The Now and the Not Yet

Yesterday, driving home from work, I headed east, into the dusk, the sky streaked with Advent colors of blue and lavender and mauve. And I was thinking about Advent -- what Advent means.

Actually, Advent means a lot of things. In many ways it's a hard season to get a handle on -- you've got eschatology, the Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist, the first part of the Gospel birth narratives...you've got penance, you've got hopeful expectation...lots of concepts and images swirling together, like the December sky at sunset.

I can write, I think, a fairly cogent summary of what Advent means -- but it's perhaps not so easy to encapsulate what Advent means to me. That was my feeling, anyway, heading home on Friday evening.

But later on, at home, for some reason the phrase "Word and Sacrament" kept popping into my head. So I thought about the Church year, and about how the seasons of the Church year relate to the life of the Church. Lent, where we are invited to enter into God's kenotic action in Jesus, to follow him through his Passion, into death and then again into life, is a season with a baptismal theme -- indeed, in many of our churches we conduct baptisms at the Easter Vigil. Pentecost is the season for extended focus on the Word made flesh; for listening to Jesus' words and watching his actions as he lives with and ministers to those around him. If Lent and Easter show us God's salvific action though Christ, then the "green and growing season" explains the saved for what? -- what moving in a Godward direction, what living Christ into the world, look like.

To me Advent, with its theme of hopeful, joyful expectation, is a time to think about the Eucharist -- the "foretaste of the feast to come." Sometimes I have a very hard time dwelling in that place between the now and the not yet, in a variety of contexts. It's easy for me to become angry, confused, discouraged, even desperate, when my "eyes are on the prize," but the prize never seems forthcoming. It's easy for me, at times, to embrace the definition of faith once offered by a child in Sunday School: "Faith is believing something you know isn't true."

This is where a sacramental understanding of how God operates becomes so valuable. The Reign of Christ and the renewal of all things can seem very far away indeed -- perhaps even unattainable; a nice fantasy our spiritual ancestors came up with to keep their sense of chaos and despair at bay. But when we believe that Jesus Christ is truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, when we see them, touch them, taste them, incorporate them into ourselves in the radical trust that, somehow, Jesus is incorporating us into himself -- I don't know about you, but that multidimensional, multisensory encounter with Christ can get me through another week of life on this planet, in the space between the now and the not yet.

We have an Advent wreath at church, and I have one at home. But for me this year I think perhaps the most meaningful symbols of the season for me are going to be the wafer on my tongue and the sip of wine on my lips -- the Word of God become the enfleshed God With Us, who once entered into our common human existence in a particular place, at a particular time, no different than any of us; who graciously enters into our lives now, again and again, in the humble stuff of earth -- water and grain and grapes; who has promised to enter into our world again in a different, definitive way, when "all will be well and all manner of thing will be will." Even so, come, Lord Jesus.


Chalice and paten by Holbrook's Stoneware .