Advent has traditionally been considered the new year of the Christian calendar. Maybe you remember an advent calendar as a kid, counting down the days to Christmas? Well, Advent is all about expectation, but mostly about expecting the messianic age, the promised king who will restore God’s world. Advent ties our here-and-now to God’s coming promised finished creation. It helps us re-capture what Jesus’ birth must have meant to the people of Israel, to his families and disciples. Advent helps us to look again with compassion and hope on those in need of rescue. For the families in Capitol View, Atlanta, it gives us eyes of compassion and hope toward our neighborhood’s prostitutes, drug addicts, and trashed foreclosed homes––not to mention our own addictions and despair. Some times we think of heaven as a place in the clouds and “the end times” as an airlift out of a world “going to hell in a hand basket.” But the kingdom promises of Jewish prophets, and of the king who came in a humble stable, reminds us of the importance of the here-and-now. Jesus would teach over and over, look around, heaven is breaking through. So, Advent moves our eyes out of our own problems or the impossibility of every day life up to the hills, to the horizon, ahead of us “from which our help comes.”