THE LORD OF ALL TIME: PREPARATION FOR ADVENT
Christianity is an incarnational religion. We confess that God became Man by the Virgin Mary for us and for our salvation, that Christ the God-Man died and rose again in a body and that in His body He now sits in glory at the right hand of God in heaven. We confess that Christ will return to judge all of humanity and creation in the body and we believe in the resurrection of the body and an embodied eternity. This means that for Christians, there is no such thing as mere spirituality in the sense that we are only concerned for our souls--faith requires all of ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be made a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice to God.
To worship the incarnational God as incarnational Christians means that there is no dimension of time or space that does not belong to Christ the King. We must always resist the urge to tear reality into two untouching dimensions of the ‘spiritual’ world out there and the ‘material world’ down here. The Incarnation of Christ that brought the Kingdom of God into our midst made impossible forever such a distinction. And so in the process of being formed to worship the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength we must learn to worship Him with our time as well.
This brings us to Advent and the Christian year. The Calendar narrates our time as it is known by those who have been made partakers of the life of Christ. The Calendar does not make sense from another perspective. In the eyes of the world, our holidays are arbitrary commemorations of pivotal events in the life of a spiritual guru. But understood through the Spirit, who has revealed to the Church the significance of a God who took on flesh and thus took on time, we know that the Calendar goes much deeper than that. In truth, the Calendar is a claim to reality. It asserts that the same Christ in whom all things hold together, the same Christ who is the lord of time as the true beginning and true end, that the life of this Christ is the most foundational dimension of reality and the truest sense of time we can know. The narrative of January through December, the narrative of twenty-four hours a day, these narratives only tell us how matter is moving around. The Christian Calendar tells us from whence all things arose and the end to which all things are heading.
Thus as we begin the Christian year with the first day of Advent tomorrow, we stand at the pivot-point of three advents of Christ the life of the world. We remember His first Advent at which the Word became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth. The Incarnation revealed what God had always willed for the whole creation--that all things were made to be the Temple of God and that all of humanity was purposed to be His priestly-kingly people, a steward race over all creation before the face of their Creator. So too, we remember His final Advent when He shall come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead, unveiling the Kingdom He brought among us that shall have no end. The Judgment day shall reveal as it is and thus reveal all that Christ is and all that we are and all the world is. On that day when the thoughts of all hearts shall be revealed by the one unto whom all hearts are open, all desires are known, and from whom no secrets are hid--on that day all shall be made to appear to be exactly and only what it is. The fact of the first Advent of Christ is the promise and guarantee of His second Advent.
And this brings us to the third Advent, in which Christ comes to us continually in the Spirit now. He has made our life His own so that He can make His life our own. He comes to dwell with us that we might dwell with Him--to make us children of God like He is as the Son of God. Christ comes to dwell in our hearts by faith so that we may become inheritors of the Kingdom with Him. He comes to us now in the teaching of the Word, in the graces of the Sacraments to form and teach and correct and prepare us now so that at the great Second Advent when all things are revealed we will stand revealed as the people of God. The whole shape and meaning of our lives is found in how we are formed by the Christ who came and the Christ who comes so as to be ready for the Christ who shall come again at the last day. As St. John the Baptist said, “make straight the way of the Lord.”
My prayer for us this Advent is that as we approach in this sacred time a deeper union with Him as He has made Himself present we would be formed to receive Him always as the Lord God who became flesh, and as the Lord God who comes to save us so that, on the last day, we will receive Him as He returns in glory as King as the same Lord and Friend we had received all our days in Word and Sacrament, and rejoice in welcoming Him and the fullness of His Kingdom.