Advent Grace and Favor

Festivals, feasts, jubilees, anniversaries are human and divine experiences. Our lives are filled with these events, which mark times and punctuate the seasons of our experience. Most significantly for people of faith are the religious celebrations and events which annually point to the presence of God in the unfolding of our personal and communal lives.

This weekend we mark one of these significant turnings of our communal lives. As Church we begin the four week season of Advent. We begin as Church, for we are Church. Advent is ours personally and communally. In hearing God’s Word, celebrating the Eucharist, with music marking our feasts, and signs and symbols to nurture our vision, we say who we are. We become yet another time more intimately and intensely what we celebrate.

Last weekend I wrote about remembering in regards to the communion of saints. In looking to Advent, more thoughts on remembering are in order, for remembrance is the rhythm of our religious, liturgical lives. Remembering brings us to a shared past, intensifies our present moment, and energizes our hope in the days to come.

Advent is such a season, in which we remember the fidelity of God, who dealt wonderfully with his People in his past promises and actions on their behalf. We are invited in the seasonal readings to be attentive and alert to what God has done in the past, namely, that he has been faithful in his actions within our world. We are asked in the prophetic readings to note the promises made which are our surety.

Grace and Favor
The promise made takes shape in what Isaiah calls “a year of grace and favor”. That is a time of jubilee when the good news is preached to the poor, liberation is brought to the captive, “justice and praise spring from the earth.” In short, because we are recipients of the promise, we walk in a new light, with renewed energy. And the best news is that God walks with us.

Advent is a time of being alert to the Kingdom of the Father in Christ. When John’s disciples are sent to ask Jesus if he is the one or should John wait for another, Jesus tells them that “the blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised to life, and the poor have good news preached to them.” That’s the shape of the Kingdom to which we are called.

What we remember is that all of this is accomplished in Christ, the Son of Man sent by the Father. In his death and rising, and in our share in that mystery, the Kingdom begins to happen. We remember that present reality, for which reason the Eucharist is central to the Advent Season.

The Eucharist points us to a future also. As we proclaim often at the Lord’s Table: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. In the last phrase we remember into the future. Advent reminds us to be alert to that return. We are invited to awareness and urgency to be prepared when the Lord comes. The Eucharist, in the words of the hymn of Thomas Aquinas, is the “pledge of future glory”.

The future glory is the gathering of all the Saints from every age and time around the Banquet Table of the Kingdom. Already around our parish Eucharistic Table, we see the gathering of the nations in Christ by the power of the Spirit. The Eucharist is an invitation to this yet unseen, but marvelously hopeful future.

On the Way

Advent reminds us that we are on the way to the Kingdom. The “straight highway” has yet to be prepared for the Lord’s coming and for our walking to the full glory of the Kingdom. Along the way we are fed and along the way we are urged to feed and nurture our brothers and sisters on the journey to the Kingdom. Eucharist is not the end of the journey, but food for our passover through death to life forever.

Advent reminds us what we do while we wait for the Lord and his Kingdom. While we wait, we remember in Word and sacrament. While we wait, we are given as food for our brothers and sisters. We move forward in Christ and await his blessed return.

CDH