Advent 3: Death as the Beginning

Hope - Love - Joy - Peace. 

We celebrate life in our many festivities, and in this season new birth, the Holy One incarnate among us. Life brings hope, we suppose, and we hold fervently, ecstatically to the things we think bring us life. Yet the thought of Christmas, of Christ coming, inevitably leads the mind to the end of the story, or rather the climax that is the beginning of our story as believers: His death on the cross. "Rejoice", the angels said, but Simeon prophesied to Mary, "a sword will pierce your own soul." How could this be? How could God's promise--the promise of life that lasts forever--end with the death of the very chosen one, our Messiah?

As paradoxical as it seems, death can be the only way to life. Death of your own petty dreams and selfish desires. Think of a field of weeds, choking the harvest. The weeds must die in order for the good seed to bear fruit. We often hold so tightly to the dead end ways that we have convinced ourselves will bring us the very thing we long for and He, in His mercy, knows that we must allow Him to wrench them out of our lives--through death--in order that we can live unto Him and the surpassingly great life that He offers. Consider relationships in which we fail time and again because we have habits or are choosing temporary satisfaction instead of love that lasts. We must die to the immediacy that our world loudly proclaims to grasp profound intimacy that remains.

This year presented an opportunity to experience a shaking of things that could seem to be the way to life but in reality they only bring death because they represent our grasping for life on our own terms. He can use the upheaval of a world in turmoil uniquely in each of our lives to reveal areas in which we are demanding life on our own terms, and He can bring death into them if we have the eyes to see how He is coming in this year. It's our choice, after all. We can shake our fist and zombie-like run back to the same devices, gnashing our teeth and waiting for life to get back to "normal". Or we can embrace death; let Him reveal life His way and begin again, renewed in hope for the joyful abundant life He offers. Look closely at the places you felt death the most and ask Him how you can see the possibility of a life. Ask how you can be a life-bearer in that. He is coming. He offers a new beginning.

I close with the ending of a book I love by CS Lewis that captures the ultimate idea--that death is only the beginning for those of us who have tasted life eternal:

"'...and all of you are--as you used to call it in the Shadowlands--dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.' [...] but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."