Advent 2020: celebrate 'thisgiving'
/To hear Brandi read this week’s essay, visit the Expand Your Us Youtube page, or click: https://youtu.be/YEO5lFmGbqQ
December is here. Usually this month begins a manic but magical season of frantic rush and intentional memory-making. Of crazy parties and quiet moments before a well-lit tree. Of neverending things to do and contemplative pauses to ground us. This year though, December means we begin to end a year full of hard. More than in years past, we have experienced untimely death and illness, job loss and insecurity, mental health concerns and physical restrictions, literal and figurative isolation, and distance from our communities. With schools closing, a year of uncertainty looming, rising COVID numbers and sustained exhaustion piling up, December does not feel like the beginning of a season of magic and miracles. It feels like being the last runner to complete a marathon, after the finish line has been packed up and the fans are gone. Or maybe like the beginning of the end of a horror movie, where you know it’s almost over, and you aren’t sure what’s coming, but you know it is gonna be bad.
And yet. My long relationship with God and Christ offers a counter narrative to the one I just shared, one seen best through Advent. December hosts a holy time to pause for Jews and Christians. While December ends our calendar year, Advent begins the Christian calendar. That’s what Advent offers: It takes a thing that feels like a dead end, and transforms it into a beginning. The Latin roots of the word mean “to come toward” or “coming,” and in every sense, Advent is a season when we reflect on the coming of Christ, the coming of hope, the coming of joy, and the coming of justice.
I use a contemplative practice which grounds me in the waiting, the lamenting, the longing for an encounter with the Divine by reading scriptures every day during the 4 weeks of Advent. Below this essay are readings I put together to help followers of Christ dwell on the coming of Immanuel, God with us. They remind us of the context that the Messiah came out of and into: Christ is the fulfillment of God’s covenant with a weary and hurting world; Jesus is the manifestation of the Word—the prophecies and scriptures—that came before Him. I include a hymn you can hear, a prayer to pray, daily scriptures, and a few readings to ponder. I’ll share them weekly in case you want to join me, along with a few thoughts that have captured my imagination in the week just passed.
This week I have been struck by the idea that Advent, a Christian holiday, follows Thanksgiving, an American holiday. Christians tend to mash them all together, as if founding America and blessing it was the eleventh commandment. It wasn’t. Still, it is kind of fun that Americans, greedy and thieving as we are and have been, are simultaneously generous and thankful. Incredibly, we pause a lot of work just to memorialize giving thanks. (Of course the origins of that holiday offer us a master class in historical erasure and hegemonic oppression, and now we twin that holiday with Black Friday, a day fueled by aggressive greed…but I digress.)
My youngest child still has charming speech mistakes, and she calls Thanksgiving Thisgiving. Her pronunciation offers instruction for how to celebrate Thanksgiving and prepare for Advent all at the same time. Thisgiving requires engagement in the moment; it demands my full presence in this moment and rejects multitasking and achievement (outside of pie baking, of course). It asks for humble generosity, the giving of oneself to others rather than to our agendas. Advent invites a similar response.
Advent, for me, is a reminder that the God I claim to love and the Christ I claim to follow are wholly uninterested in the power structures that control me. The earned importance that I find alluring, to which I try to conform, for which I perform my loyalty and pledge my energy and allegiance, is blasphemous. God is not impressed by our achievement or perfection. The season of Advent can serve as a reorientation for the Christian; a time and space to remember your own failings and attest your need not for more importance, money or position, but for a Savior.
The Biblical record shows the Creator God often shaking his head at the wayward creatures we have become. We lose our way. We betray God and each other. We chase after power, treating people like pawns used to get us what we think we deserve. But God doesn’t just talk about the mess we are in. God doesn’t just moan about how it all turned out. God decides to do something, and becomes a baby who can grow up and walk among people who need a reminder that they were made to live differently than they do. Jesus shows us how to live together, to love and sacrifice for each other, to see people where they are and to love them even when they are disasters. Jesus celebrated Thisgiving. He showed up with his whole self, and he gave all of his attention to the people around him. Day after day.
