The End is NOT Near!

What ends your world:
• a work project's missed deadline
• wondering if mom needs a nursing home
• hearing no answer to prayer
• plans gone awry
• tears over a breaking relationship
• fear of a bounced check
• terror about our country at war
• too few shopping days left until Christmas?

What creates your world:
• joy at a family's mending over a holiday meal
• certainty that your burdens are shared
• hope in God making a way out of no way
• hands and hearts joined at a communion table
• trusting forgiveness big enough to forgive yourself
• looking for, and finding, a prayer's answer
• believing that you're beloved of God
• reliance on an Emmanuel (God with us)?

Advent signals the church calendar's New Year. In much the same way our culture's New Year begins, our Advent new year begins with reflections, regrets, reminiscences, ruminations, and especially, reveling over what God has seen us through. Advent is a time when we remember God's coming, not necessarily a time of either our own easy arriving or our own blissful feelings. As time, Advent is a season - a season of expectant waiting, of expecting, and yes, of anticipating God's arriving in our midst. God's arriving amidst our pain; our loss; our fears; our shattered dreams. And God's arriving amidst our desires, our longings, our dreams and our hopes - not for more of the same, but for more of the new. More new life, new hope, new faith!

Advent isn't a make or break time, because our God is not an all or nothing God. If that were the way of God, the end of the garden story would have been The End of the God story, at least as we've come to live and thrive in it!

That's not at all how God chose to end the story. In fact, God's end of the story is just the beginning of the story... "I will put enmity between you (the serpent) and the woman, between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head, and you will strike at his heel" (Genesis 3:14-15). And in God's own time - the fullness of time, as we pray it - in God's own way, we've come this far by faith.

Part of what Advent hopes to remind us, as God cradles and cherishes us in this time, is that though we've come this far by faith, we have a ways further to go. And we'll get to the "whatever" and to the "wherever" that farther is, the way we got this far - by faith.

That's why when we're with this God, in this Advent time and in any time, cradling and cherishing are parts of the journey, not part of a "holding pattern." One of the best English translations of the first verse in the Hebrew Bible puts it this way, "At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth..."

Understood this way, creation isn't done yet. More importantly, God isn't done yet either, which means, of course, we're not done. Never done, even when it looks like we're un-done and feels like we're done in! That means the only question we know the answer to is this one, "Are we there yet?" Well, that's not quite accurate. There is another question we can answer - in sure and certain hope - "Where is your God?"

God has not abandoned us. God will not leave us orphaned. God IS near. So clearly does God want us to re-member that, re-live that, that our God came among us in a way that surely invites us deep in our god-image roots and down in our god-likeness core, to cradle and to cherish a babe in a manger. Come, Lord Jesus! Let the church and the world say "Amen!"