WHAT IS ADVENT?

From J. KAMERON CARTER:

What is Advent? What is the hope into which we enter during this season as we move towards Christmas—not Christmas the commercialized phenomenon on the nation’s calendar, but the interruptive event of Emmanuel, God-With-Us?

It is the hope of Christ’s coming, that in him God meets us and that therefore we are not God, not the lords of the earth. It is the hope that in his coming to us, our will to mastery, our will to Lordship, our will even to good intentions, our will to usurp the position that only God can occupy, the position of the Judge and thus our willing to judging is overturned. For the narrative of power, in God’s coming in nakedness and as a helpless and vulnerable child and in strangeness, is what the naked Christ delivers us from. In short, salvation has come.

Amen!

Carter's words followed upon his finding a "wonder passage" in a letter written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his cousin in which he describes his conversion. Bonhoeffer's words may be found at the link above.

Carter continues:

Bonhoeffer’s conversion narrative proves to be a Christmas narrative, a narrative that turned him from himself, from power and mastery, from bourgeois comfortability, and toward the weak and vulnerable, the “wretched of the earth” as Franz Fanon put it—toward those who in a world bent on the worship of power and security, wealth and prestige, are the despised and rejected.
....

Christmas, or the coming of God-with-Us as the man Jesus, is liberation—liberation first of all from the will to power and mastery that dogs us all and liberation in the world. God-with-Us means we are free to be for another, for their good, for their flourishing, for their well-being. In this sense, Christmas is liberation, which is love.

To me Carter's words are wonder passages, too.

J. Kameron Carter teaches theology and black church studies at the Divinity School at Duke University.

Thanks again to Ann V.