By Patrick Schmadeke
Evangelization in the World Today
It’s time to say goodbye to fall decor. We’ll trade out the garland of autumn leaves for garland of spruce, miniature ceramic pumpkins for miniature ceramic evergreen trees, ornamental gourds for pinecones and red berries, scents of pumpkins spice for pine. The burnt orange table cloth will have to go, but the white runner can stay — it will pair nicely with a deep forest green. As the oranges, reds, and browns of fall become the reds, greens, and whites of Christmas, the Advent wreath will be our occasion of liturgical-season-sobriety. This is good. Advent is a season worth paying close attention to.
I have an Advent discipline in mind. I think it’s worth getting away from the practice of labeling the four candles of the Advent wreath as hope, love, joy, and peace. Children’s coloring sheets, parish bulletins, religious education materials, and the like will often include this clear and concise labeling. But I worry the labels are closer to a Hallmark version of Advent than the real thing. I don’t want to say that Advent is absent of hope, love, joy, and peace. Rather, my concern is that these four themes are not the whole story of Advent.
Neither the Sunday Gospel readings nor the collects for the Mass give credence to this four-fold thematization of Advent. The theme of joy for the third Sunday, Gaudete Sunday, has legs to stand on. As a sequence of four, however, they give off an air of lightness and sweet serenity that doesn’t fully capture the tenor of Advent.
There is an arc to the Advent season. From Sunday to Sunday, “each Gospel reading has a distinctive theme: the Lord’s coming at the end of time (First Sunday of Advent), John the Baptist (Second and Third Sundays), and the events that prepared immediately for the Lord’s birth (Fourth Sunday)” (Introduction to the Lectionary, 1981). The Directory for Popular Piety (2001) and the Homiletic Directory (2015) further unpack our understanding.
Advent brings into relief a three-fold presence of Christ — the one who was, who is, and who is yet to come. In this three-fold presence, our memory, our hope, and the awareness of Christ present with us now intertwines into a single experience. This experience becomes a springboard for evangelization as we embody the good news in day-to-day living. Advent trains us so our evangelization becomes an experience of the incarnation.
Jesus says we don’t know the day the Lord will come (1st Sunday), so we embody the good news now. John the Baptist calls his audience to conversion (2nd Sunday), so we embody the good news now. Jesus brings good news to the marginalized (3rd Sunday), so we embody the good news now. The angel tells Joseph his son will be named Emmanuel, which means “God is with us” (4th Sunday), so we embody the good news now. Each of these can be transformed into a question to live each week by:
Week 1: am I ready for the Lord’s coming at the end of time, which could be tomorrow?
Week 2: is my whole self — heart, hands, mind — converted to Christ?
Week 3: have I been the good news to the marginalized?
Week 4: do I see God in my midst? Am I embodying the love of Jesus to those in my midst?
The urgency of these Advent-themed questions should not simply provoke us to evangelize harder. We don’t just take what we already do and turn up the dial. Rather, Advent sets us back on our heels, and in that moment of imbalance, draws us forward out of ourselves. It purges our false images of God, purifies our understanding of mission, clarifies the roles of hope, love, joy, and peace in the Christian life, and transforms us evermore into people recognizable as children of God. What that purgative process looks like is a different journey for everyone. What I do know is that if we end Advent in the same way we started it, then we weren’t doing it right. Advent is upon us. Be awake. Be ready. Go.
(Patrick Schmadeke is director of evangelization for the Diocese of Davenport.)
