Grant your faithful, we
pray, almighty God,
The resolve
to run forth to meet your Christ
With
righteous deeds at his coming,
So that,
gathered at his right hand,
They may be
worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.
Through our
Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
Who lives
and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
One God,
for ever and ever.
Advent is for waiting –
if people know one thing about Advent, it’s probably that. We’re waiting for Christmas, which isn’t very
long to wait and we’re waiting for Christ to come again, without knowing how
long that will be. Regardless, we’re
waiting. So why did our opening prayer,
our collect, talk about running? “Grant us the resolve to run forth to meet
your Christ.” That’s what we prayed at
the start of Mass. Running: it’s a
fascinating and compelling characterization of what Christian waiting looks
like.
It can be a
dangerous image, because it could give us the impression that we arrive at the
heavenly banquet under our own steam.
That Advent is all about our
running,
rather God’s action. But when I think
about my experience as a runner, it’s not my own strength that comes to my
mind, but my need. If you’ve ever done
anything truly physically demanding you’ll know that moment, when every muscle
in your body, from your heart out, rebels against you and tells you to quit, that
you can’t finish this race. And then the
gift comes. “Grant us the resolve.” The gift of knowing, in a bodily way, that we
can’t do this alone. And God provides,
but there is so much gift in those experiences that inspire us to ask, that
draw that prayer out of us, and it’s these we find in running.
It’s not just
the resolve God provides, though, but the destination and the starter’s
pistol. Our first reading from Isaiah starts
with something amazing, with a mountain being lifted up. I try and end each day by thinking of what
amazed me that day, what leads me to say wow to God (along with thank you,
sorry, and please). God is doing amazing
things around us all the time, as amazing as raising up mountains, and stopping
and seeing them, and worshipping the giver rather than the gift, is how we get
inspired to run. We run because our hope
gets fed. We run because of this amazing
dream that Isaiah has, his a poetic longing for peace with justice, where all
nations gather to learn from
the God of Israel, where the weapons of war are transformed into tools for
feeding one another. We recognize that we’re
not there yet, but God has wrought his victory, and we respond, respond by
running. We recognize that we can’t do
this on our own, but we long to be there, and we let our lives run with our
longing.
St. Paul
uses a different image in our reading from Romans. God has given us the dawn. We don’t live in the full light of day yet,
but it’s not night anymore. The darkness
has begun to fade. So, we respond. We wake up.
We take off our nightwear, we wash and we dress for the day. That’s Advent, to see the sun’s first rays,
long for the fullness and respond. Advent
running means change, means conversion.
Advent is subversive to the fear, hatred, isolation and violence that
plagues our world. Advent running is
running towards Christ, but not under the illusion that Christ is absent from
our journey. The light that is dawning
is Christ’s. And what Paul says we are
to put on, our running gear, is Christ.
We have put on Christ in baptism, and in Advent we renew that, we
recommit to it. We fire up our longing,
we see the light that’s dawning, and we run, and we show Christ to the world.
“Grant us the resolve, the strength to run forth
to meet our Christ.” Our destination is
not just a dream or a mountain or a dawn, but a person, a person who showed us
the power of love. The collect
continues, “Grant us the strength to run forth to meet our Christ with
righteous deeds.” Now, that could be misread,
as if meeting Christ and righteous deeds were two separate things, as if we
accrued enough righteous deeds to put on our resumé and presented that as
evidence we were entitled to meet our Christ (like if you collect enough Pepsi cans
you might get to meet Luke Kuechly or however that works). We’re not saved by our resumé; we’re saved by
Jesus.
No, the
righteous deeds aren’t the entrance fee; they’re the address for the party. In feeding the hungry, clothing the naked,
educating the unknowing, serving our neighbor in need, we encounter the face of
Christ. We just celebrated Christ the
King last week, the end of the last liturgical year, when we mainly read from
Luke’s gospel. This liturgical year, we’ll
be mainly reading from Matthew’s. When
we come to the end of this liturgical year, in 51 weeks’ time, we’ll celebrate
Christ the King with the reading where tells us to seek his face in the poor
served. “I was hungry and you fed me.” “When did I see you hungry, Lord?” “Whatsoever you did to the least of my
brothers and sisters, you did to me.”
That’s what Christian waiting looks like.
This
Advent, let’s run and in our righteous deeds, meet Christ.
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