Advent Series Year C Roadmap: A Righteous Branch

Year C 2024-2025 Seeds and Ways Focus and Roadmap: Embodied Jubilee: Justice, Righteousness, and Redemption

In the biblical narrative, justice and righteousness were often encapsulated in the same word. In fact, when reading the text, when encountering the word “righteousness”, it would be entirely appropriate to substitute the word “justice.” In Year C, with an emphasis on the Gospel according to Luke, the emphasis will be on reclaiming justice as an essential element of the reign and realm of God and both a hope and sign of the kindom of God manifested on earth. Luke’s account gives particular attention and significant emphasis on the marginalized, oppressed, and silenced in society. Individual righteousness, a derivative or consequence of following the way of justice, will be treated as such.

Jubilee, represented by the settling of all debts, will be claimed as the ultimate destination of the collective and communal faith journey. The call to discipleship throughout this liturgical year will be to participate in embodied jubilee. The Suggested Congregational Response to the Reflection will point to and offer a path to engage with this call.

Finally, no treatment of justice and jubilee would be complete without a focus on the redemptive acts of the Holy One and God’s disciples in human history. That is good news. Let’s proclaim it!

Advent Series: A Righteous Branch

Advent really occupies two seasons: remembrance of the Incarnation and birth of Jesus as well as anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ. Advent holds the “already” and the “not yet.” Advent affirms that the work of the Messiah is done and the work of realizing the reign of God on earth remains incomplete. When we pray, echoing the words Jesus modeled, “your kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven,” we not only point to a future hope, we remember the Christological reality that Jesus embodied the vision of that prayer in their body.

“Jesus is the kingdom of God. In his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus is the quintessential demonstration of the rule of God in the form of self-giving love, and he is the true covenant partner, embodying active human faithfulness unto death. His life is the concrete embodiment of divine and human fellowship marked by Jubilee justice, which is the compassionate justice and mercy of which Micah 6:8 speaks. In him, God has entered the cosmos in a definitive fashion, overthrowing the politics of death that stands behind the ways of much of our world. His resurrection, among other things, is a vindication of his way of life, a way of life that death cannot master.” — Christian T. Collins Winn, Jesus, Jubilee, and the Politics of God’s Reign

Advent calls our attention away from resurrection to incarnation. The Word becomes flesh. Love has skin and bones. Hope moves like oxygen coursing through arteries and veins to reach from and through the heart. Peace breaths in and out while joy functions like muscle, getting stronger the more we exercise it. Advent is ready to give birth to the kindom of God enfleshed, alive, and ready to be nurtured into maturity.

During the four Sundays of Advent, we receive inspiration from the prophet Jeremiah and turn to the New Testament epistles for our focus texts.

“In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” Jeremiah 33:15 NRSVue

December 1: 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 | “‘For All the Joy”
December 8: Philippians 1:3-11 | “Praying with Joy”
December 15: Philippians 4:4-7 | “Again…Rejoice”
December 22: Hebrews 10:5-10 | “Abolish to Establish”

“But love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to stretch out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if that means hours, days, weeks of disappointment and sadness.
The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us. And to save us.”
― Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept