pat loughery

This weekend is the beginning of Advent. Advent is the season in the Christian calendar in which we are invited to prepare ourselves for the Christmas story. Advent is about patient, joyful expectation of the arrival of Christ in our midst, and it is meant to be a time of hope for something different, while realizing that what we wait for hasn’t yet happened.

The idea is based on the Hebrew understanding of rememberance. In our culture we think of time linearly: a historical event happens once and only once. But the Hebrew worldview (and even more so, the Celtic worldview) sees time more fluidly, so that when we actively remember some event, it is as if a stone is dropped into a lake, and in the ripples that expand out past the initial event, the event is in some very real sense re-lived.

When Jesus invites his disciples into communion with him in his final Passover meal, and he says “do this in remembrance of me”, this is what he means – our communion celebrates not just an event in the past, but is actively occurring again and again every time we gather.

Christmas is the Christian celebration of the ripples in time from the incarnation of God, the birth of a fully human infant who enfleshes God.

My favorite season in the Christian calendar is advent, because the aspect of God’s interaction with humanity which most thrills me is the incarnation, God-become-flesh.

In the Christmas event, the eternal God, the creator of creation and the highest power in the universe becomes one of us and one with us. He does this not as a backup plan to fix a broken humanity, but he does this to wholly, completely, humanize God and allow us humans to pursue full communion with God.

God enters flesh and time, becoming vulnerable and frail as we are, and his entry into the world introduces him to discomfort: He is cold, he is hungry, his nappies are soiled, he has no language with which to communicate his needs and desires. God is limited in Jesus, emptied of the fullness of God-ness in order to be fully and totally human, to how us what humanity can be.

God, for the first time in eternity, needs a haircut, must wash his feet, urinates and defacates, learns. God experiences the limitations and thrills of humanness.

God is Immanuel, God-With-Us.

We, though, tend to minimize the humanity of God in Jesus. Our culture, Greek-thought-influenced as we are, recoils at a fully human God, a God who leaves footprints in the sand and whose stomach grumbles when hungry and who has body odor after a long, hot day. (And, the idea of Jesus urinating probably makes you recoil more than you’d care to admit, but… what else would a fully human Jesus do?).

But a God who is only transcendent above humanity is not the God who is with us; that is only the God who created us. That God is not necessarily the God who fully knows us, who understands the reality of our struggles, of the difficulty of walking uphill at the end of a hot day, who understands the pull of the desire to do good and to be good admidst temptations to brokenness.

The Advent season prepares us for the arrival of a fully human God, in a cattle stall in first-century Palestine among everyday people.

The Advent season invites us to prepare for the moment at which the cattle can nuzzle the infant cheek of God, and outcast shepherds can hear God’s cry before nursing from his mother’s breast.

Advent prepares us to fully receive an everyday, unspectacular God. A God who, in Jesus, shows us the full reality of what it means to be human, in dwelt by God’s spirit, capable of miraculous things: prayer, kindness, healing, community-building, reconciliation. Resurrection. Life abundant and not bound by time.