The Promise of Advent – Part 1: Deliverance

Samson and John the Baptist: Two biblical figures who offer us two very different but consistent mandates as deliverers.

One of my favorite collects for Advent says, “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us.” This is a prayer for deliverance that marks in some ways the very heartbeat and nature of Advent. We are a people who in this season cry out to God.

More Than a Sweet Holiday

You see, the true Advent is anything but the sweet holiday we have made it in what one author describes as the “domestication” of Advent: little Advent calendars that you open up with toys or pieces of chocolate inside. Instead, Advent is in fact meant to be an intentional accessory in stirring up within a people of God a deep and profound longing for the world to be made right, for me to be made right. For my relationships and my family, my places of business, my community, politics, the arts, medicine to be made right in the sight of God.

And both Samson and John the Baptist get at that every problem, because as you know, Samson was sent as a deliverer. His personal life was a complete train wreck. It is in some ways a testament to the mercy and grace of God that someone so profoundly weak and immoral and volatile would, in fact, be used to defeat a foreign occupational army. And yet that’s what God did.

The longing for the world to be made right was answered in Samson by the changing of a materialistic guard: military sent away; a new people raised up. It’s important to see that because many of us not only try to domesticate Advent, we so personalize it that we don’t understand that what we are crying out for is not personal forgiveness.

Instead, Advent celebrates a point at which a whole web of deliverance is meant to occur, where in the end, it’s a new heaven and a new earth. At the end, deliverance literally encompasses everything you and I see, because all is under judgment; therefore, all needs to be redeemed and made right.

More Than Personal Redemption

At one point in my life, I was somehow taught that what the second coming of Jesus would do would be to rescue my soul. This immaterialist thing inside me would be, in essence, redeemed, and I would escape into this immaterial place called heaven, and earth would burn up.

But that truth is contained nowhere in scripture. Instead, the forgiveness and mercy that I received in Jesus are in fact meant to be a foretaste for literally a new land, a new government, a new sharing and generosity, a new set of relationships marked by having a society filled with not just kindness, but literally a miraculous absence of division, disease, any distinctions to set one group over and against another. It’s a new politic. It’s not merely personal redemption.

And that’s why in this season, we hear about Samson. But just to make sure we don’t miss the point, we also hear about John the Baptist, who called people to repentance. You see, I would think if an Episcopal priest took the role of John the Baptist, he or she might try to pastorally care for the people in the midst of a land of oppression and never ask the larger questions about complicity with evil, about an economic system that favored the oppressor over the oppressed.

And nothing could be further from the truth. Because, you see, the vision of Advent is a new heaven and a new earth. It’s not my personal escape from the land of sin and death – which is why we have both Samson and John the Baptist.

More Than Personal Transgression

So what does that have to do with you and me right now, in this particular Advent season? First comes the recognition that you and I are reminded in this season that the very nature of mercy and forgiveness is not just for my personal transgressions that the enemy always likes to remind me of. It’s also for the fact that I live in a system in which I am personally complicit, inescapably so. And these sins, whether they be economic, whether they be political, whether they be financial, are the sins of our people.

Here’s how awful it can feel: I want to go to the store to buy a whole bunch of clothes to give away, because in this Advent season, we’re taking a collection to give away clothing for people in need. So I salvage out of my closet, and I show up in a particular department store because everybody has sales at Christmastime, and I buy a bunch of stuff because I know that’s what homeless people need: socks, underwear and so on.

And yet, if I look very carefully, I see a label on the underwear, and I realize it was made in a sweatshop in Hong Kong. And my capacity to be able to buy that underwear at a rock-bottom price has everything to do with the absence of a fair wage being paid to the people in Hong Kong, which allows me to have greater buying power.

In other words, I have the money, so I get the advantage. They have no other jobs. They’re the ones who are receiving the oppression, all of which has been personally fueled by my individual purchase.

But there’s more to the story. We’ll discuss it together in Part 2 of this post.

 

How does Advent offer deliverance to you? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.

(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on Dec. 19, 2019, in the Diocesan Chapel, Orlando.)

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.