Last year, when my wife was teaching her special education kids about life in the rainforest of the Pacific Amazon, I learned the phrase "emergent layer." That's a term used by ecologists to describe the region directly above the canopy, which is above the understory, which is above the forest floor. This emergent layer is comprised of all types of species of birds as well as some monkeys that will occasionally leap out of the safe confines of forest leaves.

I thought of this as I began trying to summarize the phenomenon of the emergent church. It's a bit like summarizing the phenomenon of flight in these dense pockets burgeoning with nascent life. Each animal flies in distinct ways. Some do not fly at all. Hosts of other vital activities continue underneath it all. And yet some common values surface when the species are laid next to one another.

In American church circles, the term "emergent" describes a form of post-evangelicalism that is committed to the redemption and the future of all creation, including the outermost layers of culture, as a location for God's coming reign. The emergent layer of the American church sees itself as characterized by realism, hope, reorientation, and creativity. These characteristics fit interestingly with the ancient Christian celebrations of Advent, the forty days before Christmastide.

Shifting our focus during Advent

Advent is a season in the liturgical calendar set apart for the church to embody its anticipation of the full redemption of time. As Christ became fully human to mark humanity as "redeemable," so the Body of Christ gathers publicly to mark time as "worship-time." The liturgical calendar marks all our days as oriented in God's story. Advent marks this time with themes of expectation, preparation, and patience.

The four weeks of Advent (originally a forty-day fast) begin the new year of the church calendar. Four Sundays spent in a sanctuary, then, are a pretty small fraction of the season after Thanksgiving we spend outside the church consuming candy, choosing gifts to buy, working, dressing up the kids, blocking off a few hours to catch up with friends or enjoy some sort of intimacy with a lover, and burning imported fossil fuels driving from one to the other.

All church work is a part of the work of the church, but the importance of Advent should mark all of work, all of time — not just church services. Just as the church has historically confessed that Jesus is simultaneously divine and human (separate but not confused), so church time and "secular" time are both to be marked by the divine reality of God's coming reign. In this sense, emergent worship is much more like Celtic worship: renewed meaning bound to existing habits, and new habits to recapture very old meanings. And so worship by the Christian community in the season of Advent can be felt in food choices, TV consumption, how we see the vagrant in our midst, and how our parking and commuting habits affect our church neighbors. Emergent worship, then, is less about a 30-minute weekly event and more about facilitating the everyday interpretive choices of the congregation.

In short, it's a lofty ambition to hope that reflecting on Advent on four Sundays might shape us in the habit of expecting the reign of God against all the other habits that we share at this time of year — but it's an ambition worth attempting.

With these thoughts in mind, we will look at this practice of emergent worship and preaching through four Advent lectionary texts for 2005. How can we approach the four texts of Mark 1:1-18, Psalm 126, Luke 1:26-38, and Luke 2:1-20 in order to facilitate Advent living in worshiping communities?

I have observed four theologies that are undergoing reimagination by emergent congregations: ecclesiology, eschatology, missiology, and incarnation. From thevantage point of these emergent theologies, I want to illuminate four metaphors from these texts that reimage preaching in Advent: an ecclesiology of the unfinished way, an eschatology of trade in seeds that will find future purchase in God's coming dreams, a missiology in which language and symbols are reconceived by the Holy Spirit, and an incarnational theology of ordinary watching and witnessing.

Mark 1:1-8. The Incomplete Church, the "Unfinished Way"

In Mark 1:1-8, we are introduced to a new beginning. How different from our late-modern or postmodern culture, in which the church is seen as yet one more place with its own narrow predictable story.¹

Most church services serve up safe events with determined scripts where congregants come to get fueled up for life "out there," or to escape the rat race. But wait a minute. Isaiah's familiar "prepare a way for the Lord" was intended as a retelling of Israel's story of captivity. God's witnesses are not just sent away for time out, but intentionally issued job transfers for the very purpose of building roads for what is to come. Isaiah saw the called community as the strange vagrant yelling from the sidelines of the stadium, "Hey! You're in the game, idiot."

This very particular hopefulness, this memory of Israel, must have come to Mark's mind as he describes Jesus's cousin John. Picture some theologian/folk singer (John Howard Yoder meets Conner Ooberst, say), singing The Times They Are a Changin' to the people who dare to take public transport out of their comfortable suburbs to the city's wilderness: "Listen to this John the Baptist guy for very long and you start singing along."

The only thing that's constant is change — except in our churches. Why is that? Why is church so finished and ultimate? So unchanging? Why are we so careful to wear the vintage camel hair (bought from catalogues instead of built by hand as John's must have been) if the power is in One who's yet to come? I am embarrassed to say that much has already been written and bought and sold to outfit a church for "emergent worship."

