Bulletin column from December 6, 2020

Dear Friends at Saint Frances Cabrini Parish and Saint Frances Cabrini Parish:

Praised be Jesus Christ! Advent as a season is most certainly about promises and by extension also about trust. The Advent Scripture passages in the lectionary and the prayers that accompany them not only articulate beautiful promises on the part of God to act on our behalf, but they also express our confidence that he truly will carry them out. Why would we write down and repeat a whole bunch of promises from God if we did not also trust that he is going to keep them? God is faithful, God is mighty, God is decisive, God is just, God is compassionate, God is undeterred, and God is near. We hear this over and over again during these sacred weeks.

So, it begs the question: where is he these days? Has God failed to notice that the world is falling apart? What sort of promise-keeper is he? If we come to the conclusion that reality is just irreparably bad, then the words in the Scriptures take on the empty quality of being merely a bunch of old sayings that applied only to bygone eras. These cannot be correct conclusions about reality, or about the Scriptures, or even about an apparently absent God.

It is worth calling to mind that Advent also says loudly that God is mysterious. The season of promises is also the season that intentionally defies our sense of timing about their fulfillment. The fact is that there is a solid track record in our tradition of God keeping his promises to repair whatever is broken, and it is clear that he has never done so in a way that was in accord with our expectations or timing. It seems that God has never come quickly enough for our liking, even if it is also true that he does in fact end up coming, over and over again.

Perhaps the reason for this is that it is God’s way of teaching us how to trust. How are we ever supposed to grow in our confidence of his power to save if we have not first had to experience the panic of life crashing down around us? What would ever make us learn to cry out “come!” if we never had to sit in the ache of what is unfulfilled? Advent makes no sense to a people for whom nothing has ever gone wrong, or who never tasted the bitterness of things broken beyond their ability to fix. The promises of the Scriptures were all written down by persons who had passed through real trials that taught them how faithful God really is.

All this by way of saying that I think one simple explanation for the ongoing chaos that has been the year 2020 is that it is all God’s way of asking us, his people: “Do you trust me?” This is the question of Advent in general, and it is especially the question of Advent this year. Do we trust God? Even more importantly: do we trust God even more than we trust in ourselves? There is no other way to teach us how to trust in God’s promises for a better world than to have our trust be tested. For many of us these days, it does feel like our faith, hope, love, and trust are all being tested. It is all allowed so that our sense of Advent will deepen, and with it our faith, hope, love, and trust will also deepen. God has promised, and therefore he will do it.