Advent is a peculiar time. Here we find a time of silence, a time of wonder; a time of urgency, a time of patience. We have been cultured to cut the tension of the reality of our time, a time ‘passing away’ whilst calling us to live in it, faithfully and well. I, like you, can easily dismiss what is right in front of us because we are busy wrapping, putting up, building settings in our homes and churches for Christmas Day. Advent interrupts this hurry. Not because it slows down time, but because it reorients our priorities and focus about God and others.
But who wants to speak of Advent, when there is so much purchasing to do?
The prophet Isaiah sets the stage:
In our sins we have been a long time and shall we be saved? We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment…thou has hid thy face from us, and hast delivered us into the hand of our iniquities…Be not exceedingly angry, O Lord, and remember not iniquity for ever. (Isaiah 63.5-9).
Advent takes some practice to get used to. It is designed to show that the meaning of Christmas is diminished to the vanishing point if we are not willing to take a fearless inventory of the darkness. “Thou hast hid thy face from us” Isaiah says depicting the silence and absence of God. It requires courage to look into the heart of darkness, especially when we are afraid, we might see ourselves there. It is Isaiah that says even our best selves are distorted and unclean, “Even our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.” The authentically hopeful Christmas spirit has not looked away from the darkness but straight into it. The true and victorious Christmas spirit does not look away from death, but directly to it. Otherwise, the message is cheap and false. Instead of pointing to someone’s sin, we confess our own, “In our sins we have been a long time.”
Advent begins in the dark.
The last two years has ushered many unfortunate and painful experiences for family members who have lost loved ones to a virus and a variant of it. The pressing questions for families and individuals confess what’s in their tongues: if Jesus is the answer to all of my problems, why do horrible things continue to happen in our world? If the world was reconciled to Christ, why are nations staunchly divided? Well, these are the Advent questions. The Church has been asking similar questions for a very long time. Advent makes us reconsider the strange experience of the urgency and stress in the biblical text as a sign of its continuing truth. I like how a favorite preacher of mine puts it, “the atmosphere of crisis is the story [of the Christian community] in the Time between for two thousand years.”
We do not know why so many suffer with little apparent meaning. The first and second Advent weeks focus anticipates the Lord’s soon return. It is truly about the final breaking in of God upon our darkness. It is about the promise that against all the evidence, there is a God who cares. This One is hidden among us, the One who hung on a tree, accursed for our sake. It appears to be a failure, just as his life appeared to end in failure.
Advent begins with God.
God identifies himself with us, born into the world as a member of the lowest class and identifies himself with our human fate all the way to the end, as he gives himself up to die the brutal and dehumanizing death of a slave.
This is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the end. We, the church, live in Advent, between the first and second comings of the Lord, in the midst of the tension between things the way they are and things the way they ought to be. God will come and his justice will prevail, and he will destroy evil and pain in all its forms, once and forever. To be a believer is to live every day of our lives in solidarity with those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, but to live in the unshakeable hope of those who expect the dawn.