The Advent Paradox

From Darkness to Light, Weakness to Strength

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Adapted from Tom Frank' Facebook profile | December 14, 2024

The Christian season of Advent marks the beginning of an annual cycle following the life of Jesus. I’m always captivated by the way Advent leads on to Christmas, with so many memorable hymns, choral music and candlelight. I need that candle for the darkness of the winter solstice (which falls this year on Dec. 21).

Given the beauty of the season, Advent begins with a startling measure of doom and gloom. The reading for the first Sunday is all about terror – the collapse of the Temple, wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and famines. And that’s just the beginning of the “birth pangs.” Good God! Tell me what is going to be born from all that?

Most churches strike me as way too literalistic about this prophecy. Many preachers proclaim that we are living in those times: an unknown virus spreads across humanity; earthquakes strike without warning; hunger afflicts millions; war casts its shadow across the very lands of early Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The end is near! Repent!

Other preachers spin the prophecy as a warning and reminder. Yes, many of these events happen in today’s world; we see them all around us. It is our responsibility to prevent as much of this as we can, they say, and to help those who suffer and work to bring about an end to violence. We have been given intelligence and skills; and we have a moral mandate to use them for good. The message in my denomination is confidence — that together we can solve our society’s ills and transform the world.

Both of these interpretations are literal in the sense of focusing on the material world in which we live our everyday lives. I was raised in the second version, popularly known as “liberal,” and I meet a lot of people who have escaped from the “fundamentalism” of the former. But I find myself unhappy with both of them. I don’t meet God in either one.

A ‘profound sense of helplessness’

I don’t have that confidence with which my church raised me. What I encounter at the beginning of Advent is my profound sense of helplessness. I live in a contemporary world that seems to race out of control. I use digital technology, but I have not the remotest grasp how it works. I fill out forms for health care and retirement income that I lack the vocabulary to understand.

I can see with my own eyes that our way of life, so dependent on gas and oil, plastics and chemicals, cannot go on. I watch reports of tens of thousands of people dying from exploding missiles coming at explosive speeds from hundreds of miles away. What do I control? My car? It’s like driving an iPad. I have no idea how it works either.

I am at the mercy of forces far greater than I. Advent invites me to accept this and live into it. I resist this with all my being — after all, I’m a good liberal! Our work is supposed to usher in the Kingdom of God! But in resisting, I miss a deep and abiding truth. In helplessness is strength. In weakness is power.

I don’t want to believe it; and yet I have witnessed it again and again. It was excruciating to watch a loved one fade out from a brain tumor we were helpless to stop. Yet, I learned that I didn’t really know what love is until I lived through that ordeal in companionship with her.

‘Generosity, hospitality and love abound’

Once when I was volunteering in a neighborhood of people living on the edge of destitution, a woman stepped from her home to hand me a cup of coffee — an act of hospitality in a life of poverty. People from all over, from every walk of life, have made the simple gift of sending money or bringing whatever food and water they could afford to help us recover from wildly unexpected hurricanes. Generosity, hospitality and love abound in the simplest of human gestures.

All of these virtues are so very far from the stuff that purports to bring us together: social media, entertainment, political posturing. In fact, they are mostly invisible to all but the human beings who are brought together by these gifts. Yet, they are the substance of a life well lived in the company of others.

Our faith is for the powerless. “The meek shall inherit the earth.” I have so very much trouble trusting in this truth. In my drive for control, I don’t even want to believe it.

But at the end of that prophecy, Jesus says, “Stay awake!” You don’t know what you might see, and you might miss what is being born in our world. Truth is, generosity, hospitality, and love abound. If I am awake, I will see them every day.   

Tom Frank, of Asheville, N.C., is University Professor Emeritus at Wake Forest University. This post is republished with the author's permission from his Facebook page.