CHICAGO, IL (December 8, 2003) – Covenant Communications receives more than 250 church newsletters each month and occasionally publishes devotional material from those newsletters at www.covchurch.org. This one, called “Prepare to Meet Your God,” comes from Philip Stenberg, pastor of Bethlehem Evangelical Covenant Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I don’t remember having seen one lately, but I remember driving in the countryside and being confronted by a sign or large letters painted on a rock or barn: “Prepare to Meet Your God!” Mostly I would smile at the incongruity of the message with my present mission. I was preparing to arrive at my planned destination, a meeting with family friends – I had little awareness or desire to prepare to meet God. Mostly in life we are occupied with penultimate things. The ultimate seems so distant to be unimportant. “I’ll worry about meeting God later.”
Nearly all the texts we will read during the Sundays of Advent focus on the last things. The Greek word for “last things” is “eschatos,” which for us becomes “eschatology,” the study and knowledge of “last things.”
To earlier generations, last things were more obvious. They were very aware of the diminishment of light, much shorter days, much longer nights. The darkness was frightening, even foreboding. With the lessening of light, there was loss of warmth. Death in nature was seen everywhere. Food was scarcer. Hunger more plentiful.
For us, it is the facing of the end of another year. We are forced to acknowledge the passing of time. Hidden in that fact is the reality of our own approaching death – our own “last thing” in this location.
Christian eschatology faces the last things with a sure faith in “new things.” From the words of Jesus and the convictions of the New Testament writers, the Christian faith believes that the creator of the world at the beginning is fully revealed as the world’s redeemer at the end. God is Alpha and Omega – the first and the last, the beginning of all things and the end of all things.
The end is not so much a matter of chronology – “when” – but rather a certainty about a “kairos” event, a meeting with the one “who” is the goal of all things. The hope for the coming of Christ in glory and power has nothing to do with wishful thinking, but is rooted in the promise of God and in the confession: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”
The call of Advent is not “Get ready for Christmas.” Rather it is a call to prepare to meet our God. Christmas celebrates what God has already done. There is much to learn from those who were unprepared and unwilling to meet God in Jesus. Advent anticipates what is yet to be. The gospel of Advent is that we are being met, reformed, remade by a revolutionary God who intends to make all things new – including me and you. Despite what we might think, or what might seem so obvious around us – that the world is immobilized in darkness, strewn with death – the message is that the future is God’s!
In this in-between time, we wait. In this meantime, we hope. In this time, between Christ’s first advent in Bethlehem and his coming, his advent, at the end of time, we worship, we witness and we work. We enter into the untamed Advent wilderness with the voice of the wild man, John, ringing in our ears: “Prepare the way of the Lord!” We sing with the whole community of Advent people:
On Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry
announces that the Lord is nigh;
awake and listen for he brings
glad tidings of the King of kings.
announces that the Lord is nigh;
awake and listen for he brings
glad tidings of the King of kings.
Let ev’ry heart be cleansed from sin,
make straight the way for God within,
and so prepare to be the home
where such a mighty guest may come.
make straight the way for God within,
and so prepare to be the home
where such a mighty guest may come.
(“On Jordan’s Bank the Baptist’s Cry, The Covenant Hymnal: A Worshipbook No. 133)
While we get ready for Jesus’ birthday celebration, we must also listen to John and the others who call us to the work of Advent: “Prepare to meet your God!”
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