In Advent we anticipate the coming of Christ, who is already with us but whose liberating presence is not yet fully revealed. Early Advent texts vividly portray apocalyptic images, warnings to keep awake, and John the Baptist’s fiery calls to repentance. This year, as we reflect on these texts “with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other” (Barth), they come to life in contemporary scenes of war and slaughter in the Holy Land. Such images, together with mass shootings, persistent injustices, and climate breakdown, make clear the violence and destructiveness of what Walter Wink called “the domination system” and Marcus Borg calls “the normalcy of civilization.”