When you were little, how did you count the years? From birthday to birthday or from Christmas to Christmas? And when you were a little older, how did you count them then? From one first day of school to the next or from summer to summer? We all count the years in different ways — children, teachers, couples, sports fans — we have so many ways to count the earth’s journeys around the sun.
The church counts time from Advent to Advent. One could argue that the church year should begin on Christmas, with the birth of Christ, or on Easter, with his resurrection from the dead, or on Pentecost, when God began to pour out the Holy Spirit on that small band of disciples in Jerusalem. But there is great wisdom in starting the year with Advent.
We begin with our eyes on the horizon. We begin with expectant hope. We look to the future God has promised and prepared for us. We practice living into this future not bound by the past. We remember that the present is always open, always, to genuine newness brought forth by our God who is making all things new. And so we live in Advent remembering the birth of Jesus and confident that the one who began a good work among us will bring it to completion, as Paul wrote with joy from his prison cell.[1]
I wonder about that confidence of Paul’s — was it simply a given for him, a gift of the Spirit, or did he have to strain at times to hold on to it, did he have to find ways to cling to it by his nails, against the pull of his own heart, against the weight of soul-crushing circumstances?
The shooting on Tuesday afternoon at Oxford High School in suburban Detroit was the nation’s deadliest school shooting in three years. The youngest victim, Hana St. Juliana, was 14 when she died. Tate Myre was 16. Justin Shilling was 17. Madisyn Baldwin was 17. Seven other people were wounded. The boy who shot them is 15. The gun was an early Christmas gift from his parents: a semiautomatic 9-mm Sig Sauer handgun. “My new beauty,” he called it. The day after Thanksgiving, he and his father had gone together to a Michigan gun shop to buy it. He and his mother spent a day testing out the gun, which was stored unlocked in the parents’ bedroom. On Monday, when a teacher reported seeing their son searching online for ammunition, his mother did not seem alarmed. “LOL I’m not mad at you,” she texted her son. “You have to learn not to get caught.” A day later, the authorities say he fatally shot four fellow students in the halls of their school, using the handgun his parents had bought for him for Christmas.[2]
There hasn’t been a year without a school shooting since I came to this country, and most years had multiple ones.
1994 Ryly High School, Union, KY
1995 Richland High School, Lynville, TN
1996 Frontier Middle School, Moses Lake, WA
1997 Pearl High School, Pearl, MS
1998 Westside Middle School, Jonesboro, AR
1999 Columbine High School, Littleton, CO
2000 Bidwell Porter Elementary, Bidwell, OH
2001 Santana High School, Santee, CA[3]
And the list goes on, but I don’t want to count the years by school shootings. It was during Advent, on December 14, 2012 when a 20-year-old man killed 20 children between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown, CT. Certainly, I remember thinking, certainly this will change how people think and vote about semi-automatic firearms and large-capacity magazines. It did not.
On February 14, 2018, a 19-year-old man killed 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, wounding another 17, just weeks after mass shootings in Paradise, NV and in Sutherland Springs, TX, in October and November 2017. Certainly, I remember thinking, certainly this will change how people think and vote. Some people may have changed their minds, but pride is not so easily shaken. The idols of weapons worship stand firm on their pedestals, wrapped in the sacred cloth of liberty.
Shaken by disbelief, gripped by anger, and drained by sadness I keep returning to the prophet Isaiah, whose words continue to be a gift from one mourner to another.
The way of peace they do not know,
and there is no justice in their paths.
Their roads they have made crooked;
no one who walks in them knows peace.
Therefore justice is far from us,
and righteousness does not reach us;
we wait for light, and lo! there is darkness;
and for brightness, but we walk in gloom.
We grope like the blind along a wall,
groping like those who have no eyes.[4]
Groping like the blind along a wall, we wait for light. And in the darkness, old man Zechariah sings. And lighting a candle against the thick darkness, last Sunday we sang with him,
Blessed the God of Israel, who comes to set us free,
who visits and redeems us and grants us liberty.
The prophets spoke of mercy, of freedom and release;
God shall fulfill the promise to bring our people peace.
In Luke, Zechariah’s canticle ends with the words,
By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.[5]
I could quote the statistics for gun violence. I could read the list of reasonable gun control proposals law enforcement officials across the nation have endorsed. I could mention that it’s easier to purchase a semi-automatic weapon than to get a driver’s license. And I could again lament the corrosive influence of NRA money on our politics. But that’s not really the point. There’s just so much fear in all of it, so much fear and false pride, and so little courage, so little hope.
We live in Advent time, gratefully singing of the light that has come and eagerly waiting for the dawn to become the day without end. We sing of Advent so we become brave enough to stop groping like the blind along the same old walls, and to stand up and raise our heads, because our redemption is drawing near. Living in Advent is about leaning into the dawn from on high and living in ways that reflect that light into the everyday dark places. Living in Advent is about lighting candles and becoming candles whose flickering lights proclaim the good news of God’s tender mercy.
In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Animal Dreams, set in the early 1980s, a young woman named Hallie has gone off to Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution, when the war with the Contras is in full swing; despite the danger, she’s there to support the revolution by helping to improve crop yields. Hallie is a horticulturist who knows her way around plants and soil and bugs. In a letter to her sister Codi back home in the States, Hallie writes:
You’re thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a muggy cotton field, checking the undersides of leaves to see what’s been there, figuring out what to do that won’t clear a path for worse problems next week. Right now that’s what I do. You ask why I’m not afraid of loving and losing, and that’s my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work—that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children’s bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don’t get lost. Codi, here’s what I’ve decided: the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides. I cannot tell you how good it feels. I wish you knew. … I wish you knew how to squander yourself.[6]
The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed is no small thing. It’s Hallie’s hope. It’s every prophet’s song. It’s the promise of God. It’s why we count the years from Advent to Advent. We begin, again and again, with a hope that’s big enough to live in and close enough to the ground so we remember that the daily work adds up and good things don’t get lost.
Such hope is not something we simply have or produce at will. It is a gift from God who is committed to the flourishing of creation and its consummation in peace. It is a gift nourished in the community drawn together by the gentle power of God’s Holy Spirit who inspires courage. It is the gift of the One born among us who squandered himself for the sake of God’s reign and our belonging in it.
On Christmas we don’t celebrate that the Lord came to visit us in our exile to make it a bit more bearable. We celebrate that the Lord is come to set us free. We celebrate that we are called to follow Jesus on the way to true freedom, to the harvest of righteousness, to peace. We celebrate that Jesus has come to us to be for us the way into God’s future, and to be with us on the way.
So when John, the son of old Zechariah and Elizabeth, when John instructs us to prepare the way of the Lord, he’s not talking about a seasonal exercise. He calls us to live in the light of dawn. He urges us to remember every morning whose coming we await and where we’re going. And he wants us to see in that light the valleys that need lifting up and the mountains that need lowering — whether that’s in our own attitudes and habits, or in the disparities among us and around us, or in whatever seems insurmountable.
Dig, for every shovel of dirt lowers a mountain and exalts a valley. Dig a little, for daily work adds up and good things don’t get lost. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make a way in the wilderness. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed is no small thing. You gotta prepare the way of the Lord—for hope’s sake, for love’s sake, for life’s sake.
[1] Philippians 1:6
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/us/crumbley-parents-charged-michigan-shooting.html
[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2012/12/sandy_hook_a_chart_of_all_196_fatal_school_shootings_since_1980_map.html
[4] Isaiah 59:8-10
[5] Luke 1:68-79
[6] Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (New York: HarperCollins, 1990) 299; my italics.