While my entire Christian faith framework begins and ends with Easter, the bones, flesh, and soul of my personality identifies with Advent.

I feel Advent on the daily, even when it isn’t Advent, although the long stretches of darkness, the stars complementing it, the haunting hymns, the preparation for Christmas make me feel utterly synchronized with the season:

Quiet.

Waiting.

Wrestling between the desire to complete all the baking and present buying and decorating, and the competing invite to savor every one of the pieces of holiday prep instead.

Hygge.

Worry that time is flitting by.

Confidence that there is, actually, time and time to pause.

Gratitude for the dark, a calibration to it in fact.

A palpable tension between anxiety about reasons to repent and the reassurance in the promises to not be afraid.

Swirled together like finger paints on glossy paper, Advent is roughly 30 days of urgency and waiting, anxiety and peace, vulnerability and coziness: exactly a day in the life, even when it isn’t Advent.

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Recently, I’ve had a couple of occasions to actively reflect on Advent writ large, and specifically for each of the four Sunday’s texts.

One event was for a church in Wisconsin, via Zoom, on Christ the King Sunday, the pivot Sunday between the last and the first days of lectionary years: this year, we are moving from Luke to Matthew.

The group had asked me to reflect on the question, “What is the future of the Church?”

I didn’t like the question.

So I took liberty to change it.

I preferred, I said to the gathered group, this question: “What is the identity of the followers of Jesus?”

That prompt is far more in keeping with the season of Advent, with Matthew’s gospel’s agenda, and it’s driven less by capitalistic anxiety (I said we could imagine the first question being posed by some CEO at a huge board meeting) and more by curiosity and faithful confidence.

We already know the future, because we believe that Jesus is risen: life, not death, wins.

But that doesn’t mean that we skip about with baskets of flowers singing merry tunes on constant days of 72º and sunny, no: it means that we engage the moments of life, even the threatening, sorrowful, despairing, irritating ones, as people shaped by that promise.

Those unwelcome moments don’t magically disappear, but they are reframed with a measure of hope and defiance.

Early on in his gospel, Matthew tips his hand here, telling us that the angel of the Lord arrived to Joseph and said, “Do not be afraid.”

Let’s be honest: the guy had reasons to be afraid.

But as terrifying as that moment was for him, Mary pregnant and their names and lives at stake, there was greater reason to be assured: Mary would bear a son, one named Jesus, a name meaning ‘one who saves,’ who would also be called Emmanuel—God with us.

Stretching from his birth to his death and resurrection, the story of Jesus envelopes both our need for saving—which means, in Greek, health, healing, and wholeness—and our freedom to act according to that very salvation, placing our faith in God rather than our faith in fear.

That’s no schmarmy claim: that’s radical stuff right there is what it is: by definition, we Christians know the future and we act according to it.

As to the “Church,” well, curiously, only Matthew uses that word, which in Greek is ekklesia, which literally means those called out, those set apart.

It surfaces three times, namely in Matthew 16:18, when Jesus says that upon “this rock,” as in Petros, as in Peter (see what he did there?) he’d build his church, and in 18:17, when twice he uses the word to address what should happen when you have a beef with someone in the ekklesia.

It’s important to recall that Matthew was rooted in the Jewish tradition, and so had held fast to the synagogue and the centrality of the teachings of the Torah.

Now, though, post-destruction of the synagogue in 70 C.E., and post-resurrection, Matthew held fast to the ekklesia, a community that, even if in its nascent stages, clearly had developed enough for him to reference it and presume that others understood his reference point.

The temple, he said, was “forsaken and desolate,” (23:38), but in Jesus, he said, “something greater than the temple is here” (12:6).

For Matthew, that is, the commands of Jesus were central to the identity of the ekklesia: in fact, they are the parenthesis of his gospel, an embrace to all that Matthew felt compelled to convey.

The first directives that we receive from Jesus are found in the Beatitudes—not to undercut John the Baptist’s calls to repent, of course, holy harangues which precede Jesus’ words—and the last are these: baptize and teach all that Jesus had commanded.

In between we have perhaps the most shocking description of the commandments of Jesus when we stumble on Matthew 25, where the sheep and the goats—nations, not individuals mind you, but nations—are separated, not on the basis of whether someone has “accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior,” and not if they are a member of this denomination or that one, or this political party or that one, but whether they fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, tended the sick and the imprisoned.

You do that, and you center your identity on the commandments of Jesus, and you act as the called-out ones.

If you are a member of the ekklesia, that is, you align yourself with the commandments of Jesus, and you participate in the promise and the in-breaking of the reign of God.

And right here you have why, especially in Advent, and perhaps especially in Advent of Year A, I prefer transposing the question, “What is the future of the Church” to “What is the identity of a follower of Jesus?”

One answer, it seems to me, is make like Advent, and not just in Advent.

Stay in the Quiet.

Wait.

Wrestle.

Find the cozy.

Note the reasons to be afraid.

Defy them.

Repent.

Be called out.

Call others in.

Welcome to Advent.

Welcome to the way of the ekklesia.

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