Advent

I love advent, the season when churches go purple. Actually, I like church seasons in general. Just like the seasons of the weather, they provide different flavours of worship as the year progresses.

Advent is a season of anticipation, for me. It is not just about the promise of Isaiah that the messiah would come, a commemoration of an ancient anticipation. It is also about the promise that Christ will come again!

And while it may be hokey in our modern scientific age to think that Jesus would (or even can) visit the Earth again, it is a hope worthy of keeping alive. Can you think of an age that needs Jesus more? And by Jesus, I don't mean people talking Jesus. We need Jesus. Because so few listen to him anymore.

We need to understand that when he told his disciples that "every hair on their head is counted," that we can and must interpret that as a signal that God loves every single last one of us deeply and intimately. He knows everything there is to know about us, from our virtues to our flaws. And he is prepared to remember the latter no more, if we also will let go of our pride, our arrogance, our un-humility. Remember the parable of the slave forgiven his debt who refuses to forgive his own debtor! (Matthew 18:21-35)

If only the hard-hearted, the legalists, the cynics could understand that what is most important to know about God can be summed in a single word - LOVE! And to such a large extent, love is why Christianity flourishes in some parts of the world, even as it dies out in others. Anywhere you find Christianity flourishing - much of Africa, South Korea, South America - you see a Christianity focused on good works, and spreading a hopeful message of salvation and a personal God willing to do so much for the humblest person. And when you look at any place where Christianity is failing, you see a Christianity that has become the purview of the hard-hearted, the dour, the exclusionist, the turn-a-blind-eye wealthy... even though it happened centuries before I was born, I am deeply grieved by the fact that centuries of Christian internicine fighting... wars that pitted Catholics vs. Protestants, Catholics vs. Catholics, and Protestants vs. Protestants... that all this destroyed Christianity as a moral power in Europe. Aside from aging empty cathedrals, our faith has nearly disappeared from that continent. And Christianity is failing in Rwanda, a decade after Christians failed Rwanda so completely.

And I worry very much that some cheerleading corners of Christianity today, particularly the kind that supports militarist interventionism, will do so much damage to Christianity in general. Because any time you go without God, God leaves you to your sin. Jesus never bombed or shot anyone, and had much to say about giving your cloak to those who ask for your shirt, going two miles with they who demand one. And he lived it - the saving sacrifice we venerate, his death on the cross - was a death of complete pacifism. He even berated Peter for pulling the sword from his scabbard, telling him that to live by the sword was to die by the sword!

Go with out God, and you go alone. And powerless and weak, what remains of us? For we can do nothing without Him.