Friday column Advent 2

Advent is a dual season of the church year. One part looks toward the advent, the arrival, of god’s vision for the world coming into sharper focus. The other element, of course, is the first Advent, the arrival of Jesus, an event most Christians celebrate on December 25^th. Older, more established Protestant denominations, along with our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers, do not try to put our calendar on to the divine timetable. Our trouble is that American religious expression has a decided overlay of just such a reading of Scripture that sees a timetable emerge from disparate Scriptural passages. Older religious American expression finds itself in a position where they feel defensive about a traditional biblical interpretation as opposed to a relatively novel approach to trying to predict “the end times.” I will be blunt. All such predictions have been wrong, but that signal embarrassment does not stop folks from continuing to play the game. It is picked up in secular culture with the Mayan calendar guess that this year will mark time’send.

Instead of fanciful crystal ball predictions, mainstream Christians emphasize, with the gospels, that the advent of Jesus marks the decisive turn of history. All apocalyptic material means is an unveiling, a lifting of the lid of history, a revelation. The end is the culmination of the vision of god, not its annihilation. Almost all Scriptural references are images that speak of the dislocation of the death knell of the old way of the world, and the thrilling novelty of restoration and the shock of the new of the divine vision being played out more fully in our world.

In that sense, so many of our beloved Christmas stories are revelations about the way God would want the world to be. They are apocalyptic stories. I watched a lot of the Christmas shows when I was a child, and even now sometimes. The progenitor of all of them is A Christmas Carol ( I still like the 1951 version the best).  Scrooge’s dream is an apocalyptic vision that takes in the past, the present, and the future. Scrooge sees  the world in a new way and is converted to living out that vision.

The Grinch lives on isolation and envy of happiness, as his heart is two sizes too small. The innocence of a child melts that cold heart and allows it to grow four sizes too big.

Even Rudolph is a lesson in tolerance and acceptance of differences as the3 biased undergo a conversion. Of course, a Charlie Brown Christmas is a direct look at the Christmas blues, how even a pathetic tree can be made glorious, and even presents the gospel itself with Linus under a spotlight.

All of these cultural touchstones are effective pieces of the gospel. They provide us a way to look into our own lives and the way we could live through the safe mirror of fiction, especially children’s stories. For me, they give better insight into the biblical picture of god’s designs for our world than the charts and fevered code breaking of those who gleefully await an end of the world as we know it (with a bow to REM).

The stores have been filled with Christmas music, and at least two local stations have been playing carols since Thanksgiving. May I suggest a careful look at O Little Town of Bethlehem. Read or listen carefully to the last two verses. Look at how it imagines the second advent of Christ being intensely personal, as being born again in us. It imagines us as walking mangers, for Emmanuel, God with us. Now there is an apocalyptic vision.