Third Friday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Sitting at a Different Table
by Bernard Tam
Family gathering is a gift and something that I have taken for granted. Although much of my extended family lives in Toronto, we have not seen one another in almost three years. Both the restrictions and our cautious COVID practice meant our gatherings have been mostly virtual and not with the whole entirety of the family. As time has passed there have been so many changes: children are growing up, careers have changed, and there are new life situations and circumstances. As we venture to gather again, there is this mysterious feeling, familiarly mysterious. People we have known for so long now seem like strangers—Family that we need to rekindle and re-story with one another. Yet the longing to meet once again, the eagerness to re-enter into one another’s story brings this warm familial feeling. Advent in the liturgical calendar represents waiting, yearning, and anticipation. The longing of the coming (and many would also emphasize the second coming of) Jesus. We are living in the in-between time, embodying the familiarity of the story while at the same time experiencing the mystery of how and when the story will unfold.
The passage in Galatians 4 describes how the world was completely changed by the arrival of Jesus into this world. In Him, who we are has changed from distant relatives to close-knit family members. No longer seen as slaves or servants but grafted into the closeness of the family. But “when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship[daughtership]. Because you are his sons [and daughters] God sent the Spirit of his Son into the hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer slaves, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.” This radical transformation offers an outlook in this time of learning to engage with one another in the unfolding of the pandemic seasons.
How Jesus changes people from slaves to heir is something that is whispered through the Testaments. In the two other lectionary readings, 2 Samuel and the Psalms, we also hear the messianic whisper, the longing to experience this community being renewed by God. The context and the recipients of the story are so different in the various passages, and most of them may not acknowledge one another as kin. They are not only strangers in history, but they may also be strangers in culture, ethnicity, and worldview.
As I sat with the story of the first Christmas, I thought of the arrival of the Messiah being met with a strange bag of different people (not necessarily right at birth but in the first few years). Shepherds, Eastern magicians and scholars, and a variety of different priests and prophetesses. All of these people are complete strangers to one another. Their stories do not intersect with one another, and yet unbeknownst to them, as they encounter Jesus, they are being grafted into a new community, a new family, and becoming kin under the Lordship of Jesus.
People who are unknown to one another have been made known in Jesus Christ. This new familial unit extends farther and wider. It has no uniform identity apart from Jesus; it comes in all forms, shapes, and sizes. Do we ever get disrupted by people around us? That challenge and move us to see afresh what the Kingdom family is like?
This past Saturday, our church community held a neighbourhood Christmas party. There were people from different backgrounds, with different stories and histories. Their stories would have never intersected in any other circumstances, but it was coming together for this Christmas table that brought them together—sitting together and sharing a meal. Those who were once unknown have been made known in the celebration of Jesus. The coming together of differences is the kind of community that reflects the Kingdom values. Scot Mcknight in his book A Fellowship of Differents writes, “The reality is that each of our churches has created a Christian culture and Christian life for likes and sames and similarities and identicals. Instead of powering God’s grand social experiment, we’ve cut up God’s plan into segregated groups, with the incredibly aggravating and God-dishonoring result that most of us are invisible to one another.”
As we return to the Advent season and the anticipation of the celebration of the birth of Jesus. I wonder if we seek to see the birth narrative with our current eyes and not just with historical lenses. With these new eyes, we begin to see how all the strangers—unknown to us and us to them—encountering Jesus are made known (made anew) to one another. No longer do we see strangers, acquaintances, weirdos, etc., but we see brothers and sisters, made in His image. May we see and embrace one another afresh this Advent season.
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