Antonio Fauci, the Italian prophet whose hotline 123-BOO-STER is intolerably busy, has cautioned us with the Christmas trigger warnings of yesteryear. He is not sure whether we should celebrate Christmas. He encourages booster shots and then more booster shots. This, he knows. What he doesn’t know is whether the buffet of boosters will be sufficient rationale for a Christmas party. We will have to wait and see.
Fauci, of course, must persist in skepticism. In fact, the Fauci currency only has value if the stock market of fear and uncertainty is high. Currently, it’s keeping up with Bitcoin’s best days.
But this entire scabrous affair opens up the lovely opportunity to indoctrinate my dozens of readers in things to come. See what I did there? I took the whole Fauci moment and turned it into an opportunity for doing the thing the Left hates Christians do: speak objectively. And here is the whole shebang in a nutshell: the eschatology is upon us!
You heard me right. For those of you outsiders, I refer to the end of things and the beginnings of new things in Church life. Advent is coming in a few weeks, and there are lots of things prior to it (Reformation, Make-Fun-Of-The-Devil-Day, All Saints, etc.). But if Fauci is going all eschatology on us–talking of things to come, then, so can I. And the things to come are full of meaning for the life of the church. We may even say that the things to come give life to the church because all the things to come find fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth.
I don’t want to restate the hundreds of articles I wrote on this topic in the last two years, but I do want to state the inevitable dilemma some of you will face as you approach the new season. The dilemma will take on different facets, but as I see it, you will be debating whether certain conversations should be a part of the life-stream of family life. The question is quite simple: will Fauci control the vocabulary of the new creation starting on November 28th? Or, will we let the church set the stage for all doings and happenings? If we are unsure how to answer this question, Fauci wins automatically.
As Advent approaches, we are approaching the dawning of prophecies and promises. For the Christian, Advent signals an expectation for a new language to enter into the eco-system of church life. My encouragement is to begin thinking through the rituals and rites of life through the lens of the calendar. Necessarily, this means that we avoid the temptation to relish in the land of Fauci-like hypothesis. While we don’t–most of us–subscribe to the prophecies of Fauci, we need to also avoid the apocalyptic speech that embroiders the other side of the debate. We need to avoid the other extreme of allowing the anti-Fauci lexicon to shape us when we should allow ourselves to be shaped by the lexicon of the church. In sum, what I am arguing is that we don’t meander from Fauci to Focault. We do not need to quarantine forever and we don’t need to believe that Nietzschean doom comes upon us unless we isolate ourselves in some Benedictine island.
No, in fact, the best answer to Fauci is the Church Calendar. Let me say that again to my evangelical friends who are somewhat skeptical of my clerical collar: the best answer to Fauci, and Focault, for that matter, is the Church Calendar. We must live these remaining weeks of Pentecost/Trinity with the full expectation that no matter who our modern prophets may be, we follow another prophetic line that builds our longing for a final prophet who brings blessings far as the curse is found.
So, dads and moms, get ready for Advent, Christmas, and all the other goodies. Don’t let the false grammarians dictate your festivities. Do life with church and folk; with saint and paint; with prayer and cake layer; with singing and ringing; with smells and bells. Stay even closer to church life in sorrow and cheer. In fact, if I had a t-shirt campaign, it would read, “Calendar much, Fauci less!”