The problem is that candles and coffee have become the postmodern substitute for locust and honey.² Pastors who learned in seminary internships that robes help set a worshipful tone by diverting the congregation's attention from what one is wearing have forgotten what they learned in church history: that Calvin dressed pastors in academic regalia to show they were teachers. We see garb in worship as a method of disguising the temporal contextual elements of the worshiping community. And so, when we're introduced to a new medicine that helps the message go down, we buy it up.

Change can be prophetic, for prophecy anticipates change. A system of innovation helps equip the church to dare to expect something new, to wait for the Lord whose day is near. Innovation is a daring act of hope.

In a recent visit with a church located in a rural bedroom community outside of a major Midwestern city, we meditated on this passage, seeking a metaphor to guide the entire service. We came upon the metaphor of road construction. For this small church, the questions of a disappearing rural way of life and the indiscriminate sprawl of the city will come face to face with the way Isaiah and John prophesied. Innovation in this church means reunderstanding their ways in light of an unfinished vocation en route to God's dreams. Perhaps this will even soak into their own congregational identity as they explore their own future building plans. For this congregation, Advent worship requires building a theology of construction, of ecology, and of business. It includes a worship service that teaches its members to witness as an agitating community, instrumental to the fair and hopeful construction of their town.

This Advent, consider asking: "How do our liturgy and worship demonstrate the openness of creation waiting for its completion?" Why sing Christmas carols that remind us of great days we've already had, while the festive table has empty seats all around? The thoroughfare always has both a richer, deeper understory and a broader, more brilliant destination than the well-trodden granite pavestones on which we currently tread.

Psalm 126. Our Tears as Seeds for God's Harvest

As I am writing this, media images of 90,000 square miles under as much as 20 feet of sea water, sewage, and rainfall, along with images of the faces of tears and destitution, are strewn about our house. I am stunned by the capacity of countless leaders and followers to place blame before the emergency is even abated. In a world of re-elections and special probes, terrorist disasters and natural ones, phrases like "coming home... bringing in the sheaves" sound a bit triumphalistic or Pollyannaish. But the poet of this Psalm knows what a rebuilt city tastes and sounds like during harvest time. This poet can set our hearts on a time of dreams and rejoicing so that we dare to hope again in a future harvest.

Poets don't toss words around carelessly. He must have known that "dreams" are part of a healthy restored creation. Perhaps he anticipated Jung, thinking, "the dream writes the dreamer." These children of God waiting for the restoration of their fortunes need the vision of a future harvest where the present tears they are sowing will find purchase. Your tears aren't going to waste!

These poems are recorded in our Psalter for us to rehearse the same promised harvest. Like a violinist who practices with the breathing and posture that she will need during her performance, our worship practices include tears to equip us with the necessary posture for the performance of the Lord's harvest.

If the Zion that the psalmist longs for includes emotion and imagination, then it follows that Advent expectation would include the same. Too many of the worship practices in churches today are not very different from 24-hour news channels. Flashes of stock image after stock image drown out our capacities to imagine and emote; we stay in writer's blocks with little time available in the 60-minute window of worship for mourning or dancing.

By throwing out liturgies of confession and assurance of pardon, the contemporary church has lost the emotions of sorrow and imagery requiring imagination. By leaving behind difficult texts, and asking congregants to watch the performances of familiar sacred tunes, higher steeple mainline churches are losing volition and the courage to give testimony.

Fresh tears of lamentation bring the anger and ambivalence from "out there" into the very worship gathering. As contemporary and traditional worshippers alike, we could all be better shaped towards God's future by a more regular performance of the laments of the psalmists.

The familiar lament of the psalmist in hymn 13 is, "How long, O Lord?" Our Advent text, Psalm 126, is similar; "Get me out of here so I can sing a new song!" There are the tears of reminiscence, and then there are the tears of the dispersed. New songs are the latter. They are fresh laments, fresh tears. Dispersed New Orleanians are singing this from all over the continent: "How long is it gong to be this way?"

In our church last weekend, our time around the text (you might call it preaching) was oriented around a song. We sang a short refrain, something like, "Kyrie, Lord have mercy," and then as the instruments continued in an ambient drone, different people read excerpts of lament psalms and excerpts from the newspaper headlines together. Then, we returned to the refrain. It was Karl Barth's "newspaper in one hand, Bible in the other" meets postmodern theater. The mantra of lamentation led in weeping. Most of us had been bombarded by flood images all week, feeling more and more useless and bitter. The rhythm of lament brought our despair to expression and helped us discover our voices.

