Sunday, December 22, 2019

Restore: #AdventWord Day 22


StarWars is a Christmas movie.

Die Hard, not so much. 

While the running plot of Lucas’ films does not hinge on the lectionary cycle of #Advent, the incarnation of hope through collective acts of resistance to an oppressive empire draws sure parallels. There is a deep longing to restore the galaxy that mobilizes the protagonists in a “God-with-Us” kind of way. I will spare you the abundance of illustrations that have been (over) leveraged by preachers for the last forty years. What I will do is continually allow for our droids to be placed in the nativity scene each Christmas. They remind me that as long as God’s people have the faithful imagination to share gospel stories in our generation, the Spirit will also generate the capacity to work towards God’s dreams to restore the world God made good a long time ago. These are the dreams fully made known in Jesus, who lived and loved around a Sea of Galilee far far away (give me just this one). May we live into this restorative plot line in our time and place, in this generation and for the sake of those yet to come.