our own instincts and re-learn what it means to be still. To wait.
It is my hope that in this humble exploration of Advent both you and I become enlarged in our waiting.
- Gross, Bobby and Lauren Winner. Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God. City: IVP Books, 2009. 48. ↩
Hauerwas on Advent
I’ve been preparing for Advent both in my ministry and in my personal life, and as I was doing some cursory studying, I came across this video of theologian Stanley Hauerwas ruminating on the nature of Advent. Enjoy.
“Learning how to wait as a people of nonviolence in a world of war, you’ll know what Advent is. Advent is patience. It’s how God has made us a people of promise in a world of impatience, and Christ has made that possible — for us to live patiently in a world of impatience.”
- Fortress Forum, a social community for religious academics, has posted an interview with Walter Brueggemann. “Given the current frailty of the capitalist system and the fact that the ‘big money’ continues to grow while ordinary people increasingly become poor and homeless, I suspect that this character [God], embedded in this tradition, is a wake-up call for contemporary social-political thought. It is not difficult to imagine that dominant ideologies and narrative explanations of reality have reached a dead end. For that reason I judge that it is a worth-while effort, regardless of one’s ‘faith commitments,’ to continue to pay attention to and exposit this character and the tradition that clusters around the character. I understand that to be the work of biblical theology. Such a perspective refuses to be boxed in by the critical categories of Enlightenment rationality, for it is a reach behind that rationality to see about the haunting that cannot be so readily dismissed.” Brueggemann’s newest book is titled An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible. 11/19/2009
- Shane Claiborne wrote a letter to non-believers in Esquire(!) titled What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff? “The entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay ‘out there’ but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, ‘Nothing good could come.’ It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society’s rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.” 11/18/2009
- Catalista has released an iPhone app that connects volunteers with opportunities. “Even beyond the mobile access to volunteer opportunity listings, what seems especially compelling about Catalista is the possibility that it could facilitate spontaneous, ad-hoc volunteering, whereby people with a few hours of unscheduled time on their hands can find and participate in local opportunities that they might not have been able to plan for otherwise.” 10/25/2009
- Philosopher and theologian Philip Clayton is writing a new monthly column for Religion Dispatches. His first offering is Religion and Science: Toward a Postmodern Truce. “In the American public square today, it’s hard to find discussions of the interplay between science and religion that achieve what our society most needs: genuine self-criticism on both sides, born of the recognition that both sides will have to do some bending if any sort of truce is to be achieved.” His new book, Transforming Christian Theology: For Church and Society, is available for pre-order. 09/12/2009
Sullivan on religious authority
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, director of the Law and Religion Program at SUNY’s University at Buffalo Law School, discussing one of the themes in her new book:
“[There is] a new openness to seeing Americans as naturally ‘faith-based,’ enabled, I believe, by a convergence between a broad range of humanistic critiques of scientistic understandings of the person, social scientific and biological; social and political movements that originated in the mid-twentieth century; and a contemporaneous shift in religious authority and anthropology from the church to the individual. The exclusivity of materialist/medicalized understandings of the entire range of human capabilities and experience, as well as ecclesiastical capacity to insist on orthodoxy and particularity, are both fast eroding in the face of these changes. It’s a next step in the radical disestablishment of religion in this country. This shift toward locating authority in the individual means that it’s much easier for people to move among religious communities, religious ideas, and religious practices in a much more ambiguous way, a way that is less determined by someone outside oneself.”
Sullivan doesn’t say whether this shift in authority from corporate to individual is bad, she just say that it is. So what do you think?
Do you sense a shift in religious authority from corporate to individual?
Is this affecting “ecclesiastical capacity to insist on orthodoxy and particularity” (think ELCA Churchwide Assembly)?
Is it creating a new generation of religious nomads?
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