Welcome to the Good Faith podcast. I'm your host, Curtis Chang, and the Good Faith podcast is a production of redeeming Babel.

And it's where friends who follow Jesus help each other make sense of the world.

And we here at Good Faith are beginning a four-part episode on Advent.

So I wanted to explain why Advent is so important for followers of Jesus to make sense of the world,

especially in this moment.

There is a temptation to make sense of the world by what arrives in our news feed.

The news that arrives could be about the economy, culture, and especially

these days, about politics. But the point is that the news that arrives is the thermostat. It's what

sets the temperature of how we're feeling in the world. And because the modern world is subject to a number

of forces that constantly accelerates change,

especially via technology, this makes our experience of the world feel always changing, erratic, and unpredictable.

And so living this way where news events that arrive in our feed are the thermostat means we're like people living in a house

where someone is always unpredictably changing the thermostat. And so one moment we're too hot,

another moment we're too cold, and we never know what to expect. Well, Advent reminds us to not let

what arrives in our news feed serve as the ultimate thermostat.

The word Advent is derived from the Latin word Adventis, which means coming or arrival,

which also translates to the Greek word parusia.

So what Advent reminds us is that how we're supposed to make sense of the world actually has already been set.

It's already been determined by two anchoring historical arrivals.

The first Advent celebrates the first arrival of Jesus, his birth, which has already happened.

And that birth declares that Jesus has already initiated the rescue

of the world from all that it ails us. And then Advent also anticipates another arrival,

...