Advent is a season of beginnings.
The church year begins. The story of Jesus coming to dwell as one of us, to live and die as one of us, begins. In the darkest days of the year, we begin to see glimmers of hope somewhere off on the horizon.
Time begins again.
But as compelling as these beginnings are, the ultimate mystery and majesty of Advent shines forth in its promise of the completion of time, and its finally fulfilled hopes as Jesus returns to dwell with us forever.
God’s love and God’s ongoing presence on this earth and with all of us will be accomplished. “Even as heaven and earth pass away, my words will not pass away,” Jesus says. The words of Jesus breathe and speak love; redemptive love, fulfilled love, and love reunited, God reunited with us, love flowing unimpeded through time, space, and eternity. These words of love will never pass away.
So in the meantime, in this time of God’s not yet complete reign on this earth, we live in hope, hoping that our love for God and for one another will increase, that our imperfect and incomplete loves will constantly be taken and refined in the crucible of God’s perfect love.
Advent is our season of longing for completed and fulfilled love.
The apostle Paul knew about love that longs for completion.
In his letter to the Thessalonians, he writes about his longing to get back to the people who are members of one of the first house churches that Paul brought into being.
“Night and day, we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith,” Paul wrote. Paul wanted to get back to these people he loved, not to rest on his laurels and to soak up their adulation, but to continue the good work he had begun there in helping to form and to shape their faith in the Lord Jesus.
So Paul prayed, “Now may our God and Father and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you.”
Meanwhile, the Thessalonians were feeling a great deal of anxiety about when they would see Paul again. Plus, Paul had told them about Jesus returning to complete God’s reign on this earth, and that Jesus would return soon. But when? When would Paul get back, when would Jesus return? The Thessalonians wanted some certainty.
Paul tells them, in all the uncertainty, and in their absence from one another, and in his own uncertainty about when he will return, that one thing is certain.
That certainty is the presence of love.
As they wait for Paul, and for Jesus to return, Paul encourages the Thessalonians to continue the good work that has begun in them. They can work on whatever is lacking in their faith by increasing their love for one another.
To increase and abound in love for one another is to remember that our love for one another is not yet complete. Ongoing love, no matter how rich and deep it gets, is still a longing love for more love.
When we are separated by space, by time, and ultimately by death, we still long to be with those we love. The American Automobile Association estimates that 53.4 million Americans are traveling this Thanksgiving weekend. And I guarantee, over 53 million people aren’t traveling simply to eat turkey and all the fixings. My guess is that most of them are going to the trouble to travel because they are longing to be with someone they love.
But even after making the effort to be with the people we love, tensions may impede our love, regardless of our best efforts.
Stories of Thanksgiving fights around the dinner table have become legendary. But in moments when we are tempted to be less than loving, Paul’s insistence that we are to increase and abound in love for one another can help us to stay on track.
In her article, “This Thanksgiving, be kind at the table, I wish I had,” that appeared on November 24th in The Washington Post recently, Steff Sirois writes about her brother Paul, age thirty, who died of Covid not long before the Covid vaccines became available. In the article, Sirois describes her past political arguments with her brother at the Thanksgiving table. Sirois would get red faced and more and more heated, accusing her brother of being stupid. But Paul never struck back, instead pivoting to their shared childhood memories that ultimately had them both in laughter.
Sirois says that “those Thanksgiving arguments with my brother were a waste of time I took for granted, a waste of breath that I thought we could afford to expend frivolously.”
Now that her brother is dead, Sirois, quoting writer George Saunders, says that what she “most regrets in her life are her failures of kindness.” And she goes on to say that “if it hadn’t been for Paul’s refusal to make an enemy out of me for those trivial reasons that family members so often do, if he hadn’t insisted on loving me unconditionally in spirit of our differences, I would have bigger regrets to make peace with.” She says that her brother’s “unrelenting kindness, his ability to incorporate laughter and show love at the height of their most heated arguments, is even in death, his greatest gift.”
Increasing and abounding in love requires that we choose kindness when we are tempted to do otherwise. And the beauty of choosing kindness even in the small bits of life—in the grocery store, waiting in line, answering an unsolicited phone call, choosing to be kind to those around us even when we’d rather not, means that when we hope to choose love in the most awful of situations, we are more likely to be able to do so, because we have been practicing love all along.
And God will help us to love one another. By remembering God’s everlasting compassion and love as the Psalmist does, we can then remember to be humble and compassionate and loving in our relationships with others. Choosing kindness, and then choosing love, strengthens our hearts in holiness.
And choosing love helps us to follow the advice of Jesus as he talks about the end times.
“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.”
Dissipations, addictions and worries all take root in individual and communal failures of love.
To actively work on increasing love by faithfully loving one another, and to contribute to abounding love in this world that lacks love is to help to make way for the reign of God to finally be completed on this earth.
Jesus was born on this earth and lived and died as one of us. But the sweep of the birth, life, death, and even the resurrection and ascension of Jesus is not the end of the story, not at all! Jesus still longs to get back to us because Jesus loves us.
For as we Christians know, Jesus is still not done with us. The love that Jesus has for us is greater than all eternity, and that’s the love with which he wants us to love one another. His love for us stretches past the end of time, even after everything else that we have ever known has passed away. Jesus promises to return, in power and great glory, to finish the work that he only got to begin in his time on earth here with us, the work of bringing God’s reign of peace and love to completion on this earth and in us.
So as this season of Advent begins once more, we begin again the timeless work of love. Let us pray that God will strengthen our hearts in holiness and make us people of love. Then, when time draws to a close and Jesus comes in power and great glory, we will run to him, whose name is Love, and stand with joy before him, because while we have waited for his return, we have chosen to love one another as God has always loved us.