What do we anticipate during Advent? The coming of Jesus? He already came, and he comes to us each day in a myriad of ways. Do we, then, await the second coming of Jesus? Such a day is excessively anticipated and leads to many false paths. No, what we await is what Jesus came to proclaim in word and in deed, what he taught us to pray for - the kingdom of God.
We have imagined the kingdom wrongly, thinking it to be a worldly political empire like other kingdoms governed by violence and lies. This kingdom we await is the one that John and Jesus both preached: repent, accept the mercy of God, and extend mercy and love to others. The kingdom comes when we do those three things. It comes to us within our hearts, and it becomes an incarnate reality in the lives of others when we commit to a life of love and mercy.
This message is as rejected in our time as it was in the time of John and Jesus. In their day there was a certain honesty about putting them to death in order to show their displeasure at the message. In our day, we invent vicarious religions that pretend to follow Jesus but are not about love and mercy for all. Advent is our time to repent of this tendency, to accept God's mercy, and extend mercy and love to all in the world.
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