We are accustomed to Advent. It is the season that is all too familiar to us. It is of course the forerunner of Christmas in our minds. It conjures up holiday images of thanksgiving of, giftgiving, of togetherness, family, and blessedness. We are used to thinking of Advent in this way. It is the time for Christmas carols, for Christmas decorations, for good cheer and good food.

All this might be well and good. But it truly has nothing to do with the meaning of Advent. For Advent is about expectation. Advent is about a coming. Advent is about a life lived in a sort of nonsensical hopefulness, an irrational expectancy in the face of uncertainty, fear, and death. Advent is about longing. As our prophetic text has it today: “Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence!”

You see, before Advent leads to Christmas, before expectancy and longing for liberation lead to new creation, before all these there is uncertainty, doubt, forlornness, sorrow, despair. The season of Advent calls us out of our rush to Christmastime sentimentality. It tells us to tarry with the unfinished nature of our lives. It asks us to take the time to grieve and to cry out. It refuses to prematurely suture our wounds. The demands that our hope be a deep hope, one that goes all the way down to the root. It calls us away from shallowness, from easy hopes for small transformations, for manageable, spiritual, little victories.

The longings of the prophets were deep longings. They were longings for a total liberation, for the thoroughgoing transformation of the world into the dwelling place of God. Likewise the hope of the people of Israel at the time of the birth of Christ was a deep, desperate hope. It was a hope for tangible deliverance from tangible slavery and suffering. It was a hope for real and true freedom from real and enslaving forces of domination. It was not a quaint spiritual hope for a spiritual savior to take care of our spiritual problems and help us in our generally good lives.

No, at the root of our faith at the root of our confession that our Lord and Savior was born of the Virgin Mary as a baby, lies deep apocalyptic expectation. An abiding call for a climactic transformation of all that is into something new.

The scandal of Advent lies inside this mystery, the mystery of a child in whom this apocalyptic transformation of the world waits to come about. Behind the manifest weakness of the newborn Jesus lies the manifestation of the New World order that is coming from God. All this must begin with the real, raw, and uncertain hopes that this broken world demands of us. We must begin where we are, in the midst of sorrow and suffering, uncertainty and incompleteness. It is from here that we must cry out for liberation. And it is from here that we must learn to recognize the surprising way God will surely answer us with salvation. And truly it is this surprising act of God to save us that we truly long for, as the prophet speaks of: “awesome deeds that we did not expect”!

Amidst the failures of human projects and power, politics and procedures, the hope of Advent comes alive as true longing, longing for fundamental change and transformation of the world. Amidst the wreckage of the earth, from the edges and corners of this ravaged world comes the hope of Advent. The hope for the tearing open of heaven and the shaking of the mountains, the hope for the upending of every status quo, the defeat of all powers of domination. In the face of devastation and victimization comes the hope of Advent, the hope for a transformation and liberation that can barely be imagined, that can only hoped for, only be longed for — that only a decisive act from God alone can bring.

Advent is a time of apocalyptic longing, of sitting amidst the fragments of this world and the fragments of our lives and longing for a fundamental change in the face of it. It is a word that is always in season in the midst of our human games of power and politics, of idolatry and ideology. It is the same expectancy that runs through Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming”, written in the wake of the devastation of WWI. Amidst the ruins of the optimism of the 19th century, the world was thrust into despair, and apocalyptic longing as the 20th century dawned in blood and destruction:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The poem speaks of the incoherence and failure of the modern world amidst the destruction that humankind has brought down on itself. It looks to the world and sees a desolate place, a desert haunt in which bestial powers and darkness are the norm. And yet, precisely in this place, the place of incoherence and lost innocence, the place of desolation and destruction, the poet looks, longingly for a revelation, for the coming of something new, reminded of a rocking cradle that upended twenty centuries of stony sleep. Even as it looks for a rough beast, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, for some strange new power to arise, it is this rocking cradle that haunts the poet’s memory. This unexpected gentleness and vulnerability that cannot be assimilated to the world of beasts and powers, of domination and subjugation.

