Allowing Advent to Linger

One of my favorite Christmas carols is the macabre Coventry Carol. Can there be peace among the mournful? Is this why lament is so imperative? One of my favorite versions of this carol is by the London Brass. The harshness of the snare and the fanfare explode into “raging” (as is the lyric), when the story of Herod’s abhorrent charge is revealed in an almost intolerable clamor. It tries to disrupt the lullaby. The slow cadence and ominous minor key melody warns us that something bad is about to happen. (Many of us feel that way now as the new year draws near.) And then the somber timpani and weeping brass conclude this haunting story. The carol makes reference to the Massacre of the Innocents in the Gospel of Mark when King Herod orders the killing of all male infants under the age of 2. He is threatened by a Greater Benevolent Power over his own hubris. This somber lullaby is imagined as sung by all mothers in Bethlehem. Mothers know the power of a lullaby.

https://youtu.be/rS-KTv2t9Js?si=5Dv1AMxzhp82JW3i

Whether such a massacre actually happened is questionable. Mark is the only Gospel to make mention of it. But the point is clear. The peace Jesus brings is not a quiet peace but one of emphatic liberation; a threat to topple oppressive power and those who would rather expel or exterminate life and lives to keep such power; it threatens those who boast their their own supremacy and fragile egos. (Sound familiar?) In our context, when xenophobia and transphobia spread unjustifiably, and perpetuate discriminatory fear, and endanger these, our Beloved siblings, the great divider can only summon power with lies in this way. But in doing so, their threats become very real. Additionally, our modern day global wars and genocides are a mirror; how can we not weep, mourn, and sing this carol with raw emotion? As we reflect on the Feast of the Holy Innocents which falls on this day, what comes to mind and heart are all humans and children in war zones from Ukraine, to Sudan, to Palestine… “Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child…” Oh, the little tiny children…

“Christmas Time is here…” But oh, how I miss Advent…Christmas has begun. Advent is over. The arrival has dawned. The light is here. The wait is over.

Or, is it?

Christmas is here, but we are still waiting. Bombs are still dropping. Family members are still estranged. Grief still stings. Refugees are still seeking shelter and safety. The gap between the rich and the poor is still widening, and ever more so in unfathomable ways post 2024 election and within the already expanding oligarchical arrival in America. The top 1% of the United States hold nearly ONE THIRD of the entire nation’s wealth; a hoarding of disgusting proportions. Social and safety nets are weakening and teetering on the threat of cuts or removal. Accountability evades the powerful. Toddler behavior, crime infestation, and twisted views are characteristics of an incoming administration. Courts are being hijacked. White supremacy garners more response and protection than for those it harms. Integrity still hides behind ulterior motives. Kindness and wokeness are still perceived as weakness. Vulgarity is acceptable, even admired, or ignored. Mockery of disability is laughed at. Lies and manipulation still win over the obligation to do what’s right. Disinformation has run amuck and bamboozled even good people. Gun violence only raises awareness among the powerful- if it affects the powerful. Voter suppression increases. Apathy discourages civil participation, action, and voting; such is exactly the authoritarian’s hope. Capitalism exploits and perpetuates violence. We have many a reason to be deeply concerned and worried about what the next 4 years and beyond will bring, while already suffering from similar threads throughout history. I have wanted to write about the election results, but have struggled to cope, and to find the words to describe such disappointment, anger, and despair. And there is so much beyond elections that deprive us.

But the invitation during Advent is to be aware of the ways in which God is still with us, working with us, while also depending on us to leave behind what dehumanizes, oppresses, exploits, and kills. “Emmanuel” has no significance if we do not realize that we are also the embodiment of that coming, that arrival, that subversiveness to the powers-that-be. Such a sacred seed has been planted, and seeds take root in the dark of the soil. 

