Advent Attitude 1: Uninhibited Selflessness
Did you survive Black Friday? I hope so. Come with me now into a much safer and more loving space—Advent.
Advent is the antithesis of Black Friday.
Black Friday is all about scarcity, limited opportunities, and fear of missing out. It is about chaos and frenzy. Everything about Black Friday screams “ME!!!”
Advent, on the other hand, offers the promise of abundance and hope. It is about calm and peace. It is about recognizing that it is, in fact, not about me. Advent celebrates the dawn of an era—the coming of Jesus—marked by uninhibited selflessness: a new kind of love found in Jesus Christ.
The uninhibited love that flows in the Kingdom of God as a result of the coming of Christ is not just a fleeting warm fuzzy feeling. It is an ongoing unselfish concern for the good of others. In fact, the better word here is charity, which is the kind of love that God shows—a totally selfless love. This kind of love involves sacrifice because it means putting our own needs on the back burner. The saints are legendary for their heroic acts of sacrifice, many of them quite dramatic. In less dramatic but no less heroic ways, ordinary people practice this kind of love day in and day out—parents setting aside their own needs to care for the needs of their children, spouses setting aside their own needs to care for one another, older siblings setting
aside their own needs to tend to the needs of younger siblings, workers setting aside their own needs to tend to the needs of a customer or co-worker, and so on.
Above all things, this attitude of selflessness is the most noticeable attitude of Kingdom-dwellers who are basking in the glow of the ultimate act of selflessness—God giving us his own Son, Emmanuel—God-with-us. So much so that Tertullian, a second-century Church father, reported that the Romans often commented when observing Christians, “See how they love one another.” This doesn’t mean that the early Christians “love-bombed” one another with hugs and expressions of affection (although such displays did occur), but rather were known to consistently and without inhibition act, not in their own interests, but in the interests of others.
The only thing that Black Friday and Advent have in common is that they both emphasize saving—the former is about saving money, while the latter is about Jesus saving us! It is the presence of Emmanuel—God-with-us—and the overflowing abundant grace that have busted down the door of sin that have ushered in an era of unbridled selflessness to effectively save us from ourselves.
—Joe Paprocki, based on Under the Influence of Jesus
|
