Brief synopsis of the readings: In the book of the prophet Isaiah, Isaiah spoke in God’s name. The Lord’s house will be the highest mountain and all nations will stream toward it. The Lord will then judge between the nations and all will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nobody will train for war ever again. In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus told his disciples that nobody could predict the future and used Noah’s Ark as an example. “So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be out in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.” Jesus then warned his followers to stay awake because they don’t know when the day of the Lord will come.

Happy new liturgical year and welcome to Advent. As we all know, the season of Advent comprises the four weeks before Christmas and it’s considered a time of preparation. The next month will find us awash in decorating, baking, shopping, sitting in traffic, and worrying over how things will go when everyone gathers for Christmas, “the most wonderful time of the year.” In years past I’ve spoken of the difficulty of pushing aside all that so we can make room for Advent. Let’s take this year off from all that.

And even though we celebrate the birth of Christ we don’t really know Jesus’ birthday. Seemingly everyone has a theory over why we chose December 25th but it’s worth noting that (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) it’s close to the shortest day of the year and we’re not alone. It’s also when we commemorate Hanukkah, Saturnalia, Kwanzaa, and Festivus. There is something about our need to find light in the middle of the darkness.

When we speak of darkness often say that it’s always darkest before the dawn, but it’s not really true. It’s darkest at midnight. But as the darkness continues past midnight it can become harder and harder for us to endure. We know enough science to know that when the sun sets it will rise the next morning; we know that it’s dark because the earth rotates and the sun is on the other side of the world. We also know that days get longer and shorter because the earth is tilted with respect to the sun. But the ancients didn’t have this perspective and there was some fear that perhaps the sun was going away forever or the days would continue to shorten. Pagans celebrate Saturnalia when they recognize that the days are once again getting longer.

But none of this answers why God decided to send Jesus to us 2000 years ago. Things were not going well for the Chosen People then, but they had seen worse. They suffered under Roman occupation but the Romans respected the Temple (until the destroyed it after Jesus’ resurrection) and as long as you paid your taxes and didn’t try to overthrow the Empire you could live your life. They appeared to have it much worse during the Babylonian exile or when the Greeks ruled them. Ultimately we’re never going to know what’s in God’s mind or why God chose when he did. It is, as they say, above our pay grade.

We can, however, know what Christmas promises. Christianity is unique in that while other faiths talk about a creator sending messengers or prophets, only we believe that God was born among us. Only we Christians wrestle with the divine/human nature of a historical figure. While it’s a mystery we can celebrate it and we can see what it portends for us. The reading from Isaiah gives us a familiar line: They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again. The line also exists in the book of the prophet Micah and I wonder sometimes if it has become too familiar to understand how radical that is. The idea of turning weapons of war into tools for gathering good marks a dramatic turn in the human experience. Simply put, we have never experienced this in all human history.

So does Advent mean we passively sit around and wait for it to happen? Well if that were true, what need would we have for Jesus? Meaning no disrespect to Isaiah or Micah, just articulating this line isn’t enough. Jesus came to us to lead by example. He came not as a king but as a newborn. He didn’t come on a throne but in a feeding trough (manger). And he didn’t come during the light but during the darkness.

That perhaps is Advent’s greatest irony. We light lights while the darkness is still growing. We light lights because we know that we can be the light in the darkness. We are given the gift of not just waiting for light, but making it. Of being it.

When Jesus talks about how to prepare for the coming Son of Man it shouldn’t increase our anxiety but our determination. Nobody at the time of Jesus expected the Messiah (though they looked forward to it) and, as I said, we don’t know why it was then. But what if the Son of Man comes when we finally beat the last sword into a plowshare? Again, we can’t know the mind of God, but could that be the plan?

It’s fashionable to look at our world and think we are going in the wrong direction, but let’s look another way. It’s true that wars and conflicts have become more global and lethal than ever before but I think we’ve become less tolerant of it. We can see times in our history where war was seen as a “rite of passage,” a way for someone to “prove himself.”

But I think we’re coming to a better sense of the madness of war. We pray for peace on earth with an awareness of how much our swords and spears have cost us. Last week I wrote about how democracy moves us closer to the Kingdom. Since our leaders govern only on our consent we have the ability to choose plowshares and pruning hooks. And I think we’re getting better at it.