The season of Advent is a challenging time for Christian people. In the span of only four weeks, we are presented with several (huge) themes and messages: the Second Coming of Christ, God’s judgment, our own preparations for those events and the record of God’s direct intervention into human life through the miraculous conception of Jesus in the Blessed Virgin Mary. Furthermore, Advent also uniquely fuses our experience of past, present and future. This is the time when we look at what God has done in the past, what God is doing and saying to us today and what God promises about the future through a single lens, making all of that inseparable ”“ a single, living reality that directs our lives….
What does Advent offer? The famous biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann gets at it best: “A past without gifts, and a future without hope, gives us a present filled with anxiety.”