Here, But Not Yet: The Feeling Of Advent

During Advent, Christians sing songs such as, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.” These songs anticipate the hope that God’s people felt as they waited for this Savior. Congregations light candles of hope, peace, love, and joy, like an emblazoned clock counting down to God’s intervention. My family has an Advent calendar with hand-sewn Nativity story characters, which travel daily from numbered pocket to numbered pocket on a red and green felt background.

Waiting for something that has already happened is a curious practice. Explaining the season of Advent was quite difficult for me until my wife and I were pregnant with our first child. When a child is in the womb, the child is certainly real even though you can’t hold the baby in your arms. A mother’s body changes, subtle flutters soon become kicks, and ultrasounds reveal a profile, leading someone to say, “She looks just like you!” or “Are you sure you aren’t having an alien?” The child is certainly real, but not yet born. It’s kind of like recording kick counts as the baby’s due date approaches. Ask any mother — the baby is already here, but not yet born.

The Advent season plays with our notion of time. The church gathers in the present to ponder the past for a future hope. A Christmas Carol is a beautiful story for the Advent season because it is a tale in which the past, present, and future all come together in one transformative night. Certainly this story is about Scrooge’s love of money and his altruistic failures, but it is also a story about how Scrooge cannot let go of his past. Early in the story, after establishing that Marley had been dead for some time, Dickens writes, “Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley” (Stave One). Scrooge seems to cling to the past because his (only?) friend Marley represented the only things in which Scrooge trusts: hard work, frugality, unwavering discipline, and action that can be weighed, measured, and counted.

One of the reasons I love the song “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” is because it’s difficult to count. The time signature is common time (four beats per measure and the quarter note gets the beat), but each measure seems to flow into the next without a structured beat or meter. Rarely does a phrase in the song begin with beat one, and words are extended past measure breaks. The song also talks about the promises of the past coming into fruition. The words and music together suggest that the past and future unite in an ambiguous but blessed present. Scrooge is stuck in the past, and he can’t move forward because one can only count what one’s already been given. If your world is only what can be weighed and measured, Advent’s “here, but not yet” mantra makes too little sense for a merry investment.

Jesus came to save us from counting our past as our only reality. It’s like when Moses led God’s people out of Egyptian slavery into the wilderness. Before they reached the Promised Land, the Book of Exodus says, “The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt … for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger'” (Exodus 16:2-3 NRSV). Because living in the wilderness was difficult and they were caught wandering between where they were and where they were heading, the people complained and wished they had died as slaves. The people became stubborn and bitter (see Exodus 32:9), almost “Scroogelike” in their relationship with God and one another. Instead of moving forward in faith, trusting that God was with them, the people kept looking over their shoulders, hopelessly lamenting over the way things were.

Advent is like living in the wilderness between what was and what will be. Living into this tension, remembering God’s promises, and depending on faith become spiritual disciplines that keep us from becoming Scrooges ourselves. Even though the Promised Land may seem far off, we hold tightly to the promises of our God, for “he who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23 NIV).

 

An excerpt from The Redemption of Scrooge by Matt Rawle.

Matt Rawle is the Lead Pastor at The Well United Methodist Church near New Orleans, Louisiana and a graduate from the LSU School of Music and Duke Divinity School.

This I Know: Getting Children Close with the Bible

One of the first things that children learn about the Bible is that Jesus loves them, as they sing the beloved song, “Jesus loves me.” And they learn that it’s in the Bible where they first meet Jesus, this One who loves them so much. In this musical affirmation of faith, children take a first step in naming God’s presence in their life, something we hope that will grow with them throughout their life. But if we want this growth to continue, it is imperative that a child’s engagement with the Bible be more than a Sabbath experience.

I grew up with four experiences that were formative for my Christian formation. I had a Bible storybook that I read at night. It didn’t have many pictures but the stories became vivid in my memory. No picture of Hannah’s prayer to God or God’s calling Samuel in the night could be as vivid as the picture in my mind. Second, my parents took me to church school and embedded me in a loving faith community. They also provided me with experiences of caring for and being loved by those who were different than me, people with disabilities. And finally I grew up in a house where the Bible was often on the kitchen table, along with stacks of commentaries as my mother prepared to lead Bible study with her women’s group. The Bible was visible, active, and present in my life and surely it marked me forever for a life of faith.

Parents make a mistake when they leave the spiritual formation of their child with the church and take no personal responsibility for it themselves. By doing this, they miss the opportunity to grow in their own faith as they read Bible stories with their child, and help them make connections between stories and actions in the world. Perhaps they do this because of their own negative experiences with the Bible, or lack of any knowledge, or struggles with what they believe themselves. Thinking that the Bible is best taught by “experts” they abandon this important role. Whatever the reason, it’s time to support parents in reclaiming their important role as faith educators with their children.

Consider these suggestions, ways to enable parents to claim their active role in helping a child grow in their faith.

1. On the Sunday when you give Bibles to children, invite parents to come to church school for class together on “Finding your way in the Bible.”
2. Offer workshops or a class for parents on topics like: How to choose a Bible storybook; How to read the Bible with your child; Dinner table conversations – how to connect the Bible with living life in response to God’s love.
3. If there are mid-week choir options for children, offer a conversation for parents about the Bible stories children are engaging on Sunday morning.

Distance education is a term that graduate schools have used to describe an aspect of their curriculum.  Maybe it’s also a way to describe Christian education programs for children. A child’s ability to grow in faith also needs to be close. Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, a beloved author of many books for children has written,

“We need to give our children stories that they can grow with.  The first expression of religion is experience. We are people of faith because we had a religious experience. The closest we can get to that experience is story.  Then the story is transformed into ritual and liturgy. Then comes reflection on the ritual – theology. Theology is the furthest from the experience. The closest we can get is story.  We want our children to get close.”

(“Tell Me a Story:Narrative and the Religious Imagination of Children” in Faith Forward: Re-Imagining Children’s and Youth Ministry, CopperHouse, 2015)

When we read the Bible with a child, inviting their questions, encouraging their wonder and imagination, we get close to the stories, understanding them in the context in which they were written and beginning the important work of interpreting their meaning for living faithfully as God’s people today. Getting close to the Bible is a wonderful life-long opportunity. What a gift it is to share that with a child.

 

Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Caldwell lives in Nashville, Tennessee where she teaches as Adjunct Faculty at Vanderbilt Divinity School.  She is the author of I Wonder, Engaging a Child’s Curiosity about the Bible, Abingdon Press, 2016.