The word for the fourth and final week of Advent is “love,” and it is associated with Joseph. When God’s angel told him in a dream to not be afraid to marry Mary, Joseph loved his fiancee enough to make her his wife, in spite of the raised eyebrows and innuendo that would be directed his way because of her illegitimate pregnancy. He then loved as his own the son Mary bore, though the boy was neither flesh of his flesh nor bone of his bone.

As we wait, not passively, but actively, for Christmas and Christ’s coming, we have the opportunity, like Joseph, to see one another as the God-bearers we are, and to support and love one another as we attempt to bring to birth the new life that God has planted within us.

Henri Nouwen sees this loving support not just in Joseph and Mary’s relationship but also in the meeting of Elizabeth and Mary (Luke 1:39-45):

These two women created space for each other to wait. They affirmed for each other that something was happening that was worth waiting for. I think that is the model of the Christian community. It is a community of support, celebration, and affirmation in which we can lift up what has already begun in us. The visit of Elizabeth and Mary is one of the Bible’s most beautiful expressions of what it means to form community, to be together, gathered around a promise, affirming that something is really happening.

Mary and Elizabeth’s mutual support points beyond itself, giving us a picture of what Christian community looks like.

In a similar way, Joseph’s love for Mary and for Jesus, with its attendant self-sacrifice, points beyond itself, giving us a glimpse of God’s great outpouring of himself in love for all of us, love that is seen so clearly in the Incarnation, the coming of the God who created the cosmos to live among us as one of us.

From Kimberlee Conway Ireton, The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year (InterVarsity Press, 2008), p 21-23.

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The watchword for the third week of Advent is “rejoice,” and it is connected with Mary whose “soul doth magnify the Lord” (Luke 1:46 KJV). This week also has a different color than the other weeks: pink, for joy.

Mary’s words and the change in liturgical colors remind us that this time of waiting and preparation is a joyful time, that even in the midst of fasting and penitence we can know joy because, as Mary sang in the Magnificat, “God has done great things for [us].”

In my Protestant upbringing, Mary was simply a Jewish peasant girl who was the mother of Jesus. I’ve since learned that Catholic and Orthodox Christians have a much richer and more symbolic understanding of Mary. They call her theotokos, Mother of God, God-bearer. She is the symbol of humanity itself, fallen but willingly entering into a restored relationship with God through her “yes” to the angel’s proclamation that she would be the mother of the Messiah….

By bearing in her womb the Son of God, Mary makes possible the Incarnation and, thus, later, the crucifixion and resurrection. In so doing, she turns the mourning of our fallenness into the rejoicing of our redemption. It is God who does these great things, to be sure, as Mary herself proclaims, but how great a God we serve, that he would allow us, invite us, long for us to participate in his redeeming work in the world….

During Advent, we are to be like Mary, waiting actively, joyfully, and expectantly for the new life that has been and will be born into the world. And also like Mary, we are to be agents of this birthing. We are to bring the Light of the world into the world.

From Kimberlee Conway Ireton, The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year (InterVarsity Press, 2008), p 21-23.

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Taproot Theatre Blogathon Update: Thanks to the generosity of Scott Cummins and Tiffany Werner, each comment will raise $3 for Taproot’s reconstruction efforts after the fire. If you haven’t yet, please go leave a comment on the blogathon post.

for you will go before the Lord to prepare the way,

to give God’s people knowledge of salvation

by the forgiveness of their sins.

In the tender compassion of our God

the dawn from on high shall break upon us,

to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

–Luke 1:76-79

This week’s word is “prepare,” and it is linked with John the Baptist, the voice “crying in the wilderness: prepare ye the way of the Lord” (Luke 3:4 KJV). During these weeks before Christmas we are to be preparing a place for Christ to come into our midst.

Much of this preparation is watchfulness. “Be on guard,” Jesus says to his disciples—and to us (Luke 21:34). We are to be always on the watch and to pray as we wait for Christ’s return. As Paul writes to the Thessalonians:

…the Day of the Lord will come like a thief at night. It is when people are saying, ‘How quiet and peaceful it is,’ that sudden destruction comes upon them, as suddenly as labor pains come on a pregnant woman; and there is no escape. … so we should not go on sleeping, as everyone else does, but stay wide awake. (1 Thess 5:2-6 NJB)

Preparation involves paying attention and staying awake, so that the coming of Christ will not take us by surprise and so that we will be ready and able to recognize that day when it comes.

In the circle of the church year, Advent follows a long season of Ordinary Time in which the busyness and dailyness of our lives can distract us, making us forget to pay attention or to remember that we are living in expectation of Christ’s return. That is why we need Advent—it reminds us to pay attention, to be on guard, to keep watch that we might be ready for Christ when he comes.

From Kimberlee Conway Ireton, The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year (InterVarsity Press, 2008), p 21-23.

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For those of you who’d like daily reflections during Advent, Christine Sine has gathered a whole host of writers on her blog, all of whom are sharing what they’re waiting for in this season of preparation.

Each Tuesday during Advent, I’ll be posting an excerpt from the Advent chapter of my book. Here’s today’s reflection on waiting:

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning
more than those who watch for the morning.
–Psalm 130:5-6

Each of the four Sundays of Advent has a watchword for the day as well as a Biblical figure with whom it is associated. The word for the first Sunday is wait, and it is associated with the prophet Isaiah: “The Lord himself…will give you a sign…: the maiden is with child and will soon give birth to a son whom she will call Immanuel” (Is 7:14 JB). It this sign, this Son, for whom we wait in Advent.

Our Advent waiting occurs on two different levels. Certainly we wait for Christmas and the celebration of Christ’s birth in history past, but we also wait for the risen Christ to come again. In fact, the Gospel passage for the first Sunday of Advent is not the story of Jesus’ birth—the Annunciation or Mary’s response to the angel’s startling proclamation or Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem. Rather, it is part of Jesus’ speech about the signs of the end of the age, when we will see “the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory” (Lk 21:27). The Church’s choice of this passage speaks to me of the larger significance of Advent. Yes, it is a time of waiting and preparation leading up to Christmas—the celebration of Jesus’ birth in history—but ultimately, we are not waiting for Christmas; we are waiting for Christ’s return.

In English, the word “wait” tends to imply passivity, maybe even boredom. But this is not the implication that Jesus would have had in mind when he spoke of his disciples waiting for his return. In Hebrew, the word for “wait” is also the word for “hope.” (Thus translators can render “Wait for the Lord” as “Hope in the Lord” with equal accuracy.) This linguistic equation of “wait” with “hope” means that for Jesus, immersed as he was in the language of the Hebrew Bible, there is no conceptual differentiation between waiting and hoping. They are one and the same activity. This melding is especially apropos during Advent, when we wait in hopeful expectation for the return of Christ. Henri Nouwen calls this “active waiting.”

Active waiting, he says, “means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment.”

One of the traditions I find most helpful in cultivating this attitude of mindful attention during Advent is our family’s nightly lighting of the Advent wreath. Each week during Advent, we light an additional candle, proclaiming as we do so, “Jesus Christ is the Light of the world, the Light no darkness can overcome.” This progressive lighting of the candles reminds us to wait with attentiveness through the darkness of December, because the Light who is coming into the world already shines in the darkness—if only we will watch and see.

From Kimberlee Conway Ireton, The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year (InterVarsity Press, 2008), p 21-23.