Belmont University Advent GuideSample

Today’s readings remind us that it is an everyday do-over discerning light from darkness. God reigns, we are assured throughout the biblical canon, but it is as if the good news of how God reigns—and will yet reign in the land of the living—is elusive, ever-changing, and ever-demanding of new feats of attentiveness on the part of the God-seeking community. Walter Brueggemann tells us that this news is relentlessly narratival, a mobile army of metaphors, in one sense, an occasion for fresh imagery and lyricization at every turn. And our readings bear that insight out.

“Sing to God a new song,” admonishes the psalmist (33.3). And the canon follows suit. Does God delight in the ritual sacrifices described in Leviticus? Not anymore (if ever) according to our psalm: “Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving” (50.13–14). Images of God’s earth-shaking, mountain-melting prerogatives abound in scripture, but Zechariah sings a different song on God’s behalf: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord” (Zechariah 4.6).

A commitment to renewed imagination and resilient expectation concerning the work of God’s spirit and the way it blows contrary to whatever it is we think we have in mind might be one way of characterizing the oil the waiting bridesmaids are expected to have in abundance at every moment in Jesus’ parable concerning the coming of God in Matthew’s gospel. It appears among a series of analogies Jesus offers in view of the times when “the love of many will grow cold” (24.12). Like each of our readings, it addresses a meaning crisis to which wakefulness both general and specific but also necessarily agnostic (not knowing what’s ahead or when) is the only prescribed remedy.

And we are assured meaning crises to come as we await God’s final righting of human disorder. The one who is worthy to open the scroll that would give cosmic meaning to human history is still elusive in our passage from John’s Apocalypse (5.4). And when the worthy party does appear, the slaughtered Lamb is a complete opposite to the Lion promised in the preceding verse (5.5–6). True power and wisdom, we are made to see, are contrary to what we have been prone to credit as worthy. May we develop a love for such strangeness, for the overcoming of our preferred expectations, in the days to come.

David Dark
Assistant Professor of Religion and the Arts