The Church Pregnant (Penitential Advent 1 of 2)

Mary Great with Child
St. Mary's, W Jefferson, NC

To the woman he said, many are the pangs, many are the throes I will give thee to endure; with pangs thou shalt give birth to children.
                                                                                    -Genesis 3:16b

We speak of Advent as a time of hope, and that is a true statement... but we must also speak of Advent as a time of pangs and throes that we must endure. When we seek to strip the penitential nature out of advent what we are in fact doing is abandoning the pregnant Mary to the desert. We want to gain the hope her trials have bought us but not share the cost of the act that brought that hope.

As a church we are the bearers of Christ in the world. We are the church pregnant with the expectation of Christ's coming again. That means to be church we should be in the midst of pangs and throes that we must endure. That means as individual christians we should be in the midst of enduring pangs and throes as we live lives in proclamation of Christ Crucified. These pangs and throes are at many points indeed our own, but we are equally called to enter into the pangs and throes of others. To be Christian is to be both the pregnant and also the supportive spouse to those around us. We are each others midwives.

For too many decades we have sought to shunt the pangs and throes out of church, this has been especially true in the transitions we have made around Advent, when the realities of such should be most pressing. We have erred toward making the church a place where we can bring and recognize our hope only but not our tribulations. We have erred in making the church a place where the tribulations of the world are given a momentary relief but not borne and brought to fulfillment in Christ. In our hopes to create a space of comfort for all we have failed to create a place that requires the comfortable to enter into the discomfort of others.

We have become, to readily the spouse that does not endure the pangs and throes of childbearing and childbirth. We too often refuse to be midwives for the pangs and throes of those around us... to aid in the bearing of them so that we may truly enter into the Hope of Christ. It is only by entering into these realities, by making them our own, that we can become the Church Pregnant and truly bear the Hope to the world. This is why we must live into the penitence of Advent because pangs and throes are being endured in our midst and in our lives and only by bearing them with each other can we truly find the Hope inherent to the season.