Are you looking forward to Christmas?
‘Watch, Prepare, Rejoice, Behold’ – four themes of advent, each word
written on one of the Advent candles in the banner which hangs in the church at
this time of year.
It’s a time when we look forward to the coming of the king.
We await the arrival of Baby Jesus, winding ourselves back in time, anticipating the promised nativity. We look ahead in faith to the future coming of the king at the end of time, although we can’t imagine what this will be like. And we reflect on the king’s coming among us now, day by day, to all whose hearts are open and also to those in whose hearts there is the smallest beginning of openness,
Advent is the beginning of the annual journey through the Church Year by way of many festivals, the major ones being Christmas, Easter, Pentecost. The journey also leads through routine days of ‘ordinary time.’
A friend of mine told me about the reaction to his finding Christian
faith as a teenager of a group of young people he met with regularly. Most of them
probably reflecting the viewpoint of their church traditions, hailed his
conversion as an arrival. One, a perceptive girl with an Episcopalian
background told him ‘this is just the beginning.’
And she was right. Finding faith in Jesus is certainly an arrival, but it’s
an arrival at the beginning of an on-going journey. It’s only a genuine arrival
if it is the first step of a journey.
In my past experience, Christians who focused on conversion as ‘arrival’
didn’t hold Christmas and Easter and Pentecost as particularly special. ‘Don’t
we remember Christ’s birth and death and resurrection, and his presence in the
Spirit every Sunday?’ they would say.
Now it’s good to remember that in Christ God gives as everything we will
ever need, but a thankful appreciation of the spiritual provisioning we receive
through faith can easily turn to a blasé sense that we know it all, while in
fact we may have forgotten so much, and lost touch with the reality behind even
the things we do remember.
And that’s why the theme of Christian faith as ‘journey’ is so meaningful
to me. As we travel in faith we find our unique identity, we discover our
God-given destiny, we learn new things through life-changing experiences which
are only learned that way and so can’t be given on day one of the journey. We
learn, we forget, we re-learn, we see things we’ve always known from new angles
and perspectives as we climb the spiral staircase towards the flame at the top
of the lighthouse.
Many Christians find that living through the Church calendar every year
is a stimulus to journeying. Imaginatively, we live in real time through the
experiences of those caught up in the first Christmas, the first Easter, the
first Pentecost. We are humbled and enriched by these reflections, and also confront
the challenges of living for God in ‘ordinary time.’
For some of us, this Christmas, this Advent will be the beginning of a
journey. Some of us will come to Jesus for the first time and sense God drawing
close to us as we draw close to God. For others it will be a stimulus to keep
journeying forward together, as we focus on a God who has come among us, a God
who will come, a God who connects with us now, bringing light into whatever
dark place we currently passing through.
This Sunday, we’ll be lighting the third Advent candle. Rejoice!
Welcome, King of Kings!
(From the Hilton Church of Scotland blog)