What an amazing practice, to join in with creation's groans.³ It is in facing these nightmares, gathered before God, that God's dream for a creation that will shout with joy, with trees that will clap their hands, begins to truly make sense to the church. In risking to plant seeds of tears the church can begin dreaming with their whole bodies for a creation where such seeds will find purchase. By identifying with the darkness of those who mourn or hurt or despair or are confounded we reimagine with them a dawn of new mercies. And we reimagine that our acts and tears will be a part of this dawn.

This Advent, consider asking: "Is there space among us to lament the losses we hope will cease? Can people truly grieve here? How does our church make space for acknowledging the lonely exile we dwell in here, so that the celebrated rescue of our coming Emmanuel — that great break-fast of Christmastide — will be all the more embodied?" Those who sow in tears will come home shouting at the tops of their lungs about the purchase their tears have earned: a healthy market for their crops, paid for with joy.

Luke 1:26-38. The Pregnant Church, Conceiving Newborn Gospel

A couple of years ago a friend of mine worked with some middle school students to create embodied prayer postures to accompany the performance of the Apostles' Creed. (I use the word "performance" intentionally because confessions are acts of public worship, reinterpreting the material of everyday life to the observing world.) Most Sunday nights in our worship gathering, we repeat these postures, making "heaven and earth" by cupping hands together the way a dough maker would and dying with Christ by lying flat on the floor "buried, descended... (counting 1, 2, 3) and on the third day..." standing back up. The most clever part of the tradition our church was handed by these middle-schoolers was the set of actions accompanying thelines "conceived by the Holy Spirit." We hold our index finger up to our head and then to the sky and raise our eyebrows as if it were an "aha" moment within the divine perichoretic think tank.

What if the creative work of conception were as simple as that? What if our job were to be the midwives of new concepts? Dreams become reality, forever bringing the material and the divine into an integrated relationship. What if this specific ground and language on which we stand — right here, right now — were pregnant with potential for the creative dream of God, a new heaven and new earth?

Well, our text is also rooted to aspecific place in history. This story is placed within a specific historical time period, a specific month, specific geographical setting, with a specific protagonist who was specifically never sexually active, betrothed to a specific man of a specific household. And then the predictable scene is interrupted by a specifically new utterance forever transfiguring the shape of that specific context.

When gospel-news comes into culture, culture transforms. Just like cyan pigment introduced to magenta changes the canvas forever, gospel transfigures culture. The sending-God touches Mary, and through the news of a messenger she realizes her vocation, "God-bearer." The words she knew before like "virgin" and "barren" are reconceived to mean "miraculous" and "womb of possibility". If this transfiguring Christmas news is possible within Mary, then all of life, even church life, has become pregnant with meaning, conceived by the creating Holy Spirit, for the purpose of God's new creation. And so church, theology, and worship are all reborn as they are handed from practitioner to practitioner.

The transformation of God's good news into new symbols is something missionaries have taught those of us in the West a great deal about. Lesslie Newbigin, British missionary to India, has explored in depth the exchange between God's revealed Word and its particular context. In the emergent conversation, much has been discussed about Newbigin's proposed triad integrating and differentiating between "gospel, culture, and church."

The Incarnation uniquely shapes the church's perspectives on the relationships between the good news, the culture for whom that news exists, and the community called to bear that news. Just as Mary is transformed into God-bearer, we the church are also transformed as we gather to follow the "aha"of the author of creation. In the exchange between the gospel, the culture, and the church, words and symbols are born anew as well.

In Advent, we prepare for continual fresh encounters with that Word and at the same time expect that the events of the incarnation are the central clue of what is to come. We imagine God standing in the future of God's kingdom fully realized, sending that future back to us as we ask and make room for it where we are right now. Thus, we believe that whenever we faithfully bear the gospel in worship, we become a public performance of what is to come. This can be seen in the emergence of the New Monasticism conversation, renewed appreciation for house churches and intentional communities, and the return of desert father imagery to describe the vocations of church members. This is a reimagining of the entire institutional practices of church communities. And, like the pregnant Mary, we see that the material reality we put in play for this performance is reconceived, reborn as it is caught up in the swell of the reign to come.

Luke 2:1-20. The Magic in Waiting and Listening to the Other.

I can vividly remember sitting in the pews of St. Mark's Cathedral on a large hill in Seattle on a Sunday evening when the choir was singing at Compline. A chorus of middle-aged male octogenarians in hooded robes sang mostly in Latin under low lighting before an assorted congregation of college students, artists, hippies in sleeping bags, homeless people, and tourists like me, gathered in the circled pews to face the altar and the cross that stood on it. There was a sense of awe, as people came to have their bodies rung by the resonance of the voices bouncing in the cathedral's monstrous stone walls. I remember asking my wife, "What is it about this 'otherworldliness' that appeals so deeply to the aesthetic of the earthiest in our society?" I loved it there.

