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There is a risk for any religion that looks to accomplished events as its foundation. The word once unexpectedly spoken becomes *ours*, is absorbed more and more into our needs and fancies and preferences. Once it was strange, now it is familiar and idolatrous. The Advent tension is a way of learning again that God is God: that between even our deepest and holiest longing and the reality of God is a gap which only grace can cross; otherwise we are alone again, incommunicado, our signals and symbols bounced back to us off the glassy walls of the universe.

Only the newness of a new turn of history, the specific newness of new words, acts, and relations, can show the God who will not allow himself to be caught in the circle of ideas alone, and so can show the God who exceeds both the fiercest longing and the profoundest speculation of creatures. Because Advent tells us to look for mystery, absolute grace, and freedom in a fleshly human face, within the mobile form of our shared history, it brings our idolatry—philosophical and mythological alike—to judgment. Our hunger *is* met, we *are* talked and touched into new and everlasting life, our desire *is* answered—but only insofar as we have lived in an Advent of the religious imagination, struggling to let God be God, casting our idols of silver and gold to the moles and bats, ‘for fear of the Lord and for the glory of his majesty,’ longing simply for our God to show himself as God in the ‘total and presuppositionless love’ of his incarnate speech to us.

Rowan Williams, a sermon on celebrating Advent as Jews celebrate Passover, from ‘Open to Judgment’