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

storytelling as an antidote to data

In a recent memo to his company, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, again affirmed that slide decks were banned from executive meetings.  Instead of consuming data through bullet points on a projector, Bezos advocates a group reading of a narrative about the topic up for discussion.  His executives sit together in the conference room, silently reading a document that tells a story or explains a paradigm before they discuss the issue at hand.  While this might seem like an inefficient way to run a meeting, Bezos has tapped into the thing that helps us thrive as humans: we were made not just to capture and process knowledge, but to understand stories that help us make meaning.

In my World Literature courses, I begin the semester by asking my students why we tell stories.  As the discussion warms up and students begin to share, an apologetic for storytelling emerges: Stories educate, they inform, they explain and entertain.  Stories told in community do even more though; they help us understand who we are, what access to power we have, and what responsibility we have for each other. They teach us how to resist in meaningful ways, and they affirm our cultural connection to our communities. They teach us how and why we belong. 

Our society has developed incredible ways to collect and process data.  From Survey Monkey to Google Survey to professional pollsters, we are obsessed with gathering feedback.  This can be helpful when we use such data to evaluate our success or failure at achieving goals.  However, often it seems that good data proves we are successful, removing our need to engage with others in meaningful ways, processing their experience in real time.  Data is helpful, but collated data is incomplete without stories that help us make meaning of it.   For instance, I belong to some startups, and we are constantly surveyed for feedback.  Nevertheless, the interpretation of that data often seems to have failed to capture the overwhelming sentiment of most stakeholders.

It is easy to dismiss anecdotes as incomplete, simple snapshots that do not tell the whole story.  However, Bezos and other innovative leaders know the value of anecdotes to understand one’s experience.  There is a reason we read reviews of books, movies or purchased items, even though we see the starred rating.  The comments of others give us context for the starred reviews.   They help us understand and consider the source.

In an age of daily polls measuring optimism, disappointment, or approval, I’d like to urge us to take time to hear each other’s stories.  Polls and data support binaries, forcing us to either approve of or dismiss others.  Stories, on the other hand, allow us to listen for nuance, to recognize that we can support an idea while also being frustrated with parts of it.  We can endorse a candidate without loving every aspect of their behavior or actions.  We can belong to a community and struggle joyfully in it.  Stories allow us to tell our own narrative in the context of others.  When dividing ourselves into us and them is instinctive, telling a story about my experience with others carries with it a level of accountability to describe other people as people. 

“ Stories teach us how and why we belong. ”

I am a follower of Christ, and according to eyewitness accounts, he was an obsessive storyteller.  Ninety percent of his time was spent walking around rural Galilee, chatting with random people, listening to and healing hurting people, and teaching crowds who loved the way he talked about God and others.  Jesus loved a good story, but more than that, he knew that the narrative arts offer a fantastic way to illustrate human frailty and hope.  Stories helped hearers find meaning in choices they faced, helped them understand people in their community, and forced them to investigate their own way of being in the world.

One of my favorite things about Jesus is also his most infuriating characteristic.  When people ask him questions, he responds with a story.  Like the character Raymond Reddington on NBC’s The Blacklist, Jesus appears to have never been in a hurry, nor to think understanding is best reached in a linear fashion.  Instead, he would tell a story that clearly or not-so-clearly illustrated his thoughts on the posed question.  I suspect he developed this habit for a few reasons. One, he rejected transactional relationships resolutely.  Two, he knew truth is often stumbled into, rather than logically arrived at.

Person: Hey Jesus, I’ve heard you know things (or think you’re important, or are saying things that make my power feel unstable). If you really know so much then answer this….

Jesus: [I see what’s going on here. You want to catch me in a morally compromising position, or you want a simple fix for your frustrating life, but that’s not how life works.  Morality is not to be weaponized or formulaic, but should encourage compassion and interdependence.  Besides, I’d rather chat with you for a while about other things that interest me. Let’s dream together about how the world is and what it could be.] Let me tell you about a guy I know….

Person: Oh I get it! I’d like to follow you around now; I think I need more of this! (or Oh! Wait….what? or Oh…hard pass, I’m out)

Maybe the point of life is not to efficiently convey facts or collect opinions for a pie chart.  Maybe the point is to swap stories about how the world works, about a community we could form together.

My favorite type of literature indulges in magical realism.  The idea is that sometimes truth is illustrated best through images or ideas that technically defy logic.  A feeling can be best conveyed through a fantastic story that might stretch the bounds of possibility.  Sure, a list of bullet points can get an idea across at Amazon, but a story illustrating the same idea can lodge itself into hearts and minds, creating a shared moment that builds community in the process.  Aren’t we all desperate for community?

In my own habits, I am trying to hold myself to a higher standard.  If I can’t get a thought across without a personal anecdote or a shared story, then maybe that point is better left not made. Data without context is incomplete.  Collect the data, complete the surveys, project your powerpoint, but don’t forget that we are people sharing our space and passion with other people, all telling stories.  Listen.