Last week, Open Door held our first ever Fall Festival. There were games and a bounce house and hot dogs and Pam brought her big 18-wheeler and we had door prizes. We weren’t sure who would come, but there were more than 75 folks there. Our small church was filled with people we had never met before, and there were other people we had not seen in ages, and the people who were there were excited.
“It feels like a change is in the air, Pastor,” one woman told me. “This feels good, like good things are about to happen!”
That expectation that something is on the way is the key idea behind the Christian season of Advent. The four Sundays before Christmas, Advent is a time of waiting, of expectancy, of waiting for something good to happen.
The scriptures tell us that God made a good world, but then we messed it up. The birth of Jesus – the coming of the Christ child – was God’s rescue plan for the earth. It was God’s plan to make things right, to fix what we had broken, to restore shalom.
Things seem tense right now. Wars, inflation, political unrest. Vulnerable populations are at risk, and we seem so very divided as a nation. We feel like a people in desperate need of saving, and quickly. We need a rescue plan. We need to be fixed. We need some of that shalom.
So, like the ancient Palestinians, we are caught in a time of waiting for the one who will rescue us from this domination system we find ourselves in, and who will show us the way home. That is what Advent is all about really – a time of waiting, yes, but also a time of hope that tomorrow can be better than today, that we are not forgotten, that God is not yet done with us. God is faithful, and the God who loved us into being has not given up on us – will not give up on us – and that God sent Jesus to show us the way to live.
Open Door Mennonite Church 