Advent Contra Empire: Week One
Waiting as Fugitive Refusal
Dear Becoming Ones: A reader of this Substuck,
, invited me to think about Advent this year from the Eastern Orthodox perspective. So, while we did not get our stuff together in time to share out a collaborative week this week, I have high hopes that in the coming weeks, we will add to this resource for you to follow along and enjoy a lengthy Advent Season that refuses Imperial Time!Paz, —RCE+
Advent Contra Empire: Week One
Waiting as Fugitive Refusal
Text: 2 Thessalonians 2:1–5, 13–17
Theme: The Coming of Our Lord Jesus & the Refusal of Imperial Time
Date: November 9, 2025
Advent begins in the shadows—not the twinkling lights of December, but the uneasy knowing that empire persists.
The people of God have always waited in the long night of imperial rule.
The Thessalonians waited under Rome.
We wait under empire’s contemporary disguises—militarism, border surveillance, anti-trans legislation, Christian nationalism, and colonial ecologies of extraction.
We begin here, in the tension of longing.
In the ache that knows things should not be as they are.
Advent in the Eastern Tradition
In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Advent does not begin with festivity—it begins with watchfulness.
While the Western church keeps a four-week season, the East holds a 40-day Nativity Fast, mirroring Lent—not as punishment, but as clearing.
A making-ready.
A re-tuning of the heart to perceive reality apart from empire’s illusions.
This early shift into Advent today, on November 9, calls us to retrain desire, to unlearn the habits of empire that teach us to hurry, hoard, consume, and numb.
It is an invitation to live as those who are already fugitives from the imperial imagination—people who slip loose from the empire’s claims on identity, value, and future.
In this way, waiting is not passive.
Waiting is counter-formation.
Waiting is decolonial refusal.
Waiting is the recovery of God’s time.
Do Not Be Quickly Shaken
Paul writes to a community frightened by empire—misinformation, rumor, threat, and despair.
He tells them:
“Do not be quickly shaken.”
Do not let empire name reality for you.
The “lawless one” in this text is not chaos.
It is the order of empire itself.
The order that disappears bodies and calls it peace.
The order that criminalizes care and calls it law.
The order that crucifies prophets and calls it security.
Advent Contra Empire is not sentimental waiting.
It is refusal.
It is fugitivity as a spiritual posture.
The Contradiction at the Heart of Advent
Empire says: urgency, scarcity, domination.
Advent says: patience, sufficiency, solidarity, belonging.
To wait for Christ is not to wait for rescue.
It is to remember we belong to another world already breaking in.
To wait is to become ungovernable by fear.
Paul says:
“Stand firm and hold fast.”
Not to nationalism disguised as faith.
Not to a church that blesses empire.
But to the tradition of liberation:
The prophets who refused silence
The widows who persisted
The prisoners who sang at midnight
The migrants who dreamed on the run
The trans elders who kept one another alive
The ones who remembered:
God is not enthroned in the palaces.
God is in the streets of uprising.
God is in the breath of the oppressed, breathing still.
Field Practice for the Week
Refuse the Time of Empire. Return to the Time of God.
Choose one intentional act to disrupt empire’s tempo:
Sit in silence for three minutes each morning, without striving.
Light a candle at dusk to reclaim your body from the workday.
Eat one meal slowly, in gratitude for every being—soil, hands, water, seed, labor.
Turn your phone off for one hour and step outside. Even the doorway counts.
As you do, pray:
I refuse the time of empire.
I return to the time of God.
I wait in the lineage of fugitives
who loved one another into freedom.
This is not self-care as escape.
This is liberation rehearsal.
Waiting is not idle.
Waiting is training the senses to recognize the world being born in the cracks.
Benediction
Beloveds, go from this place unshaken.
Go as those who know empire is not inevitable.
Go as those who have already slipped through its grasp.
Go as those living in holy fugitive time—
soft, alert, ungoverned by fear.
May the God who comes in the night
find you awake in tenderness.
May the Christ who is always arriving
rise in your breath, in your body, in your belonging.
May the Spirit who gathers the scattered
draw you into communities of refuge and repair.
And may your waiting be a refusal to surrender imagination
to the world as it is.
Go now in courage.
Go now in slowness.
Go now in fierce, unshakable love.
Amen. And may it be so.