Shame-filled Advent?

I came across this post today on The Episcopal Cafe, just days before Advent begins and daily meditations begin to appear on this site. As we prepare our hearts for the season that lies ahead, I hope you find it, as I did, a helpful reminder. (The Episcopal Cafe posts edited and digested versions of blog posts; if you wish to read the full, original post, written by J. Mary Luti, you can find it here).

In particular, I commend the words reproduced below to you - and quite frankly to myself as a preacher. How can we speak the deeper truth of this season and challenge one another in love, without falling into the trap that Luti (rightly, in my view) names? Can we find a way to have a shame-less Advent toward the goal of entering more deeply into "the drama God sees, the drama in which the Incarnation is the daring protagonist, the drama in which God and humans and all creatures are unaccountably finding each other, groping weirdly in the human dark by the light of desires great and small, guided and misguided, but desire for each other all the same?"

(Rich Simpson)


Too often I’m left feeling shamed and abandoned by the church in this season, because I’m a human being like the ones I hear derided from the pulpit. I may not line up at 12 midnight on Black Friday, but I do get all caught up in commercialism and I am needy and I do want things and I do feel pressure to spend and I am certainly no Virgin Mary in Advent, rapt in pregnant contemplation in the quiet candlelight of my room during these four weeks. And if I, being a committed religious professional and all, feel shamed and condemned by anti-consumerist, world-deriding sermons, I can only imagine how it feels to a secular person who wanders into the pews to be told with divine authority that their secularity has rendered them unfit for Christmas.

Pray tell, dear preachers, where is that ‘other world’ in which people are pure and focused on the heart of the matter? (Certainly it’s not the church, which is as busy and as unfocused in this season as any heedless secularist or frantic shopper bent on the latest gadget at a door-busting price. Let the one who is without sin cast the first Christmas tree ornament.) Which world is it in which people do not need or want or try to get and try to please and try to make themselves feel better and try to escape the inevitability of their deaths? Is any of us who preaches against that bad world a citizen of some other country? No, because there is no such other world. There is only this one. And we are this world too. And we had better be. Because it is the world in which God finds us. God won’t find us anywhere else, so we ought not try to go someplace else, or lead others astray either, by telling them that the so-called secular, consumerist, commercially driven world is bad and wrong, or soon to be forsaken by God if we don’t shape up and stop buying things and having wild holiday parties.

It’s the world we have, the world we are given; and it’s a world of human creatures full of longings deep and powerful, longings for God, I would say, but so overlaid with weakness, frailty and the nagging effects of sin that we fix ourselves on needs and things that are not God. Things that are not against God, mind you; just not God. And because they are not God, our desires cannot be wholly satisfied by them. And so we keep going after other things and acquiring more things (you know how this goes—it’s your story too). 

But to say it is un-Christian to live like this is simply wrong. To say we have fallen into the hands of some consumerist Satan and are screwing everything up is wrong; even more, it is to miss the deeper drama. The drama God sees, the drama in which the Incarnation is the daring protagonist, the drama in which God and humans and all creatures are unaccountably finding each other, groping weirdly in the human dark by the light of desires great and small, guided and misguided, but desire for each other all the same.