Advent, the Ninth Month
The Church has long celebrated December 25 as the birth of Jesus and has just as long identified March 25, precisely nine months earlier, as the day on which he was conceived—the day that the angel Gabriel announced this news to Mary (Luke 1:31). This year, more than any other, as we make our strange way forward through “The Covid” into our celebration of Advent, we may find inspiration by holding both of these dates in our hearts and minds.
Two disclaimers: Human pregnancies are way more personal and organic than any calendar can capture! And the dates identified by the Church to celebrate the Nativity of Our Lord and the Annunciation are best understood as liturgical history.
Why hold a date in March in our hearts and minds as we plan for Advent and Christmas? Because March was when the world changed for all of us. My calendar has a note on March 15, “Church cancelled across our synod b/c of Covid-19.” The next Sunday reads, “Church cancelled again,” as though it were something of a surprise that the global pandemic had not been resolved within a week!
Mary’s world changed, too, on the day it was announced to her that she would conceive and bear a child and name him Jesus. Her situation was not resolved within a week! But as pregnancies tend to go, her new reality grew and developed within her. It began to change who she was. It changed her relationships with others. It took on a life of its own to which she had to relate in constantly changing ways. Her experience on any given day could not predict what would come next, but on nearly every day of her pregnancy she had to ask, “Who am I now? Who am I becoming?”
Our celebration of Advent tends to focus our liturgical attention on the pending birth of Jesus more than Mary’s experience of a roughly nine-month pregnancy. Like the happy work of decorating the new baby’s room or like having a baby shower with close friends, Advent normally feels like getting ready for Christmas.
But this year, our significantly changed life experience may compel us to focus our Advent attention on what the last eight or nine months have been like for us and to answer for ourselves, “How have we been changed along the way? How are we being changed? Who are we now? And who will we be when the situation we are currently in does resolve in something like a delivery, like the birth of a new way of life for us?”
It is not necessarily Christian work to reflect on our lives and to strive for clarity of identity; it is human work to do this. Luke tells us that Mary “pondered all these things in her heart,” (Luke 2:19) even “treasured” them (Luke 2:51). What makes Advent Christian work is to connect the human work of narrating our reality and striving to clarify our identity to the Gospel proclamation of what we believe God is doing through Christ our Lord in and through the experiences we encounter.
And here is where the Church’s liturgical history can help us. While not precisely the spring and winter equinoxes, March 25 and December 25 intend to connect what we believe God is doing through Christ our Lord with the natural world’s cycle of life. In the northern hemisphere, the spring equinox marks the restoration of life after winter. The winter equinox marks the end of the advance of darkness and the return of ever-increasing daylight. The Church declares that fully within our experience of darkness and death, God is working through Christ our Lord to bring life and hope and light.
This Advent, let us ponder and treasure what redemptive work of Christ is being born out of our life-changing experiences over the last nine months.
Bishop Kurt F. Kusserow
Southwestern Pennsylvania Synod Bishop
kurt.kusserow@swpasynod.org | 412-367-8222