The message of Advent often emphasizes the relationship between “me and Jesus” rather than that of “Jesus, me, and the other.” Advent offers us the cozy assurance that the cute baby in the manger made my salvation possible and that I can look forward to the day when Christ returns and my salvation is fully realized. But if that is all we get from the message and sermons of Advent, we are missing the point. The message of Scripture and of Advent invites us to continue the work Christ was about while he was on earth—the work the Holy Spirit continues to do. Advent invites us to widen our focus from our own salvation to join in God’s mission on earth.
This article helps us more fully understand the message of Advent and is worth reflecting on during Advent planning. How might your liturgies, song choices, prayers, and sermons provide a more expansive and missional vision of Advent?
—RW
The turning point of human history is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14)—or, as Eugene Peterson paraphrased it in The Message, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” Advent begins the church calendar with this “invasion of holiness” (Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry, 1992, p. 121).
Advent embraces the past: Christ has already come as the promised Messiah. Advent anticipates the future: We wait for the second coming of Christ, bringing completion to the not-yet-consummated kingdom of God. And Advent celebrates the gospel, the good news that God entered the world in Christ, ushering in the kingdom of God.
Worship in Advent cultivates our memory of who we are and how to live as God’s people. Our worship rehearses the biblical story, celebrating the good news of Jesus Christ while offering understanding of why our world is not the way it’s supposed to be (Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, 1995). The world God created was good, flourishing in harmony with God, with others, and with itself. But humanity, in a selfish quest for control, chose to live in a way different from what God intended. This selfish quest disrupted that good world, corrupting and diminishing all aspects of our lives. So God the Father sent his Son, Jesus Christ, who humbly entered this brokenness, and the Word spoken in creation became the Word made flesh (John 1). The Word sends the Spirit to create a called-out people, the church (Acts 1–2; John 20:21), and sends the church on a mission (2 Corinthians 5) to make the Son of God visible to a world of people who have exchanged the true image of God for their own understanding. The good news of the gospel is that through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, God initiated the restoration of what had been broken (Revelation 21:1–5). Jesus offers the world its only hope for healing our relationships with God, with one another, with ourselves, and with all of creation.
The heart of God’s restoration is that Christ takes the broken, fragmented pieces of our lives and makes us into whole people, bringing about a new humanity by redeeming every part of us. Echoes of that transformation sound to the ends of all creation (N. T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today, 2011, pp. 27–28).
The scope of the good news of this gospel restoration compels us to believe that there is nothing too small or too large, too insignificant or too profane that cannot and will not be redeemed by Christ and the work of his people (N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, 2008, pp. 211–12). Our confidence is that God will one day renew the whole earth in Christ. Until that time, we work toward that future, intentionally entering into the brokenness of our world to be God’s agents of restoration.
Our understanding of the incarnation shapes our worship and how we live as embodied witnesses of the gospel. As the Father sent the Son to a particular culture, we also are sent as witnesses to enact the gospel in word and deed in our particular cultural contexts. We give witness in these contexts—not separated from our own brokenness, but bringing our own broken histories with us. This reflects the tension found in Advent. We have already received the love of God in our embrace of Christ, but we have not yet been completely restored. How do we live out our mission within this tension? What behaviors does the Spirit of God want to develop in God’s people, and how do our worship practices help that development?
I suggest that our gathered worship practices reflect the message of Advent and its tensions by seeking to form a people with the behaviors of humility, honesty, and hospitality. Two Scripture passages illustrate how we are to live as witnesses to the ways of Christ as active participants in God’s mission of renewal in this broken world.
Philippians 2:1–11
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit” (v. 3). These verses describe how we are to live. Paul’s answer for individualism and ego in his context was reminding people of their true identity in Jesus: “Have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who . . . did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather he made himself nothing. . . . He humbled himself” (Philippians 2:5–8).
Paul indicates that the imitation of Christ’s mindset and behavior as we live out our mission of witnesses to the gospel is the very will of God for the church. Paul reminds members of the Philippian church that they participate and share in the Spirit (Philippians 2:1). Jesus had promised the gift of the Spirit (Luke 24:49), who would lead them to be Christ’s witnesses (Acts 1:8). Jesus told his disciples he was sending them as the Father had sent him, and he breathed on them to receive the Spirit (John 20:21–22). The church in Philippi is evidence of God’s love (1 John 4:7–12), the fulfillment of Jesus’ promises, and the working of the Spirit. Paul is reminding these Philippians of their very essence. They are created by and share the same Spirit. This is true for the church in Philippi and in our unique contexts.
The Practice of Embodied Witness
After pointing us toward Jesus as our example, Paul clarifies the true nature and essence of the church. Our nature is that of servants (Philippians 2:7). When we live in congruence with our Spirit-formed identity, we reject vain conceit, selfish ambition, and control (2:3). Rather, we live out our mission by putting others’ interests before our own. The Christian community presents a way of life to the world that stands opposed to selfish desire, conceit, or pursuit of power, instead offering to bear with others all the consequences of life in a broken world.
