Advent
is the annual season of expectation, of attending to making ourselves ready for
the Lord’s return, as we prepare to celebrate his first coming long ago. Each
year, it has been my practice to count the days, with an Advent reflection.
This year, I am going back to the very start, to contemplate what it means to
declare that God is King of the Universe in the face of the upheavals of the
world we live in. This was the defining question for God’s ancient people
carried off into exile in Babylon—that is to say, how they wrestled with this
question, and the answers they came up with, literally defined them as a people.
Their answer was to shape a Great Story, a life-giving, hope-sustaining, future-imagining
myth, from an oral tradition handed down to them over centuries. In their
exile, and its aftermath, they wrote much of the Hebrew Bible, or Christian Old
Testament, as we know it. I shall be working with Robert Alter’s translation, The
Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary.
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