Bishop Brian Cole invites us to reframe Advent as a waiting and making space for the second coming of Christ in addition to preparation for the coming of the Christ child at Christmas.
Transcript
Hi, I’m Bishop Brian. I want to offer a few thoughts today on Advent, particularly Advent Season 2022. I recently read an article from a friend in Kentucky that reminded us that the Advent season is as much about the second coming of Jesus as the first. Now I understand that you and I delight in the coming of the Christ child, delight in the stories of the Nativity of Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem.
Those are wonderful stories and important stories of our faith. But if we miss the second coming of Jesus, we missed so much of what Advent is intended to help us live through. You and I are living in fragile times. There’s war in Europe. There’s a fragile economy. We are continuing to come out of a sense of pandemic and the pandemic trauma.
We continue to try to rebuild and restore democracy in our land. There are many things that feel like things are ending or coming to some sort of brutal stop. All the more to be a people preparing for the second coming not out of a sense of fear, a sense of foreboding, but a sense of hope, anticipation that the Christ coming in our midst is a time of a deeper sense of presence, deeper sense of healing, a restoring of true justice, of true peace.
This last week we read the gospel lesson and talked about “we don’t know the hour.” So I think the encouragement is don’t worry about when it will be, but go ahead and be prepared now. Live now with a sense that the Christ is coming again, coming into our midst, not to clobber us or to shame us, but to heal us and to reclaim us and to say you belong to me. You are my people. I will lose nothing that has been made by God. So you and I will not be lost in this hour, but we will be truly found.
So in this Advent season, along with reading The Coming of The Christ Child and those wonderful stories, don’t fear the idea of the second coming. It’s a time of God’s deep presence, deep abiding.
And you and I and the church and the world, we all need that openness to renewal, to new hope, to new possiblity so there’s a space in us maybe that’s empty. That’s a void. That’s an absence. And we desire for God’s filling God’s spirit to move in our midst and to restore us and to make us even more who we can be as the people of God.
In this Advent. In this time, many things are ending. But God’s presence is only beginning to show up.
Amen.