Advent worship practices, then, should discourage us from distancing ourselves from those in need and encourage us to bear with others, willingly changing our position and place to enter our context as embodied witnesses. Jesus emptied himself by moving from the most magnificent place and position to the limits of our time and place. He did this without great fanfare or welcome, but with the vulnerable dependence of a child. He took on our form and limitations. He became the ultimate bearer of brokenness (Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics, 2004, p. 197). As we enter the physical, spiritual, and emotional spaces of those who are broken, bearing with them in our mutual brokenness, we give up titles, positions, and comfort. As we “move into the neighborhood,” our arms will tire as we carry those who are weak, our hearts will break as we enter stories of pain, and our shoulders will be stained with the tears of those we comfort.
John 13:1–15
Embodying the ways of Jesus requires vulnerability. We are asked to remove our outer garment to stoop and wash dirt-stained feet (John 13:1–15). The tension of Advent is that we are both elevated by our identity in Christ and lowered by our earthly position and place. Jesus, the Son of God, came to us as a helpless child; as an adult he humbled himself by taking a towel and basin and washing the feet of those who would leave him, deny him, and betray him. His humble offering did not depend on his disciples’ support and loyalty; it is a demonstration of his character and nature. The church is called not simply to provide the resources for such acts of service, but to follow Jesus in stooping and washing.
The Practices of Humility, Honesty, and Hospitality
Humility is the appropriate response to recognizing our human condition and our dependence on God. But it will be perceived as false unless it comes with the gift of grace (Ephesians 2:8) and is void of ambition, conceit, and boasting (Philippians 2; Ephesians 2:9). Christ is the foremost example of humility, and the Spirit continues to form humility in us.
Humility allows us to enter our communities without the baggage of church programs or strategies that tempt us to view those in our community as objects to be fixed or potential church “customers” (Alan J. Roxburgh, Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood, 2011, p. 126). Humility allows us to embrace people with their own broken and unique histories.
The tension of Advent is that we are both elevated by our identity in Christ and lowered by our earthly position and place.
The practice of humility opens us up to honesty as we are “humble in our truth telling” (Craig Van Gelder and Dwight J. Zscheile, The Missional Church in Perspective: Mapping Trends and Shaping the Conversation, 2011, p. 143). Honesty allows God’s people to stand before others and admit our own brokenness, faults, and limitations. We don’t need to pretend to know everything or to be in control. We can be sincere. Honesty in our proclamation shares the good news but also repents: “I have received the love of Jesus, but I am still broken and not yet complete.” Honest witness forgives and asks forgiveness, serves and is willing to be served, shows love and receives love. Honesty extends a hand to the community and accepts the hand that is offered.
Hospitality connects our worship with our work week. Hospitality sees the imago Dei in all those we encounter and is “often the space where we encounter the ‘other,’ the stranger who brings a blessing” (Van Gelder and Zscheile, p. 132). Advent reminds us that God entered our world in Jesus Christ and calls us to discern how we are to enter our contexts with hospitable behavior that reflects humility and honesty. In our mission as embodied witnesses, both receiving and offering hospitality, we learn about the gifts, talents, struggles, joys, and pains in our neighborhood. We learn how God is at work in people’s lives. We will be challenged in our assumptions and ambitions. The more we open ourselves to learning about others, the less tempted we will be to predetermine what others need. Our gospel proclamation—in word and in deed—is no longer done from the comfortableness and control of our own space, but in the space created for us by the community we have entered. We begin to live like Christ as we enter the world. As we begin to incarnate ourselves in our communities, our true self emerges, and we experience new riches of the gospel of God’s kingdom.
The Practice of Eucharist
Many of these Christ-centering practices and characteristics are put on full display in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist. As N. T. Wright explains:
We do not simply remember a long-since dead Jesus; we celebrate the presence of the living Lord. And he lives, through the resurrection, precisely as the one who has gone on ahead into the new creation, the transformed new world, as the one who is himself the prototype. . . . We can understand the Eucharist most fully as the anticipation of the banquet when heaven and earth are made new, the marriage supper of the Lamb. . . . It is the breaking in of God’s future, the Advent future, into our present time. Every Eucharist is a little Christmas as well as a little Easter (Surprised by Hope, pp. 274–75).
As we gather together, eating from one loaf and drinking from one cup, we become re-formed into the image of Christ. Advent worship moves people past the pageantry or noise of the Christmas season. Bearing witness to the good news of the kingdom looks a little different when Jesus is primarily imagined as a cute Baby Gap model for the local Christmas pageant than when we remember that Jesus’ incarnation as a baby led to the blood, dirt, pain, and sacrifice of the cross.
“They will call him Immanuel (which means “God with us”)” (Matthew 1:23). As we gather around the table, the Spirit renews and nourishes us, collectively and individually. “God with us” is experienced in the bread and the cup and shapes us to be agents of renewal in a broken world. As the faith community breaks the bread and drinks the cup in the Eucharist, we become a people shaped by the humility of Jesus in his incarnation, life, and death. We become more vulnerable and honest about our brokenness. And we are nourished to be people of hospitality, offering witness to the gospel of Christ in our neighborhoods.