Riders are reminded to pay attention to where they are standing and what their feet are doing. Everyone is reminded that the solid platform on which they are standing will remain behind, and the floor onto which they will step will be moving away. From where you are to where you are going - there is a gap....and it is very easy to get tripped up in the gap.
As children of God, we stand in a gap as well, although probably not the one we would describe. Our liturgical calendar places us in Advent, and we always open the season with a vision of the end of chronological time and the birth of the fullness of time in God's reign. Outrageous things happen; St. Mark pictures the stars falling and the moon turned to blood.
Yet as the season of Advent moves along, we move closer and closer to the birth of the child Jesus. First John the Baptist points to Christ's coming and finally by the end of December we have once again found the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. I think that we often feel a gap between what we experience and the coming reign of Jesus, and that gap is very good at tripping us up as we go about our day to day lives. A small dose of 24 hour cycle news and you would be convinced that the sky is falling and so are the stars and everything else. In fact, some days the end of all this mayhem seems preferable to another day of slogging our way through it all.
So we look with longing to December 25th which is the Church's celebration of the birth of the Christ. We want to sing the familiar carols and see the sanctuary beautifully decorated. We want soft candles and a (rarely achieved) time of peace where we can contemplate the coming child. Lying in that manger are our hopes and prayers, our intercessions and tears.
Our life is lived not in the gap between the reality of this world and the softness of Jesus, but rather between the birth 2000+ years ago and the fulfillment of God's promises in the end of time and the beginning of Christ's reign. We live between the incarnation of God's desire for all of creation in the person of Jesus and 'the end of all we know' that is coming. We live in the gap, and if we don't pay attention, the gap will trip us up.
We might think we are to simply wait patiently for Christ's coming. We might think that God's future will pull into the station just like the next subway car and all we will have to do is step on board. We might think that we are no more than passengers with no real work to do. I think not.
In our baptism we were joined to the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, and in that joining we take up the ministry and mission of Jesus - to bring into reality the 'world that is to come'. We are to bind up the brokenhearted, release the captives, and raise people up out of ashes. There is work for us to do as Jesus' world and God's vision unfold in the here and now.
Faith in a crucified and risen Jesus is not about leaping over the reality in which we live. Faith in the crucified and risen Jesus is about living in the reality knowing that the victory belongs to God. We are preparing others for the future as the future continues to come towards us.
Occasionally this looks like soft candles and beautiful decorations. Occasionally it entails singing Silent Night and setting up a miniature creche. Most of the time, it looks like washing the feet of others. Therein lies the gap.
As we count down to the child's birth once again, I want to remind you to 'mind the gap' for that is where our ministry lies.
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