So also did the prophet long for the climactic tearing open of the heavens, for the shaking of the mountains, and the overturning of the nations. And just so, in the face of the hope of Advent, God did truly come, and promises to come again. But this coming was not the one we envisioned. No, no. This above all was the awesome deed we did not expect: That the climactic, apocalyptic invasion of God to liberate and transfigure the world came, not in power as we know it, but in the form of the least of these, the most vulnerable of the world’s humanity. God’s coming, God’s faithfulness to come and save us, and come through on our every hope, our every longing, our every outcry was so strange to us, so unbelievably unexpected, that we humans would ultimately respond by rejecting it with crucifying malice.

But this is truly the grace, truly the word of hope on this side, between the Advents, that God’s coming to us, God’s fulfillment of the world’s hope did not come on our terms. The rocking cradle and the empty cross do indeed vex us to nightmare, and just so does the living Jesus and the empty tomb call us out of our nightmare-bound sleep and into new life, a life we could not have expected or imagined. And just so it calls us into new hope, a hope that realizes, in the face of God’s surprising coming to us, that our hope on our terms tends to lack imagination. God comes to meet our cries for the transformation of the world as a baby. And God comes to us when we have become crucifiers saying “Peace be with you. Do not fear!” This is the God who is coming to us. The God of the cradle and the cross. The God who saves us, not with power, but with the glorious powerlesness of unbounded, self-abandoning love.

So as we enter into the story of Jesus again, this new year, enter it as we must enter it if we are to be honest:

• Come with longing.
• Come with sorrow.
• Come with incompleteness.
• Come with failure.
• Come with depression.
• Come with anger.
• Come with despair.
• Come with uncertainty.
• Come afraid.
• Come vulnerable.

Come into God’s story where we are, in the midst of the flaming fragments of this world, crying out with all creation for newness. Do not shrink back from truly crying out, from truly longing, from feeling the depth of our need for transformation. And in that moment and in all the moments that follow after it, prepare yourselves to be surprised when God does come on the scene to save and to heal and to restore us. God is truly coming to us, but it may not be the coming we seek. It may come to us in the form of one of the least of these. Or in the form of a brother or sister, perhaps the one you don’t want to have it come from. Prepare yourself to be surprised by how and where and in whom God will come to you to call you back to the life of the kingdom.

But our great comfort, and our great hope, the hope that Advent also reminds us of is this: That even if God’s coming is not what we would expect, project, construct, or desire, it is coming nonetheless, and our ability to fail in recognizing it does not go as deep as far as God’s unfailing love, the love that will transform all things into life. The good news of Advent is that God is truly coming in Jesus and that this will truly surprise and shake us up into new life, no matter how much we may misunderstand or fail to see. This Advent give yourselves again to hope, and in hoping, give yourselves to receive God’s surprising, unexpected way of coming in response to our hope. For this indeed is our good news, that the kingdom of God will surprise us, will transform, and will go beyond our any of our wildest hopes.

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news,  who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. (Mark 10:29-30)

There is a basic claim in the gospel message of Jesus, that we cannot avoid or ignore: the natural biological family can never come first for followers of Jesus. Family stands underneath Jesus’s call for total commitment to God’s coming kingdom. What this may mean in different contexts, times, and places will certainly vary, but I would suggest that there is a core truth in Jesus’s statement, which is echoed in different ways throughout the New Testament, namely that in every place and in every time, the Gospel challenges and re-shapes natural relationships, even and perhaps especially, the natural family relationship.

