parousia.

It is Advent. Adventus. Parousia. The Coming.

I trapse through the backyard of my home, hacking at briars and crunching through a season’s worth of dry copper leaves. My 16-year old stepson Justus and I are looking for a little cedar tree to use for our Jesse Tree. When I first mentioned doing a Jesse Tree for Advent, Justus looked at me with this cynical eye-roll he does. (I’m learning this eye-roll means that he probably likes the idea, he’s just not sure it’s worth sacrificing his cool dignity for it yet.) We leave our path and go into the uncharted woods, making trails and heading toward an old wooden barn. A good clearing causes me to wander into memories of my childhood, when a good clearing would captivate me until my hair and hands smelled like leaves and moss and trees and cold and I would run home at dusk, keeping the lights and steamy windows of my home in my sight as it got dark.

Now, I look ahead to my tall, dark stepson…skinny and athletic, quick-witted and inquisitive, he is the epitome of still waters running deep. Despite his initial reaction to an Advent tradition, he has asked me four times today about getting a little tree for our project. This is our first Christmas as a family; I know he’s never done anything like this before and I wonder what he’s thinking. And like the somewhat scary, somewhat exciting future of our Christmas together, the anticipation for the coming of the One who will save us comes daily like a drumbeat in the distance. 

He is coming. He. Is coming.

There is only one that can save us. Only one that can get us out of this mess we’re in. Only one. And he has to be a very particular kind of person. He has to be just like us. And he has to be just like God. He has to be us. And he has to be God. Us to be our representative, and God to be our advocate. That’s impossible. It’ll never happen. Up until now we’ve only know either us or God. And never in the same place, much less the same…person…? We are doomed. Our rescue is impossible.

“Sarah, look at this…” Justus and I arrive at the barn and peer inside. Besides the rustic, weathered old wood, the barn is home to some dust covered odds and ends. Things that make you wonder how they got here, and convince you that however they got here, they’ve been here for a while. We wonder whether a pile of scraps is an old blender, laugh at Justus’ dog Blondie as she digs a giant hole in the dirt floor, and rescue a flower box that may realize its potential back at the house.

Our rescue isn’t impossible. Such a God-man is coming. Not only does he exist, he is coming. It creeps up to a crescendo of perpetual excitement and in ecstasy bursting into the holy morning, glittering and humming with beauty and brilliance.

Justus and I come into a little grove of seedling pines and cedars. “You think this one will work? I don’t know what kind you need…” Justus calls from the other side of the grove. I walk through waist-high pines to a little cedar he’s holding up. “Yeah, I think that’ll do it.” “Be sure and clip it as close to the ground as you can,” Justus instructs me authoritatively. I smile and do my best, feeling a little sorry for the tree – it has no idea what it’s being selected for…

It now leans humbly in a glass of water on our kitchen counter top, recieving every night our childish but meaningful ornaments that symbolize the scripture reading of the day. It watches over our fragile, new Advent tradition. Every time I look at it or catch a delicate scent of cedar, a little spark inside me flames up. He is coming. He is coming. He is coming.

Advent is upon us.

And our hearts can only watch in wild wonder.

He so loved us that, for our sake,
He was made man in time,
although through him all times were made.
He was made man, who made man.
He was created of a mother whom he created.
He was carried by hands that he formed.
He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, he the Word,
without whom all human eloquence is mute.

-Augustine, sermon 188,2

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