This past Monday, I walked into my class and wrote on the whiteboard
Last Chance U, English Edition
This is it!
Get going.
The three guys who had bothered to come to class a minute or two early looked at me.
“Ms. G., how d’you know ‘bout Last Chance U?”
“Umm. Because I’ve worked there for 30 years?”
They nodded. True enough. “So what’s that mean?”
As the rest of the class slowly trickled in, I explained the rules. We had two days of class before break. For each of them, I’d listed a set of missing assignments on sticky notes. If they came to class those two days, they could make the work up without penalty, and bring their grades up to A’s or B’s or passing.
One of them, a tall beanpole of a basketball paper whose grade had vacillated between an F and a D all semester (they need a C to pass) jumped out of his seat and threw his hands out.
“Ms. G! I can’t believe it! Can I hug you?!!”
He could. One quick hug later, he settled down and got to his list. After two classes and an hour or so of help after class, he pulled his grade up–if he stays on the path for the next two weeks–to that C he needs to stay in school and on the team.
Advent is my favorite church season Ever since I was a little girl, each night as we gathered for dinner, the dark of winter firmly settled outside the window, lighting the candles on the wreath has felt like hope and promise: Christmas is around the corner; the growing darkness will not last; the light is coming.
And each year, the Advent readings do their level best to kill my buzz. This week, it’s Isaiah’s thrones of judgment, Paul turning light into armor, and Jesus, near the end of his life, going on about the Son of Man, coming like the floods came for the people around Noah, taking one with him and leaving another behind. Advent, it turns out, is as much about keeping awake for the second coming of Christ as it is getting ready for the joy-filled arrival of a baby in the city of Bethlehem. We only have four weeks, I’ve always protested inside; isn’t it enough to just get ready for the Incarnation?
Maybe. But maybe it’s not.
This has been a long semester of watching students fail. My class, they all admit, is not hard if they just hunker down in class and do the work. Even so, they come to class twenty minutes late or leave early because their laptop is out of battery, so they can’t write. They get their grade to a B and disappear for a week. They start on an essay and never turn it in. It’s the same every year; at the end of the semester, a few will move on to college-level classes, and too many, like the men and women in Jesus’ parable, will be left behind.
Still, that’s not why I held Last Chance U, English Edition this week. It’s not why every week, I stay after class, teaching stuff I swore an hour before that I would not teach because you were not listening. I stay because my students are genuinely, exasperatingly, a joy to be around. Because when my mother died this semester, they knew exactly what to say to me. Because at least once every semester, when I’m working with them, they get what I’m saying and say, “Hold on, this doesn’t make sense at all” and write a sentence full of such elegance and power. Because when they fail, they often try again and go on to graduate and help communities I never could. Because sometimes they leave but still see something new in themselves. ‘
They are God’s people, and God’s people screw up, don’t live up to their promises, and don’t do as they are supposed to. And so maybe Advent needs to be about the next time God comes to earth as much as it is about Jesus’s Incarnation, because for God’s people, one chance to get things right is never enough. Yet in the story that stretches from Genesis to Revelation, God never gives up on them: God–like a frustrated teacher at an open-enrollment college–showing the way to get the work done, warning of the consequences of not following the path, but always relenting, offering another chance, always seeing the promise in the people before them.
Maybe the Son of Many is always coming down, not just in some win-or-lose end time, but through Isaiah bringing hope to the people, Jesus born on a dark night, Jesus rising from the dead, the Holy Spirit blowing around frightened disciples in a locked room, Martin Luther King sitting in jail and setting the world on fire for justice. Maybe the Son of Man will just keep coming until none of us are left behind. Maybe that’s the promise of Advent, the light that no darkness can extinguish.
Sunday Morning Words 