Maybe it’s because I had a big birthday this past week, but I have been thinking a lot about the future. And I have to say that in a lot of ways, I found that except as a source of worry and anxiety I don’t think much about the future at all.
Even if you haven’t been ragged on all week about age, as I have, maybe you feel the same way. We have a tendency to see the future in two ways.
One is to hate the future, to regard the way the world is going as pretty much hostile and out of control, at best drifting, and probably getting worse all the time. And our solution is to withdraw from it, probably seeking refuge in the past, maybe a past church, or a past world, or a past country that isn’t here any more.
The other way we handle the future is to privatize it. And here, we do lots of thinking about the future, but this tends to be pretty defensive in nature. We think about the future, and our children’s future, and we plan and we prepare contingencies and map things out, but we’re mostly concerned about how we’re going to protect ourselves and our kids from all the hardships and tricks that the future is going to have in store. Maybe we can make our futures OK, if we work hard enough.
In both of these scenarios it’s hard to see the future as a stage on which great things are still going to happen in this world. Perhaps even as a place where God is still going to make good on some of the things he has promised to us.
We sometimes think only children, or young people who’ll learn better, would look at the future this way. And yet, that is the approach to the future we hear about during Advent. Advent is all about the future. We know it’s a season of expectation, but not just expectation of Christmas. Advent is getting us ready to think about the whole future, the future that stretches out from now until the second coming of Jesus, a second coming that we are preparing for and waiting for just as surely as we’re waiting for and preparing for Christmas.
Our tendency, of course, is to think about our religion as centered in the past, full of events that have all already worked themselves out. We hear today’s first reading from the prophet Micah, foretelling the messiah, and we say, well of course, that has already been fulfilled, it’s miraculous that something that was foretold in this way did come to pass, but we no longer feel the expectation and the promise that this passage must have brought to those who were waiting for their messiah for so long.
And today’s gospel, the famous story of the visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth, is also about expectation, and not just quiet expectation of the future, but openness to it, and excitement about it, and above all, willingness to participate in it. What strikes me about this story is that these two women, both expecting children under unusual and even stressful circumstances, and both of whom had plenty of good reasons to feel ambiguous or uncertain about their futures and their children, what’s amazing here is that they could talk with each other so eagerly and with such certainty that what they were doing was part of a larger plan still working itself out.
Christianity is still working itself out, a story that isn’t over. We have a future ahead of us that is hard to see. And yet all this talk during Advent about preparing a way for the Lord, about making the world ready for our Messiah to come, about justice for the poor, and about relief for the oppressed, that’s all about our future, not the past. We may yet see all these things happen, and if we have given up looking for them Advent is telling us to change our expectations.
So how do we change our attitude about the future? With only a week left in Advent? If the gospel is our example, then attitude change comes with participation. The future will make no sense to us as long as we are only watching it and documenting its failings, and not helping to place one brick on top of the other in all the work of preparation still to be done. Advent is our time to do what Mary and Elizabeth did, to see the possibilities for us and the world clearly and do whatever it takes to participate. Give something away, be reconciled with someone you’ve given up on, make a change you long ago thought was impossible. The future will come whether we do those things or not, but the world won’t be ready for the Messiah unless we do.