This is a picture of who God is. This is who Advent celebrates. This is who we strive to look like in our moments with others. Celebrate Advent today by imitating Jesus. Lean in instead of staying out of it. Engage everyone. Reject trading favors to get yourself more invitations, more power, more followers, and instead befriend the folks slipping through the cracks in your neighborhood. Show up with your best self in places usually overlooked, and be generous there. Follow Thisgiving straight into Advent, and watch December become a month of wonder.
If you would like to join me in Advent readings, the Scriptures, prayers and hymns are below. Each week’s readings will by posted on the website by Saturday evening, but the email will continue to go out on Tuesdays.
WEEK ONE
Sunday, 11/29 Gather around an Advent Wreath, or a single candle.
Light a purple candle for Hope or Prophecy
Christ is the Hoped For One, the fulfillment of prophecies and the law.
Hymn of Prophecy (Listen to this (London Philharmonic is great), taken directly from Isaiah)
“For unto us a child is born, unto us, a son is given, and the government shall be upon His shoulder; and His name shall be called, Wonderful, Counselor, the mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Hallelujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. The kingdom of this world, is become. The Kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever. King of kings, and Lord of Lords. Hallelujah.”
-Handel’s Messiah (“For Unto Us a Child is Born” and the “Hallelujah Chorus”)
Prayer for the First Week of Advent:
“Lord, may you now let us this year once more approach the light, celebration, and joy of Christmas Day that brings us face to face with the greatest thing there is: your love. What could we possibly bring and give to you? So much darkness in our human relationships and in our own hearts!...So much over which you cannot rejoice, that separates us from one another and certainly cannot help us! So much that runs directly against the message of Christmas! What should you possibly do with such gifts? And what are you to do with such people as we all are? But all of this is precisely what you want to receive from us and take from us at Christmas—the whole pile of rubbish and ourselves, just as we are—in order to give us in return Jesus, our Savior, and in him a new heaven and a new earth, new hearts and a new desire, new clarity and a new hope for us and for all people. Be among us as we once again…prepare to receive him as your gift. Amen.” -Karl Barth, 1960s
Nov 30 Deut 18:18; Psalm 45:6-7
Dec 1 Gen 3:19-21; 9:4-12
Dec 2 2 Sam 7:11-16
Dec 3 Gen 15:1-6, 22:1-18
Dec 4 I Chron 17:11-14
Dec 5 Isaiah 7:14, 9:6-7
Readings for the First Week:
“The blessedness of waiting is lost on those who cannot wait, and the fulfillment of promise is never theirs. They want quick answers to the deepest questions of life and miss the value of those times of anxious waiting, seeking with patient uncertainties until the answers come…Not all can wait—certainly not those who are satisfied, contented, and feel that they live in the best of all possible worlds! Those who learn to wait are uneasy about their way of life, but yet have seen a vision of greatness in the world of the future and are patiently expecting its fulfillment. The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come. For these, it is enough to wait in humble fear until the Holy One himself comes down to us, God the child in the manger. God comes, the Lord Jesus comes, Christmas comes.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“In the biblical world, hope does not emerge from the self-aggrandizing act of recounting our successes. It is the desperate plea for God’s intervention that arises out of lament that reveals a flickering glimpse of hope….We are not elevated above God or even above God’s creation. We do not stand in the place of Christ, able to incarnate ourselves into another community as if we could operate as the Messiah. Our only hope for meaning and worth is in the fullness of Christ as God’s created beings. Lament recognizes our frailty as created beings and the need to acknowledge this shortcoming before God.” -Soong-Chan Rah
“Advent is not four weeks of Christmas. It is, rather, a season of hopeful aching and watchful waiting amidst the very conditions—depravity, disease, division, despair, death—that made Christmas necessary at all.” -Duke Kwon
