Presiding bishop
By Elizabeth A. Eaton
Advent is an odd season A tension between what God has done, what God will do
T
he Bur- pee’ s se e d
catalog is the epitome of beauty, grace and proportion.
Its pages display the Platonic ideal of which my garden is a poor reflection. Leafing through the catalog I have been beguiled by images of perfect tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and melons. There are flowering fruit trees, grapevines and flowers. I remember my first encounter, my first brush with the excitement and danger of the Burpee’s catalog, a phone and a credit card. It was the page with the fields of lav- ender—undulating fields under a blue Mediterra- nean sky. I could turn our Columbus, Ohio, house into Provence! But the fact
that our
lot was small enough to mow the lawn with a weed whacker brought me back from the abyss. I decided to order tulip bulbs instead. Tulip bulbs must be
Advent is the season when we can say, ‘Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.’
planted in the fall. (They must also be planted right side up I discovered, but that is another story.) We all know how fall is in the par- ish: Rally Day, the start-up of Sun- day school, cate- chism and choir rehearsals. I didn’t plant in September or October.
Finally , toward the end of November, I
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took my tulip bulbs, bone meal and trowel and set out to transform the back- yard. Soil in central Ohio is often clay. It was cold. It was raining. It was muddy. My husband would look out of the back window and shake his head. After a while even the dog left me. By the time I had finished it was dark and the backyard was a soupy, lumpy, clay-ey mess. But all I could see were rows of brilliant red tulips warmed in the spring sun. Advent is an odd season. It isn’t culturally accessible. It doesn’t lend itself
to retail. There are no made-for-TV movies telling heartwarming stories about the great and terrible day of the Lord. It’s an unsettled season that holds in tension the now and the not yet, longing and hope, judgment and redemp- tion, exile and homecoming. We have celebrated the first Christmas. We know that the babe in the man- ger grew to adulthood, preached, taught and healed, inaugurated the new age of the reign of God and was crucified. We are on the other side of Easter, the resurrection, the triumph over sin, death and the devil. We confess “Christ has died. Christ is risen.” But we find ourselves in the muddy, soupy, lumpy mess of a fallen world. Scripture tells us that “God saw everything God had made, and behold, it
was very good.” We have heard Jesus’ promise from the cross to the criminal: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). And yet we live in a world still marred by sin. What a ter- rible tension—we stand between two Edens, the one at the dawn of creation and the one at the close of the age.
Now we can see the beautiful PHOTODISC
logic of Advent. Where the cul- ture (and my heart, too, if I am honest) celebrates and holds on to the manger and the star and the angels and the shepherds and the
wise men, to Mary and Joseph and the Christ child, the church calls us to look for the return of the King. Advent exacerbates the tension between what the world was created to be and what it now is, between what God has done and what God will do. Advent fills us with an unsettled hopeful longing. To our muddy, soupy, lumpy mess—when we walked in darkness—God sent God’s midnight Son. Because of Emmanuel, God with us, we can stand in our clay and see glory. Advent is the season when we can say, “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” In the meantime, plant tulips and wait for spring.
A monthly message from the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Her email address:
bishop@elca.org.
MICHAEL D. WATSON
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