Prior to Christmas, the church observes the brief season of Advent. The word advent means “coming”, referring to something that is about to arrive or appear. The central figure of Advent is John the Baptist. In summarizing his proclamation, Matthew, Mark, and Luke each use the quote from Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord!” Thus, Advent is supposed to be a time when Christians are preparing. But for what?

In reality, there is a lot of practical preparing going on during Advent: preparing for the Christmas holiday. Decorating, gift buying, baking, cleaning, rehearsing, program creating, etc. all fill the season, in people’s lives and in the church. This is often the only preparing that goes on. But presumably John the Baptist and whoever developed Advent had something else in mind. But again, what?

Advent arose long after Jesus of Nazareth had come and gone, so it is pointing to another “coming”, a second coming. What that means, however, has never been clear. The New Testament has some dramatic and graphic depictions of Christ’s return. But those who have taken them literally have tended to veer off into bizarre apocalyptic fantasies like those I wrote about a couple weeks ago.

In truth, those biblical apocalyptic predictions all anticipated Jesus’ literal return very soon, often in the lifetimes of the original readers. When that didn’t happen, the early church settled into a stance of waiting for they knew not what or when. Soon the Second Coming became so vague and indefinite as to have little if any meaning, though preachers have continued to expound on it to the present day.

It took a long time for the absurdity of all this to be called out but in the modern era it’s impossible to avoid. The epitome of that awareness is Samuel Becket’s 1953 play, Waiting for Godot. While open to many interpretations, Vladimir and Estragon’s pointless waiting for someone they don’t even know is as stinging a judgement of Advent hope as you’ll find. Act I ends with the appearance of a boy who announces that he is a messenger of Godot come to say that Godot isn’t coming today but will surely come tomorrow. In Act II, which is tomorrow, Godot does not appear either and the play ends with Vladimir and Estragon still waiting.

Becket does not seem to have intended Godot to represent God specifically. Rather, the story points to the sense of endless waiting that often pervades modern life. This is the hope or expectation that something better is always just around the corner, the experience of “waiting for our ship to come in,” as the saying goes. This can be something material (advertising’s unending promise of “the next big thing”), a new job, a new relationship, a new place to live, etc. That often-frustrated anticipation is fueled both by consumer capitalism and the fading of the belief that our lives will have some ultimate consummation in eternity.

The early church’s great mistake was deciding that salvation occurred in the “great beyond”, in both space and time. Earthly life then became a long waiting, like planes circling an airport until they got clearance to land. Since the church claimed to have the “keys to the kingdom”, it drew people not wanting to miss out on the promise of paradise to come. That worked for about 1,500 years—pretty impressive. But it doesn’t work anymore.

In Luke 17 there is a passage that the early church paid little attention to since it didn’t fit its waiting mode.

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.”

What’s coming? What “advent” are we supposed to be anticipating? Well, whatever it is, it’s not the kingdom of God, Jesus says, because it’s already here. And if we can get past the typically garbled translation, we see that Jesus points to this in the first words he says in Mark, the earliest gospel. My paraphrase:

“It’s now time for you to hear this: The kingdom of God is at hand, at your very fingertips. Change how you’ve been thinking about this and believe this good news!”

In the gospel of Thomas’ version of the Luke story above, Jesus says, “The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.” And later he says, “The kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, but people do not see it.”

Where is God’s “kingdom” (a metaphor that admittedly doesn’t work very well anymore)? It’s here, there, everywhere, in you, in me, in everyone. In short, you can’t get away from it. So what are we waiting for? Our waking up to realize it. What is coming? What advent are we hoping for? The transformation of a humanity which knows it’s true being and identity as Spirit.

I think this is the meaning of an otherwise obscure saying of Jesus in Luke 12: “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!” This is the advent Jesus is anticipating: a world on fire with God’s love, a humanity shining with the knowledge of it’s oneness with God and everything, here and now. This is why Jesus says to everyone listening, “You are the light of the world.”

All of this is in the Christmas story, if we know to look for it. The mistake we make is in thinking Christmas is about a unique ancient event when it is actually a mirror being held up to each of us now. Incarnation is the $20 theological word describing the meaning of Christmas as “the Word made flesh”, God become human. But this birth story is supposed to reveal the truth of all birth stories: we are all Spirit become human. It’s what Bible says from very beginning in the creation stories in Genesis.

As I said last week, most of the modern secular Christmas stories say little if anything about the birth of Jesus. Yet I think many of them better understand the meaning of Christmas than the church and its incessant drumming of the mythical Bethlehem tale (which is never mentioned by Mark, John or Paul). For the theme of most of those stories is transformation through self-discovery.

Again, perhaps the best example is Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge is the epitome of the modern man: focused, hard-working, powerful, wealthy. He is a “man of business”, but he has forgotten one thing according to the ghost of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s former business partner: “Mankind is our business!” The domination of his ego, our “false self” according to Paul, has caused him to miss his oneness with all humanity through his true nature as Spirit.

Scrooge’s Christmas Eve visions lead to his being reborn. He is a new person, and his view of the world and of humanity is transformed. In biblical terms, he now sees “the kingdom” all around and within him. His fellow man does, indeed, become “his business.” (While I haven’t seen them all, I think the 1951 British movie version probably depicts Scrooge’s experience the best. The transformation of Alastair Sim’s Scrooge from terror to sheer joy is an acting marvel.)

A line of O Little Town of Bethlehem implores, “O holy child of Bethlehem … be born in us today.” That comes close to the true “meaning of Christmas.” Except, again, there is really nothing to be gotten that we don’t already have. As Paul says, already it is “Christ who lives within me.”

And this is the point that all religions come to eventually, using the language of their own tradition. We are all children of God by our nature. This is not something to be achieved or arrived at, only awakened to and discovered. There is nothing to wait for because there is nothing more coming. As John says, there is indeed an unquenchable “light shining in the darkness”, and it is shining within each one of us.

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