If you’re like me, you might not have welcomed Christmas with the enthusiasm of a Whoville community, hand-in-hand, singing, “Welcome, Welcome!” Perhaps you’re among the fewer who feel a bit melancholy about the arrival of Christmas and the end of Advent. Not because the festivities of Christmas Day with gift giving, meals, games, and traditions are over, but because the time of the Advent Season in some ways, feels most meaningful in its wonder, than all of the festivities, even if you genuinely appreciate and even enjoy those, too. (And even if you absolutely love the classic 1966 Grinch Who Stole Christmas, like I do…By the way, why are we so mad at the Grinch for hating all the noise and materialism?) Maybe it’s because you have found a depth of realness in the ways you find the ability to hold joy alongside your grief, that Advent feels truer. The way darkness embraces a hidden beginning, and illumines a brighter light beauty. Maybe because in the dreaming of Advent, curiosity and vision guide us to what’s actually waiting for us to see and to do, rather than what we are waiting for to happen. And if we pay attention, we will hear the not so silent cries of injustice in the way Christ arrives in unexpected places and unexpected people, troubling us, reminding us that Jesus was born of oppressed parents, in precarious environments, from the womb of the radical and faithful Mother Mary, whose words discomfort us in our privilege, by prophesying the sacred freedom Christ calls for, to lift the lowly and cast down the mighty. Her voice weaves with those of the weeping mothers in Mark, and with today’s mothers who lament so utterly broken over the massacre of their Innocent Ones. Guns remain the leading cause of death for American children, and just under 50% of those deaths are children of color. 17,500 children have been murdered in Palestine as of today, and that is an underestimated number given who remains under the rubble. (Palestinian Pastor and theologian, Munther Isaac reminds us that Christ is in the rubble.)

Jesus had not yet been born in the moment the infancy narrative is voiced through Mary. She is looking forward to the revolution Jesus will bring, the overturning of oppressive powers; she is the bearer of the initial prophetic vision of Jesus’ Way, reminding us to trust women’s vital intuition and voice. She speaks of the peace which isn’t always gentle and mild or quiet, but one that challenges comfort, and is not the absence of conflict, but a True Peace that requires the gritty work of reconciliation and justice. It is that Advent moment where a kind of clarity comes even before Jesus was born, but also always was. Jesus takes after his mother in her courage in their how-the-world-ought-to-be vision, strikingly not only about something exclusively spiritual. It is earthly; it is to be embodied. It is to create a kin-dom on earth. It is the Moment we are still in. It is the Birthing we are also responsible for.

As the poet/activist, Amanda Gorman reminds us in her poem, “The Hill We Climb”:

“…where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry,

a sea we must wade

We’ve braved the belly of the beast

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace

And the norms and notions

of what just is

Isn’t always just-ice

And yet the dawn is ours

before we knew it

Somehow we do it…”

The inner resilience to keeping striving for peace is especially true of communities that are marginalized with whom Jesus’ very being resonates deepest. Somehow, Advent reminds us that we do it, and we will continue to do it, even in the shadows of evil, even as our days lengthen and lighten, even before we knew it. The Advent and Christmas Seasons span over the shortest days and longest nights and over the beginning of shorter nights and longer days here, perhaps with a purpose. These solemn seasons contain both the light and the dark; the waiting and the arrival. I, for one, like to sit in the in-between time, the anticipation, the hope, the wonder. I like to be in the dark where light is better illumined, where beginnings spawn and are nourished. Sarah Bessy said, “I want to be part of the people who see the darkness, know it’s real, and then light a candle anyway.” Same! (I guess the community of Whoville had it right when they joined hands in community despite all that had been stolen from them.) The Dark of Advent and the Light of Christmas both belong to God, and our belonging is in them. “There is a reason the sky gets dark at night. We were not meant to see everything all the time. We are meant to rest and trust even in the darkness.” -Morgan Harper Nichols.

Jesus is born, yes, that’s true, and Jesus will be born again. And again. Jesus is born perpetually. It’s why we celebrate these rituals, holidays and traditions every year. Not just to remind us of the significance of them in history, but to embody their significance as a reminder that liberation, justice, and Love Incarnate are every day occurrences and invitations, not something that just happened one day. Jesus didn’t ask us to celebrate his “birthday” anyway. Rather, his awaited arrival and birth should stir us to embrace the disruptive peace his coming insists upon, that which overturns systems of power, and transforms our hearts. Advent is the cultivation of the wild and revolutionary danger to those who thrive on false power-over. Jesus’ death by state violence didn’t squash the story. Mary will not be silenced. Neither will we. 

