Christmas is coming. As I sit in a booth at Panera, the old Christmas rhyme “Christmas is coming “is churning in my head: “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please put a penny in the old man’s hat…”. This season is a time of goodwill, family, and feasting. The church calls this season Advent. In Christian theology, the word Advent means “the coming.” It is the time in which we prepare our hearts and minds for Christmas, the day we celebrate the birth of Christ and the coming of the Messiah. This is a season of faith.
Right now battles lines are being drawn (again) around right thinking. Some have become so preoccupied defending “truth” and “belief” that they have lost sight of what the essence of faith is. Just spend a few minutes on Facebook or Twitter if you don’t believe me . Truth and belief are necessary; however, it is easy to reduce our belief in God to explaining God and completely miss the relationship defined as faith. Are we so arrogant that we think we have God all figured out? Have we made God into a set of bullet points or a technical set of assumptions that can be dissected and debated? God himself told us we could never truly understand his ways (see the book of Job).
Some have suggested that the word “belief” in the Bible is better understood as “trust” rather than intellectual thought or assumptions. We trust in a person, not a religious system. That is what faith is: trust. The working definition of faith is “complete trust or confidence in something or someone.” Trust feels more relational than all the other words we use to describe our pondering about God.
Advent, then, is a season of trust. I trust in the incarnation that Jesus came and lived among us. I trust that Jesus came because God is for me and not against me. I trust that God has my best intentions in mind even when I don’t understand them. In the Bible, the Pharisees missed this because they were concerned only with the details of the law and not with the person to whom the law pointed. They didn’t trust. Over the past couple of months, I have spent time with people who have walked through or are currently walking through terrible trials and suffering. In the midst of this, I have seen people who live with trust that is not based on understanding and logic, but on faith. Many of the people I have spoken with are not asking “why,” but are saying, in the midst of their pain, “God, I trust you, much like Job said, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him…’ “(Job 13:15 KJV).
As we celebrate Advent, we don’t celebrate dogma or doctrine. We celebrate the coming of Jesus, the Messiah who asks us to trust in him even when we don’t fully understand his ways.
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