By Marshall Scott
Before I moved to the heart of America, I worked for a number of years in Detroit. I lived in a suburb and drove downtown to the hospital.
Commuting in Detroit was a bit of a challenge. The normal commuting speed was somewhere around 70 miles an hour. There’s nothing quite like flying down the highway at that speed bumper to bumper.
So, one day I’m on my way to the hospital, and I see this bumper sticker: “In the event of the rapture this car will be unmanned.” My reaction was, “Well, this is a heck of a note. If the rapture comes and I’m not taken, not only will I have the frustration of being left behind, but I’ll be dodging all those driverless cars!”
Of course, I was reflecting on the all-American theological concept of the Rapture. It is a well-known and much popularized understanding of some of the events related to the coming of the Kingdom of God in all its fullness. It has not been a teaching of the Episcopal Church or other churches of the Anglican Communion, because its Scriptural roots are arguable, and it’s not spoken of by the early Church Fathers. (That’s not to say that there aren’t some Episcopalians who believe it; but then there’s hardly a perspective in the Christian tradition that you can’t find some Episcopalian believing.)
Which is not to say that we don’t believe that the Kingdom is coming. We do believe that Christ will bring in the Kingdom in all its glory. We wrestle with some of the Scriptural references and descriptions – are they literal or metaphorical? Do they refer to events in history or in the future? – but we do trust in the promise of the Kingdom. Jesus said it would happen, and so we trust that something will happen.
Indeed, it is the focus of these first weeks of Advent. In its way it seems an odd time in the church’s year. We spent the last weeks of the last year preparing for the coming of the Kingdom, culminating in the last Sunday of the year. We speak of it as the Feast of Christ the King, but it’s also the Feast of Christ’s Kingdom. And then with the first Sunday of Advent, suddenly we’re speaking again of expectation rather than consummation.
But, expectation is the nature of things. We trust that the Kingdom is coming, but we can’t know the day or the hour. As Jesus said, “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” Not that we haven’t tried over the centuries. Many times someone has tried to discern, to predict, when Christ would return and the Kingdom would come. It’s just that it isn’t ours to figure out.
And so we live in expectation. One Sunday we celebrate what we await, and the next Sunday we return to waiting.
And we wait in hope. Having waited in hope for the end, we wait again in hope for the beginning. For the Kingdom we await, the Kingdom we have so recently celebrated, has its foundation in the birth of a child. Its boundaries are set in creation – indeed, they encompass creation. Its footings are dug in the proclamations of the prophets. But the anchor for the Kingdom, the chief corner stone, comes to us in the birth of a child. This brings a change to our waiting. We have been waiting for the Kingdom in its fullness, that which we have yet to see. Now we wait for the Kingdom in its foundation, for the beginning that we have seen and known and touched.
So, as the church year begins anew, we return to waiting, and continue to wait in hope. And in the best sense of things, we return to our foundations, awaiting the foundation of the Kingdom.
This is the movement of Advent. It can seem at first an odd season – starting in the waiting that ended with the King in glory, and ending in the excitement of the celebration of the King newborn. In fact it is a season all about the Kingdom; for as the season begins we look forward to our place in it, and as it ends we hail him in whom we are citizens of it.
The Rev. Marshall Scott is a chaplain in the Saint Luke’s Health System, a ministry of the Diocese of West Missouri. A past president of the Assembly of Episcopal Healthcare Chaplains, and an associate of the Order of the Holy Cross, he keeps the blog Episcopal Chaplain at the Bedside.