Things are Not Okay: Advent 1

I fear that in my excitement to begin waiting and watching, I have forgotten what this first bit of Advent is really about. Beginning on Sunday we have been lighting the “hope” candle, which tends to be associated for me with happy ideas like joy, love, and peace. We cannot really have hope, however, until we first acknowledge that things are not okay. Think about it: “hope” is not necessary for people when things are going well. Hope is the treasure of the broken, the hurting, and the lonely.

In our readings for Morning Prayer from the lectionary this week, we have been hearing, not a story of excitement over the coming Christ, but a story of brokenness and failure. In the readings from the prophets (Isaiah 1-2 and Amos 3-4), Israel is condemned for oppression and hypocrisy and the poor cry out for justice. In the Psalms, the people are surrounded by enemies and injustice on all sides, crying out to God for mercy. In the Gospels, we find John the Baptist crying out against the hypocrisy of religion many hundreds of years later, because things have not changed.

Part of why the oppression found in Israel is such a travesty is that these are the people whom God called apart to be a safe place for the hurting of the world: the strangers, the orphans, the widows, and the outcasts. Yet our readings for this first week of Advent cry out, “Things are not okay in the world!” It is a cry, not only of the Christian Church, but of the whole world. We long for something new, for justice and mercy and hope that things will not always be this way.

The Church too has been called to be a people set apart, a blessing to the strangers and outcasts in our lands; but we, like Israel, have become unjust and hypocritical instead. So in the first week of Advent, we are called to repent- to acknowledge that something is deeply wrong with the world and, not only can we not fix it, but we are a big part of it.

Yet the prophets do not leave their people in condemnation and the rhythm of Advent doesn’t leave us there either, as we come to the end of this first week. Even as we are reminded of the ways in which we’ve failed the world, failed God, and failed ourselves, we are given a promise: God is going to do something new among you. God has seen that you cannot be the blessing to the world on your own, so God will break into our time and space to dwell among us and be the justice we long for. The bad news is we can’t do it. The good news is that God can: and soon will.

Now, as I sit with my first Advent candle at the end of a long day, I think about the brokenness of the world and repent of my role in it, both personally any communally. Then I beg God to come and transform the mess we’ve made. I sit in stillness for a moment, and I blow out the candle with a sense of hope, knowing that by acknowledging my own inadequacy I have made space for God to come and dwell among us. Because God never barges in unwanted and uninvited. That, my friends, is the hope we profess this season: not a greeting card sentiment, but a deep, almost painful assurance that God has not forgotten us.