Christ and History: Tuesday Week 1 of Advent

"The celebration of Christmas is not a sentimental waiting for a baby to be born, but much more an asking for history to be born!"

-Richard Rohr

In America, we are often driven by a sense of improvement, which can be great. We work hard and build careers and lives that make us beam with pride—great sterling edifices that prove our innovation and accomplishment. The problem, though, lies in how we place ourselves, in the midst of our towers of accomplishment, as the protagonist of the entire human narrative, whether we would acknowledge such an idea or not. Consequently, Christmas and the arrival of the Christ becomes distorted: Our focus on the self drives us to interpret the arrival of Christ, through the lens of our own bias and personal history. We see the birth of the Christ child solely as an event that has affected ME: MY salvation, MY liberation, or MY improved sense of community and belonging. 

But the coming of Christ, the root of Jesse, is an event the Body of Christ must strive to enact daily. We must work to bend the arc of history toward it’s destination of justice, creating a world where “the wolf shall live with the lamb,” the leopard with the kid, calf with lion, cow with bear, lion with ox. The coming of Christ is a sweeping movement in history that invites the people of God to cooperate and participate in the work of the Divine, loving all we encounter, especially the “least of these.” The Christ is the focus, the protagonist, the narrator, and we are swept into the folds of HIS story of beauty and reconciliation. 

Come, Lord Jesus.     

Isaiah 11:1–10

Luke 10:21–24