Advent begins and so we prepare… to prepare. Based on our Gospel today, I’d say: hold onto your hats, buckle up your seatbelts, it’s gonna be one heck of a ride. Jesus says, and I quote: 

… there will be signs

… nations will be in dismay

… the seas will roar

… people will die from fright

… the heavens will be shaken

… that he will come down from the sky in a cloud…

… and be filled with power and great glory

The bottom line is that “redemption is at hand.” End quote.

Christ is coming and that is one Big Bang.

But if it only was that simple. 

Because I myself would love to see the great sign. When I am down, in need, suffering, wondering, curious, furious, confused, doubting like Thomas, frightened like Peter, and even betraying like Judas, I look up to the heavens, say alleluia, and pray: “Dear Lord, show me a sign. And while you’re at it, please make it a good one. One that is conclusive and which leaves no room for questions. Inquiring minds want to know. Yes, Lord… show me a sign.”

If it only was that simple.

The early warning system for his actual arrival was a weird dude who lived out in the wilderness eating bugs and proclaiming that we must repent.

Christ came not in an explosion of fire and descending from clouds, but rather in the quiet shadows of night, in obscurity, seen only by a very few.

For most of his life, he grew up quite uneventfully. We know little to nothing about these years and that makes it hard for us to imagine what they must have been like.

And when the time came to summon his dream team, he didn’t go to Tom Brady, Simone Biles, and Paul McCartney… he went to the bench warmers, the losers, and the nobodies.

Though he did muster up a few show-of-force miracles, like transfiguring into the visual shock and awe Being they had expected from day one, or feeding a gigantic horde with just a few fishes and loaves, most of what he did was muffled, one on one, out of the spotlight. And usually when he did something like that, he followed up with instructions for them to tell no one else about it.

And as he climbed – heavy, wooden cross upon his back – willingly upwards toward his own undoing, people shuffled about on a crowded thoroughfare, going about their business, probably trading goods for food, haggling over prices, just doing their thing without any sense of what was taking place right there next to them. They did not notice.

There is a strange and surprising subtlety to salvation.

What if the signs that you and I seek come in the whispers, from the edges, inside darkened places? What if there is a strange and surprising subtlety… to all of it?

How then are we to prepare for… that?

Perhaps the best way to encounter the season of Advent, the truest and most consistent way to get ready… is to follow those whispers, looking toward the edges, resting patiently within dark places.

Where might salvation be happening near you? In your life? Right there, but unseen, hardly felt, mostly ignored? Maybe it comes in like a quiet stranger. Or maybe it has been there all along in the form of a neighbor, a family member, a broken promise, an insult or hurt, a challenge, that thing you’ve been putting off, the person who needs you, the fractured relationship, the secret you buried deep down in the dirt, that thing you’ve been meaning to improve or stop doing altogether, forgivenesses sought… or withheld.

What if salvation isn’t in the clouds or upon crashing seas? What if getting ready for salvation can be discovered within the strange and surprising subtleties of everyday life?

I look up to the heavens, say alleluia, and pray…

“Loving Father… help us to prepare for the coming of your son, not by waiting for you to rock our lives to the core, or expecting our shoulders to be grabbed and shaken until we finally get it and see it.

“Help us instead to find your son in a stable being held by his mom or planing the edges of a table with Joseph, walking by his side on a dusty and abandoned path, and by truly seeing his great sacrifice for us on that hill in Jerusalem. 

Advent is here. Help us, Lord Jesus, to find you in the quiet.”