The self we'd rather not see

Advent, unworthiness, and grace

I love Advent, but maybe not for the reasons you think. In my evangelical world, Advent is often a sort of a soft opening for Christmas, where we decorate the sanctuary and begin to slowly mix in Christmas songs. Though I’m a sucker for all things Christmas, that’s not why I love it.

I love it because I need a season of focused preparation. Twice a year (in Advent and Lent), the church calendar invites me to carefully consider my life: am I really what I say I am? When I preach, am I speaking something that I really know, or am I speaking out of a place of performance, a place of emptiness? Am I aware that my true self rests in God, so aware that I can live without stressing about what others think of me? Lent invites me to look at these questions too, but Advent invites me to look at them in the soft glow of an approaching lantern-lit manger, instead of the at-times blinding splendor of the cross and resurrection. I need Advent now.

Advent fills me with a sense of unworthiness—not self-hatred, but an awareness that I have miles to go. When I really look at myself, I see tangled webs of sinful behaviors and motivations, ways in which my own actions and the actions of others leave me feeling stuck. I see patterns of activities that have become such deep ruts that I cannot imagine life being different; some of these ruts are entirely my own doing, but often they have been set for me by my culture, my nation, and even my family and my churches. I need Jesus to heal my imagination to help me see that life can be different. Zooming out, we all are tangled webs like this, and further, we’re all tangled together. Sin is not merely the wrong choice here and there. Sin is a way of life. It impacts people and systems, cultures and nations, sects and governments. Sin overwhelms us and when we dare to really look at it, we see clearly just how much we need to be saved.

In Luke 7, a Roman centurion yearns for a beloved slave to be healed. Instead of asking Jesus to come to his house, he asks that Jesus simply speak a word: “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. But only speak the word….” Jesus commends the Roman centurion and notes how odd it is that a Roman centurion—a member of an occupying force that oppresses God’s chosen people—can understand how unworthy he is, while Jesus’s own people see him as a troublemaker. How can this be?

Perhaps because those of us who are religious are consumed with the project of being right. The Jewish people had a deep and commendable desire to honor God and to live into their identity as God’s chosen people. There was some disagreement among the Jews about how this should be done, and everyone got very attached to their own strategy—so attached, in fact, that they lost the ability to see the ways that their strategy may not be right. When Jesus pointed out some flaws in their strategy, they defended their strategy instead of listening to Jesus—God in the flesh.

We are living in a moment like this today. We too are attached to our strategies of following God—so attached, in fact, that any suggestion of being wrong sends us spiraling into anger or despair. If someone comes along and asks us a hard question that unsettles us, we would prefer to silence them than to consider whether or not we might be wrong. What if our way of following God has made us hyper-aware of some sins while allowing other sins to creep in and make us miss the point completely? What if we have been wrong about how to follow Jesus in America today? What if we have been wrong about Donald Trump? About sexuality and gender? About abortion? Those questions are simply too emotionally difficult to face, so we would rather crucify the outsider who asks instead of consider whether they may be right.

Advent invites us out of this by gently reminding us of who we really are—mere humans in desperate need of a Savior. We are unworthy. And not in a performative way, where we talk about how we’re all sinners but deep inside think that we’ve got all the answers. No, we are unworthy, full stop. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have convictions—far from it! When we are convicted of our unworthiness, we know our desperate need for Jesus and so we want to share Him with others. And so we speak with urgency because we want others to find Jesus. But we also listen with urgency because we desperately want God’s light to shine in the darkness of our lives, even if we see something we wish we didn’t see, even if it means that we see something else that needs to be rooted out. Only when we see ourselves as we are, and allow God’s Spirit to do His healing work, can we begin to know the true life that God has for us.