Many of you, like me, may have found it difficult to celebrate among both personal and wider societal ails and evils. How dare we celebrate anything in the midst of such tragedy, such looming darkness, such twisted narratives in the bastardization of Christianity by Christian Nationalism where the Bible is wielded as a weapon, when groups of Christians have found their “savior” in one who decides who is worthy of a “Merry Christmas” and who’s not (re: 45/47’s recent tweet on 12/27), and that such a great divider is even deemed “called by God” to… bring about what? The hell he and his cronies create for many? “In his name all oppression shall cease.” So beware of those who use his name to oppress. But such as these are not called by God in this way. He and those like him are only called by other gods- of corruption, deceit, tyranny, hypocrisy, greed, and more. And how can we celebrate when war never ceases? It is a fair lament, and one that echos ancient times, and not so far off times. But these seasons desire our pondering, and must be celebrated, in the face of distorted positions pretending to be Holy. The truth of Christmas, too- is to hold the paradox of joy alongside grief. But we cannot authentically celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus, the Light of the world, if we don’t face the complicit shadows within ourselves, the loss of humanity around us, or if we don’t confront the lies that desire to keep us compliant in destructive ways. Otherwise, such celebrations ring hallow.

Advent’s meaning and hope in these earthly realities still breaks through enduringly, and in relevance right now. It highlights the need to tell the truth and live in solidarity such that the tyrants of the day will never have the last word. That was the point of Jesus’ life and death after all. God shows up, has shown up, and will continue to show up. Not just in Jesus, but before Jesus, and ever after Jesus. And in us. A theology that insists Advent/Christmas as the only beginning or end of this Light, misses that Advent invites to see this chapter in an enduring story of God’s Light not once revealed, but constantly on fire.

How will love and humility find a way in all of this doom? The arrival of Emmanuel is something to rejoice (re-joy) over, but not like a celebration that only revels in what we gain. This is how we subvert the oppressors, with the insistence to re-joy every year, and all over the in-between. Empires have fallen, and they will fall again. When we are waiting and hoping, the invitation to see Christ’s possibility is perhaps even more palpable in the Advent darkness than on a day we might think everything resolves in a neat package. Rather the Light and Dark are entangled in the “Hark” we are called upon to pay attention to when the angels sing of mercy and reconciliation. Advent invites us to listen, and Christmas invites us to hold on. What comes next should be a manifestation of liberation born. It is a long birth pang.

M Jade Kaiser (they/them) of “Enfleshed” writes:

“Love takes on flesh in every new born baby

Swaddled in the care of community

Making refuge from state violence,

Dreaming dreams of toppling unjust powers

And bringing evil to its knees.

Each child born under oppressive rule

Is already a seed of salvation-

Their flourishing would be a harvest of justice.

Let us come and kiss their toes.

Let us come and offer them all we have.

Let us come and be changed,

For this IS the face of God.

A miracle of love’s determination.

A trick of holy subversion.

A vulnerable bundle of joy,

Through whom our freedom cries.”

Allow Advent meaning to linger, as we tell the Christmas story. It is a story that tells us something about God’s intimate presence, and it tells us about our ability to transform ourselves and our world. Such a humble beginning, but with cosmic proportions. Such an oddity of occurrence, but with an audacious quest. Emmanuel, God is with us, in our longing, in our treacherous journeys, in our mourning, in our seeking of something so far away, and yet so close. It is an unsanitized, chaotic birth. Waiting isn’t easy in times of such uncertainty, but we can inhabit the dark, and be formed by it. What is not ready yet depends upon such formation there. May this Christmas Season be blessed by an Advent Lingering, and may it summon our own Mary-like courage to face what is to come, to strengthen the bonds of Beloved Community, to cultivate and nourish, to rest, to resist and persist.

A Prayer by Cole Arthur Riley:

God of the long wait,

We take hope, knowing you are a God whose movement is not dependent on our ability to perceive it. Remind us that your wait in the womb of Mary was not time wasted, but an intimate beginning in mystery, growth, and dependency. Let our own waiting be the same, that we would find ourselves able to trust our communities to sustain us, entering safe and sacred interdependence for all parts. As we wait for healing and liberation- in ourselves, in the world- help us to practice justice, repair, and mercy, never relying on the divine to absolve us of our collective and individual responsibility. And let us wait in mystery, believing that those who think they are in control of this world are not, and that oppression will not prevail. Help us to be at rest with the unknowing, that we would trust the secret of Mary’s womb, realizing we aren’t entitled to knowledge or clarity, but are still held in love. Let us feel that even here you are moving, you are growing our way to life and healing. Protect us from despair as we wait for liberation. Amen.