Wisdom from On High

Welcome to Advent, the first season of a new church year! If you’re surprised that we’re already in Advent at Peace, it’s because we’re coloring outside the lines a little. Most congregations in the ELCA and other mainline denominations will remain in the Time after Pentecost until November 30^th, then observe a traditional four-week Advent.

There is precedent for our rebellious expansion of my favorite liturgical season. Peace is part of a small but mighty movement within the church to extend Advent from four to seven weeks. Why, you might ask? There are several reasons. First of all, the season of Advent was originally closer to seven weeks. It wasn’t until the seventh century that a four-week Advent was even proposed, and that practice wasn’t widely adopted in the western church until the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.

What’s more, as a season of preparation for a major celebration on the church calendar, a seven-week Advent more closely mirrors the season of Lent. That is to say, the longer lead-up to Christmas gives us more time to lean into spiritual practices that prepare our hearts for the Nativity of Our Lord– practices like stillness, contemplation, expectancy.

Which relates to the last and most compelling reason to back Advent up earlier into November. If we don’t observe it separately, this season risks getting lost amid the general festivity of the holidays. One of the organizers of the movement for a longer Advent puts it this way: “Against [the holiday store displays and media barrage] the Church has little defense…. What has become the global culture of Christmas effectively eclipses the season of Advent,” obscuring the “primary focus” of this time, “namely, the manifestation of God’s reign.”[1] Advent isn’t meant to simply blend in with the holiday hustle and bustle. On the contrary, in Advent we zoom out from Christmas to bear witness to all the ways God is Emmanuel, God with us, over the long arc of history.

As a bonus for those of us who love to sing Holden Evening Prayer on Wednesday evenings, and those who would like to mine our hymnal’s treasure trove of Advent resources more deeply, a seven-week Advent gives us more time to do that. So there’s that, too!

It’s important to note that we won’t change the Bible readings these next few weeks. The scriptures assigned in November already take on a more expansive, even cosmic, tone, which is fitting for Advent. The key word to know here is eschatology, or a focus on the end of all things. What is the grand story of God’s relationship to the world God loves? What is finally in store for all of us? How will history come to completion? These are the eschatological questions the season of Advent poses.

And what better place to begin on the First Sunday of Advent than today’s Gospel from Luke. How does resurrection even work? That skepticism is at the heart of the riddle presented to Jesus by a group of his detractors. The Sadducees are elite religious scholars who accept the authority only of the written Torah, or the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. And since the Sadducess find nothing therein to support a theology of resurrection, they dismiss it. If six brothers marry their brother’s widow in succession, they ask, whose wife will she be in the resurrection? It’s a trap. The question isn’t in good faith, but aims to expose Jesus as a theological pretender.

Nevertheless, Jesus responds sincerely to his interrogators, although he doesn’t accept their premises. Marriage is of no consequence in the resurrection, he replies, because our lives will no longer be confined to earthly categories. The fictional woman in question will cease to be “wife” in order to be uniquely “child of God,” as will be all of God’s beloved– Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the ancestors– who despite earthly death are somehow living. After all, God is “God not of the dead but of the living, for to God all of them are alive.”

You see, the Sadducees’ question emerges from a limited human perspective– time is linear, life and death are mutually exclusive, social categories are fixed. But Jesus reframes their question according to the divine perspective– time is not linear, earthly death and resurrection life coincide, social distinctions are distilled into one common identity, one fundamental dignity: “children of God,” “children of the resurrection.” Jesus is quite comfortable venturing into the realm of mystery here; maybe that’s part of what it means to affirm that Emmanuel, God with us, is “Wisdom from on high.”

The question is, are we comfortable with mystery? I love the way Liz Charlotte Grant puts it in the most recent episode of the podcast Faith for Normal People. As post-Enlightenment thinkers, she says, “we want to be able to categorize, we want to kind of pin down God on a board like a butterfly and study God from all angles.” In other words, we crave clarity and answers, and in that way we’re a bit like the Sadducees. The prevailing logic is that we should be able to establish and defend the solid truth.

Jesus, however, refuses to pin God down, and instead points to God’s freedom beyond the scope of our perception. In that same podcast episode, the host Peter Enns repeats a remarkable quote: “The word ‘God’ is a cloak we throw over mystery to give it a shape.”[2] Friends, faith means to let Jesus throw that cloak, that is, to trust that the shape of mystery he gives us– his rendering of God– is gracious and truthful, even as it passes our understanding.

This first week of Advent, let me invite you to lean on the Wisdom from on high, and so to settle into the mystery that you are alive to God both now and in the time to come.

[1] William H. Petersen, www.theadventproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/rationale.pdf.

[2] “The Gift of an Unclear Text,” Faith for Normal People, episode 67 (October 26^th, 2025).