In Luke 2:1-20, we end up in nearby fields where shepherds were managing to keep watch. And after Mary and Joseph did all their tax preparation and had completed the outbound portion of their pilgrimage, the labor of bearing the incarnation had to take place in a mean cathedral of displacement.

Displacement.

Woody Guthrie was a master at articulating displacement. One of America's original bards, emulated by the likes of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Jeff Tweedy, Guthrie was a songwriter who knew that the songs to evoke true American patriotism were written fromplaces of depression, immigration, and despair. People in displacement wait for news, they dream, they seek out muses, they are "all along the watch tower." Displaced people also have the time to follow the strange things that grab them. So when the good news had come to the shepherds, and the chorus of angels sang, they decided, "Let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place...." And after having done so, they weren't too big to believe in the small Lord in a trough, nor were they too small to tell the royal city what they had heard.

The shepherds also returned home and kept up the evangelization. However, it was much more like story telling, like folk singing, like poetry-slams. This good news of incarnation — that all material (strips of cloth, barns, the stars, even unilateral tax edicts) and all space (even displaced space) are now useful for telling God's story — was spread through the shepherds' own means. The shepherds told these stories as any folklorist would, and probably sang songs like the simplest of artisans.

To practice Advent as an emergent community is to be like curators bringing in the witnesses of familiar shepherds and cultivating indigenous voices within the congregation. We can bring in the artwork of pop culture, as well as that of local artists in our midst. Performing and showing non-religious art (art other than high sacred or CCM) enables the congregation to better see the material world through a theology of incarnation, to see Advent all around. We juxtapose the everyday script we live in with the counterscript we are hoping to live into.⁴ When worshippers are taught by the artists around them to express their witness in familiar indigenous terms, they are able to reimagine their own place in all of life, and begin creating their own fresh indigenous worship material.

During Advent, we must not forget that the ordinary is packed with expectation. Just as creation groans for the revealing of the glorified children of God, and our bodies wait for their adoption, so does the artwork of bards and American folk, hip-hop, and pop music give voice to Advent's anticipation. Amidst all the tranquilizing that modern media engenders, just look at the ability of movies like Hotel Rwanda and Bowling for Columbine and the work of U2's Bono to see how good art can reshape the imaginations of people. Our texts of scripture repeatedly speak of the mean and lowly things brought into proclamation, brought into the drama of incarnation.

An advent community looks for ways to invigorate imagination. Not by brainstorming how to "shock and awe" the congregation. No, emergent worship crafts each encounter with scripture to spaces to "watch," "make known," "ponder," and "return home glorifying." This kind of ordinary watching and witnessing demonstrates a deep theology of incarnation, a belief that all material, space, and time are useful for the performance and rehearsing of the coming reign of God. We can engage people's everyday imagination in worship by redeeming and creating the art they engage in every day.

Advent's Good News

Emergent church face the same challenge that congregations have faced for centuries. Their approaches, however, are shaped by a hope in the coming reign of God, engendering an increasingly holistic view of worship. If anything, emergent churches share a common conviction that risking that view is worth the potential loss of the congregation¹s existence as we know it. Insofar as the church is supposed to be a penultimate harbinger anyway, the values emerging from such congregations can inform other Christian communities as we face the changing times.

Perhaps worshiping in Advent could be part of God's dream to bring barren things to life and to bring good news of great joy for all people. Perhaps these four texts could shape all of us, this Advent, as people looking outside of the forest canopy toward what is to come.

Troy Bronsink (M.Div Columbia Theological Seminary) is a member of the PC(USA) living in intentional community in Southwest inner-city Atlanta as a parent, pastor, artist-songwriter, coffee shop manager, community developer, and coordinator of the Atlanta Emergent Cohort. Learn more about him at churchasart.org. An earlier form of this article appeared in Lectionary Homiletics.

¹This phrase was used by Jean-François Lyotard (1924- 1998) in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), to describe the disappearance of any common story or worldview in an increasingly globalized, skeptical, and individualized society.

²See Johnny Baker's paper Alternative Worship and the Significance of Popular Culture for an insightful missiological perspective on incarnating the gospel in pop culture.

³See Romans 8:18-27.

⁴Walter Brueggemann, in his address to the Emergent Theological Conversation, 2004 (mp3 audio), taught that the ministry of the church, and the precise location of the Holy Spirit's new gifting, is to manage the ambivalence between the subversive script of the Gospel and the dominant script of technocratic therapeutic militaristic consumerism.