The World is Ending

This year I find Advent is confronting me with endings. The world is, after all, ending. The state of everything-falling-apart-at-the-seams is the general condition of the world we inhabit, and it is this condition that is so easy to spend most of my time pretending is not real. For a majority of the year I stay busy with work and friends and music and hobbies and church, and I forget that I am living in the End Times (as all humans have since Christ’s Resurrection).

But then Advent arrives, and I am compelled to enter a time of waiting. I am challenged to cultivate a new kind of silence. And in that silence I am called by the Spirit to remember that the world is ending. Nothing I have will last as it is. Sometimes, in spite of every participant’s best efforts, relationships fail. Humans are so busy staying busy that we harm each other and animals and the earth without thinking. We fail to see how often we participate in orchestrating senseless disasters. 

Why would the God who calls me to the joy of the Lord also call me to remember that the world exists in a constant state of tragedy, of senseless endings?

After we abandoned God at the Fall, after that fracture, all of the other relationships in creation fractured too. We who were made to be mediators of God’s love to each other and the rest of creation abandoned our crucial role in the order of things. As a consequence, we live in the slow entropy of creation. In Advent we are called to remember this, and to remember that Christ will return in judgment at the last day. On that day he will separate the wheat from the chaff and the havoc we have wrought will be revealed for what it is.

But in Advent we are also called to hope, for we are called to remember and anticipate another coming: that of Christ come to us as Rescuer, born to Mary in the disaster zone of the Roman Empire. God born in human form, in poverty and persecution, laid not in a comfortable crib but in a feeding trough for animals. God with us.

Which is why, this year, Advent is also confronting me with hope. Everything is ending, the world is falling apart — but God does not abandon us to this disaster. He joins us in it. He will come, has come, bodily to meet us here, to make himself known and not leave us alone. He takes the slow death of all things upon his own body and then resurrects life out of it, destroying its power. By his Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection, Christ takes our senseless, destructed endings and recreates them, pulling them into the reality of the End that is not a breaking but is instead a fulfilling, a making new. Advent challenges us to practice the sure hope that Christ dwells among us and, dwelling among us, so remakes the endings we cannot understand or control.

Hope is not a feeling. Hope is a virtue we can practice. We can ask God to give us more of it. Hope is strong, athletic, insistent. Christian hope, practiced in Advent, is a recognition of Christ’s promise that he will come to us, and of his presence among us. This means hope is something we can choose, practice, and cling to. To be hopeful is to cling to Christ’s promise of healing and believe he will work it to its fullest, most glorious conclusion. To believe that, in the End, all will be reconciled, all made new.

In the End, that river clotted with pollution will again run fresh and clean, and people will find refreshment on its banks and in its waters. Wild places depleted by infrastructure expansion or logging will exist in resplendence again, and the creatures that once lived in them will again have homes. Societies will no longer be agents of oppression and division, but will instead exist in peaceful community. The deaf, mute, blind, disabled, addicted, mentally unstable, and insane will be restored to themselves. Those who live burdened by guilt, shame, fear, and unrealistic expectations will find absolute rest in the presence of Christ. That relationship that fell apart and broke your heart for reasons that barely make sense will be restored, healed, when Christ returns and remakes each of us into ourselves.

In the meantime, we wait, and we do our best to participate in this healing that has come in part and is yet to come in full. We wait for the End. We wait for Christ to come, and we practice hope. The world is ending, and everything is falling apart. Hallelujah! Christ is with us in this disaster zone we call home.