Time for a Reality Check

Be alert! Keep awake! Cry out! Prepare!

Don't the words we hear from Scripture during Advent, from Isaiah, John the Baptist and Jesus, sound incredibly familiar? Maybe it's because lamentations such as these have been in the news so often lately. The vivid warnings of veiled threats issued by George Bush, federal and state homeland security officials, and police agencies at every level are alarming.

Holiday travelers might want to take a refresher course in the threat level color-code that charts the levels of danger. The dreadful words sound similar but the posture is very different. Those seeking to enlist our participation in preserving home-land security are on a different trajectory than our ancestors in faith. Characters in officialdom bid us to look over our shoulders to uncover plotters; scan the horizon for threats; shrink world to what we can see, hear, feel, and touch; so as to control the future. Not so our ancestors in faith.

The ancestors' words are loud, but that doesn't make them desperate. The ancestors' words are shrill, but that doesn't make them frantic.

Advent Scriptures invite us to recall the past we've experienced under God's loving rule; to stand firmly in the present where God comes close in amazingly fleshy and sometimes even messy ways; and, to entrust the future to a powerful God who's very much in control. The words reflect a clear grasp of who we are and Whose we are from a trajectory of hope - that's trust, not wish - that we're God-created, Christ-saved, and Spirit-anointed. There's even a color-code to remind us that God makes and keeps promises.

We surround our worship space in blue -not because we're down in the dumps, but because its hues recall promising skies and life-giving waters – reminders of what's really real. We need that in a season when civil(ized?) culture bids us to spend like there's no tomorrow and to distrust those whom our fear inclines us to identify as not blue-blooded!

Advent's journey is the gift of time to wait for and to relish in what God has done, what God is doing, and what God will keep on doing whether we are alert to God near and present, or shrink from that reality into the terror of tinsel and fantasy. The reality is, since we're not yet home, the only security abroad in the land is Emmanuel - God with us - yet and still.