The Vital Characters of Advent

Father Alfred Delp was a Jesuit priest in Germany during the 1930's and 40's.  He was condemned as a traitor by the Nazis for his opposition to Hitler, and was ultimately hung in 1945.  In late 1944 he wrote a short piece titled "The Shaking Reality of Advent" that has captured me, not only with it's content, but with the stunning parallels to our current point in history.

I don't have the language capabilities to effectively summarize the entirety of his work (it can be found in the "Watch for the Light" devotional I mentioned yesterday), but I've been particularly taken by his description of what he believed to be the three vital characters of the Advent season.  They were necessary 2000 years ago, becoming a vital part of the unfolding drama.  They were necessary in that jail cell in Nazi Germany in 1945.  They are necessary today.

The premise of Delp's work is that Advent should "shake" us from our slumber, awakening in us the true realities that are unfolding around us.  God breaking into the world shows us in no uncertain terms that we are lost and in need of being found; broken, in need of being restored; hopelessly dying, in need of being saved.  "There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more," Delp writes, "than to be genuinely shaken up... We have stood on this earth in false pathos, in false security; in our spiritual insanity we really believed we could, with the power of our own hand and arm, bring the stars down from heaven and kindle flames of eternity in the world."  The reality of God breaking into earth should shake us.  In the midst of our shaking, Delp calls us to heed three Advent characters: The Angel of Annunciation, the Blessed Woman, and the Crier in the Wilderness.  I would add that we mustn't simply heed them--we must become them.

The Angel
Nowhere else in the Bible, save the heavenly vision of John's Revelation, do angels play such a prominent and recurring role as they do in the Advent narrative.  Through dreams, visions, appearances, apparitions, and even a sudden, glorious appearance in the night sky, angels seem to be everywhere.  Their message is consistent--despite what you see with your eyes, there is a greater reality at work.  Elizabeth may seem to be barren, but God will give her a son.  Mary's pregnancy may seem illicit and immoral, but God is interrupting history.  Joseph may seem like a fool, but God is making him righteous.  Shepherds may seem to be the bottom of the social ladder, but God is putting them at the place of honor in the greatest celebration in the history of the universe.  What you see is not always what you get.

In the midst of a broken reality, the angel is a consistent messenger of hope.  As Germany disintegrated in the 1940's under the leadership of Hitler and the Nazi party, there are seeds of blessing being sown.  As the world seems to disintegrate around us--hundreds of thousands of babies killed for the sake of convenience, girls exploited and their innocence lost for sake of insatiable lust, workers driven deeper and deeper into poverty and hardship for the sake of the consumeristic machine that drives the economy of the entire world, children dying of hunger and preventable disease for the sake of the comfort and opulence of the minority world--in the midst of all of these realities, there are seeds of blessing being sown.  The Angel is a reminder that what we see with our eyes cannot always be fully trusted.

God is up to something.  We must heed the voice of the angel so that we don't lose hope.  But even more, we must become the voice of the angel.  If you and I, who hear the voice of reality in the midst of a hopeless and broken world, do not proclaim hope--who will?  If we who trust in the work of a God who is not just sovereign but is also good--if we don't live lives marked by joy and contentedness, who do we think will?  If we are not liberally sowing seeds of blessing in the midst of the dirt and weeds of the world around us, how will the fruit of love sprout and grow and be harvested?

The Woman
John tells us that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  Indeed.  An incredible reality.  But deliverance in the form of a baby necessarily began as hope in the form of an embryo.  The Word made flesh was carried within flesh that, by faith, simply believed the Word.  The woman became a warm and inviting conduit for the grace of God to waiting world.  Mary's story is a constant reminder that God has always and will always use people.  He could have hollowed a tree and preserved the race, but instead, He called Noah.  He might have gathered a people and guided their line, but instead, He appeared to Abram.  He might have turned the nation of Egypt upside-down by divine decree, but instead, as Moses walked in the desert, he saw a bush that was burning but not consumed.  The Word that easily could have boomed from the heavens instead became the still, small voice spoken to Elijah, that he might amplify that voice to the nations.  Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Malachi--they became God's voice to the world, despite the fact that God was perfectly capable of speaking for Himself.

The Word became flesh, contained in a young girl's womb.  The Word that might have simply appeared instead grew through embryonic stages, carried in the warmth of teenage girl.

They were witnesses to the Light; warmly embodying Truth to the waiting world.  We mustn't be any less.

The Crier
He who John's gospel calls "a witness to the Light" had been predicted by Isaiah as "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord.'"  Throughout history, devastation has come upon any age and any people that have not heeded that voice.  At times, the voice crying in the wilderness has been drowned out by the voices of the age.  At other times, the voice is heard but ignored as a foolish throwback to a lost and primitive age.  The voice, like John's of old, cuts through the milieu of culture and the spirit of the age, hearkening back to the Reality on which all things are built.  The one who cries in the wilderness reminds us that, despite the patterns that we easily fall into, all is not right with the world.

Here's the problem: We look around at the world, and because what we see is normal, we somehow think it's OK.  But it isn't OK.  The values are upside down.  The world has virtually transformed the sin of pride into a virtue to be rewarded.  Mediocrity is praised.  Sin is excused.  Even the church is often built upon the strength and talent of men, with little more than a nod to the power of God, and the lack of the presence of the Holy Spirit is all but forgotten.  Things are not OK, and in every age, it's the Crier that reminds us.  The Crier is one who is grounded in the Word of God, guided by Truth more than culture, with eyes that more readily see the invisible realities of God than the broken but tangible realities of men.

There was a man, sent from God.  His name was John.
He himself was not the Light, but he came as a witness to the Light.
(ref. John 1:6-8)  

You and I are called to the same work.  We are not ourselves the Light, but we bear the Light.  Jesus declares that we are the light of the world.  Light has been given to us that it might shine, transforming the darkness into light, that all might see what is actually True.

Shine on, friends.  Shine on.