In fact, it is important to remember that the New Testament as a whole has little, if anything positive to say about the natural family as such. Instructions to families and family members consistently are framed within the larger call to the church members about how to relate to one another (submit to one another, be kind to one another, do not provoke one another, etc). The primary bond is always the bond of discipleship, the brother-sisterhood of Christ that is lived out in the peoplehood of the church. Natural families are not cast aside or rejected, but they are relativized. Families are secondary and penultimate. The brother-sisterhood of Christ, the familihood of the church is what is primary and ultimate. The message of the gospel, as Jesus and the apostles preached it is never one of “family first” or “focus on the family.” Rather natural family only has meaning in the context of the more basic, fundamental relationship that we share as brothers and sisters of Christ in the family of God. This is reflected in Paul’s opening call in our reading this week from Romans 12:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.  Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Now this may sound compelling and beautiful, and so it is. However, there is great risk in diving in and embracing this vision of the church as real and true family, and that is the risk of real and profound loss. The great comfort of the natural family is the perceived security, permanence, and stability that it commands. Spouses make vows to one another, that even today are harder to dispense with than other forms of relationship. The parent-child relationship is biological and one-sided. Children live for years and years in dependence on their parents, and as such this relationship is not likely to be easily severed. Natural family is a great draw because it feels safe, solid, given. The relationships of natural family feel safe because in them we feel we have control.

Relationships in the church however, especially today are much more transient, tentative, open to revision–more risky. Do we really dare to say, as Jesus does “Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:33-35)? The closeness of the family bond involves vulnerability, openness, and being truly and deeply known. There is risk in opening that relationship outward to embrace others, others who didn’t grow up with us, who we didn’t birth and raise, who we didn’t spend years getting to know ahead of time before we threw in our lots together as spouses. Opening up that relationship means risk: the risk of loss, of betrayal, of conflict, of alienation.

And so the church has tended to settle for less to avoid this risk. We retain walls and boundaries of safety between each other to protect ourselves from the possible pain of losing one another and hurting one another. What happens if we make ourselves vulnerable, open our lives fully to one another as family, and then someone, a brother or sister in the truest sense, someone who had become true and real family to us then decides to leave, to take their life elsewhere? We imagine we can avoid the pain of real loss if we avoid the real depth of relationship, relationship in which we dare to actually let ourselves need each other, depend on on each other, become as Paul says “members of one another.” C.S. Lewis spoke well of this risk in his The Four Loves:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Do we dare embrace the vulnerability of true brother-sisterhood? This one of the questions with which we must reckon.

However, there is another reason beyond fear of loss and pain that we may avoid Jesus’s call to true brother-sisterhood which we must name and face. Perhaps we do not fear losing our brothers and sisters, perhaps what we fear is truly being stuck with them. What about our autonomy, our freedom, our control over our lives and decisions? To truly bind ourselves to one another as family means embracing the limitations that other people impose on us. Just as natural families limit our horizons and make claims on us that shut down other possibilities, so too does embracing the brother-sisterhood of Christ. We no longer live to ourselves, and we no longer die to ourselves. Here we belong not first to ourselves, or to our natural families, but to each other in Christ. This means being imposed upon, needed, and limited.

And perhaps we just don’t want that. We imagine that we can have genuine, deep, and satisfying relationships with one another while still keeping each other at arm’s length. We imagine that we can have “community” without sacrifice, without the giving up of our American longing for unfettered, self-determining freedom. If we are really to live as brothers and sisters, as family, this may mean that we can’t take certain jobs that would choke off our time to give ourselves to life together. It may mean that I can’t take off for a year to hike the PCT because one of you may need me. It may mean that we can’t take vacations whenever we want so that our resources can support a brother in financial need. It may mean that we can’t have it all–which, if we’re honest we really do expect to be able to do pretty much all of the time. This is a reality we have to reckon with, that we have to truly face and not sweep under the rug. There is a cost to family, and it must be counted if we are really to be all in together.

But in the face of this very real risk and cost stands the word of Jesus’s promise: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29-30). The question for is is unflinchingly direct: Do we believe this? Do we believe that the sacrifice, the risk, the limits, and the losses are worth it? Do we believe that we will be given far above what we could ask or imagine if we embrace this vulnerability?

Or do we ultimately believe the world’s story? That we must play it safe, take care of ourselves and our natural family, maybe have friendships, but making sure that they are all well-controlled and distant enough to protect us? That is the question we must wrestle with as we struggle to live out what it means that we really are, in Christ, a true family.