It took me decades and far too many mistakes to understand that love, in essence, is a promise. I mean love in the Biblical sense. There are other versions out there, of course. Oftentimes I hear people use the word, when really they mean something closer to enjoyment or infatuation, or more recently people have conflated love with agreement (and hatred with disagreement). If love were truly any of these things, then focusing on love wouldn’t make any sense in the midst of advent, when we are meant as a Church to be learning what it means to wait and long for the Lord “like watchmen for the morning.”
Love in its true form, though, is a promise to know, to forgive, and to serve another, and we wait, we long, to know the fullness of that promise. Love belongs in advent because we have seen the fullness of God’s love in Christ, but it is still being fulfilled each day in each of our lives through the daily ministrations of the Holy Spirit, like a husband who vows to love his wife on the first day and loves her until his end. We will know the fullness of his love only in the end, because until then his mercies and our need for forgiveness and help will be new every morning.
For humanity, love is a mystery. Because the future is not given to us, we can have no idea when we choose to love someone—in our marriage vows, in our membership covenants, child dedications, and baptisms—what shape our love will need to take. My wife and I were married now thirteen years ago. She had no idea what was coming, nor did I. She knew nothing of all the ways I would change over these past thirteen years, of all the things for which I would need forgiveness, of the help I would need. All we knew was we wanted to love each other the way we’d experienced Christ loving us. We love in ignorance, and the more I know of love in Christ, the more I believe that ignorance to be a mercy.
I doubt any of us would be able to love the way God does in his omniscience. The Lord knew what it would mean to love each and every human before he crafted us. Knowing our sin to the full, knowing every person we would hurt, every bit of damage we would do, he loved us before the foundation of the world.
Tomorrow, Christ comes to each of us just as really as he came at the first advent. In him, you are forgiven, you are welcomed, you are loved. May his love overflow in your life, into the lives of the people around you so that we and our communities are changed in every way we most desperately need to be changed. Amen, come, Lord Jesus.
