The readings for the day are available here.
Welcome! Every day during Advent, Campus Ministry will offer
a new reflection by a member of the SLU community: faculty, staff, students,
administrators from across the university. We hope that these reflections will
be of value to you in your prayer and preparations and that this Advent season
will be one of hope, joy and renewal for you.
Hope is at the heart of the readings for today, the first
Sunday of Advent. We tend to think of Advent as preparation for Christmas,
which has always seemed a bit strange to me: spending weeks waiting to remember something that happened two
millennia ago. Except we aren’t just preparing to remember Jesus’ birth as if
the story ended way back when; what Jesus inaugurated is “both already and not
yet”: the coming of the reign of God, the full enactment of God’s will for the
fulfillment of the human project. Jesus enacted the reign of God by his life,
his preaching, his healing and forgiving, and he gave his life challenging
every force of injustice and inertia that stood in the way of human liberation.
But it is clear from looking at the world around us that Jesus’ life and
ministry did not put an end to all the anti-reign forces that he opposed:
intolerance, violence, self-righteousness and hard-heartedness are alive and well
in our time as they were in Jesus’ time. We wait not only to celebrate what
happened back then but our hope of the fulfillment of what Jesus began – the
final overcoming of everything that opposes the flowering of life and
well-being.
The first reading is brimming with that vision of a better
world that we know in our guts is out there: a day in which we will beat swords into plowshares, when weapons and warfare will be no more, when we devote our
resources to feeding people instead of killing them. While that kind of
transformation may be beyond any political platform or agenda, beyond our
ability to complete, we will never get there by waiting for it to come to us
out of the sky. Hoping and waiting both have a future-orientation to them – and
in the Romance languages even share a common root (think of the Spanish word esperar) – but hope is an active verb, a
vision that keeps us moving forward rather than waiting for something to happen
to us. We are not merely counting down the days until the 25th and
going through the mental preparations to welcome Jesus – he’s already been
here, and he’s already here now. We are retrieving the hope that sustains us,
recalling what Jesus began and is calling us to continue – the dream of a world
made new. Stay with us this Advent as we share many voices coming together to
articulate that one vision of abundant life for all.
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