“You know the time…the hour has come for you to wake from sleep.
For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.
The night is far gone; the day is at hand.”
Romans 13:11-12
“Waiting for and hastening the coming of the day.”
2 Peter 3:12
Advent Under the Broom Tree
Hard to believe it’s almost Christmas. Our tree got set up a little later this year. But we did manage to get out an Advent Calendar, counting the days. And that’s what Advent – if that word is a part of your mental furniture – has come to mean for most of us. It’s the season marking the time before Christmas.
The lights and the tinsel. The wreaths strung across city streets and evergreen trees decking our homes. The smells of peppermint and freshly baked cookies. The strains of carols. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, “the hap-happiest,” season.
Sometimes.
You don’t want to be a grinch about it and damper the Christmas cheer all around. But the old poet had it wrong. It’s December that can be the cruelest month. Like hot salt water can bring a deeply lodged splinter to the surface, so these December days can bring up a lot of pain for many people, reminders of what’s been lost.
Have you ever thought that maybe there’s another, different, better way to enter into and experience these days before Christmas?
You want this time of the year to encompass the whole truth. BOTH what’s happening in the world, what’s happening in your life. AND. A steadfast assurance that all is well and all will be well. You want, what some traditions have called, “a bright-sadness.”
In other words, we want some way to make sense of the days before Christmas in all their paradox and emotional complexity.
One of the best books I ever read on Advent, one that has forever changed how I understand and experience these days before Christmas, is Fleming Rutledge’s Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ.
“Advent” is from the Latin adventus, which means coming. Rutledge points out that, historically, the Church has recognized not one but three Advents, three comings of Christ. And historically, the major accent has been on the coming that we tend to dismiss or forget about altogether.
1 – The Coming of Christ in the Incarnation
First, there’s the coming of Christ in the incarnation – Veiled in flesh the Godhead see // Hail the incarnate Deity. Mary and the manger. The shepherds and the magi. O little town of Bethlehem.
There’s a line in that carol – The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight – that catches the depth of the Christmas story, one that in our sentimental, sanitized versions we can miss.
One of the primary differences between the Hebrew Bible and what we call the Old Testament is that we put the book of Malachi last. Malachi closes with its prophecy of a great prophet to come, who will prepare the way for the LORD. Flip the page and you read, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham,” (Matthew 1:1) reminding us from page one of the New Testament that the story of Jesus is the climax of a story that began long ago.
But between the close of Malachi and the opening of the New Testament, there were some 400 years, four centuries of silence, marked by brutal oppression and multiple military occupations. That’s about twice the age of the United States. Do you think it was difficult for the people of God to hold out hope in his promises? Wouldn’t most of us have given up on such promises as a pipedream for naïve idealists?
If we are going to immerse ourselves in the stories of Scripture and hear those stories as they were intended to be heard, we must use our imaginations to enter into that long season of waiting and watching, waiting in the dark, when there seems to be no visible reason left to hold on to hope, “hoping against hope” in the Bible’s vivid phrase (Rom. 4:18).
Have you noticed how many television shows and books today have as their principle setting a post-apocalyptic world, following some global catastrophe that has killed most people and left the survival of those few who remain in serious jeopardy, hunted on all sides? The Walking Dead. The Road. Station Eleven. The Last of Us – to name a few.
All those shows turn around one central question – why keep going? Why keep on living? Why put yourself through the torture of hoping, when it will most likely be a recipe for crushing disappointment? Why persevere? To be or not to be – that is the question.
When the main character in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is asked, “What’s the bravest thing you ever did?” He answered, “Getting up this morning.”
Now, that’s Advent.
When you can’t see any reason to keep going, when you can’t see, humanly speaking, any possible way out or through. When you are desperate.
That’s the Advent situation precisely.
If you want to enter into the spirit of the Season and “rejoice with exceedingly great joy,” (Matthew 2:10) over the Christ child’s coming, then you’ll first have to let yourself feel and experience the deprivation, the agony, the threat of hopelessness.
Only when we’re brave enough to explore the darkness of Advent, will we discover the exceedingly great joy of Christmas Day.
It’s like scales of music. The lower the register; the higher the notes can sound. But if you try and keep yourself from those low registers, fearing what will happen if you let yourself go there. If you deny or dismiss those darker notes, the cost will be a ceiling, a cap, on the high notes of exultation. You can’t revel in the heights unless you swing low.
And if you’re asked to sing those high notes of joy, repeatedly, as we often are in one way or another, whether in an American culture that demands positivity, especially in this holiday season, or in a church that primarily sings songs of triumph and victory, then, gradually, something will begin to happen to your soul. You will begin to feel hollow, hollowed out.
Fleming Rutledge tells this story: In 2017, Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, was suffering from a prolonged crisis as the result of an ongoing civil war. The government and all of its agencies had ceased to operate. All services—medical care, sanitation, food supply, factories, airports seaports and bridges – everything had collapsed.
Parents were desperate as children began to die of cholera, a disease that is easily treated in the developed world. A man named Mohammed Nasir waited outside a primitive cholera clinic as his son Waleed hung by a thread. Even if he recovered, his father had no money to get back home. Another poor man, Saleh al-Khawlani, had fled from bombing with his wife and six children, from one side of Yemen to another. He said, “the war haunts us from all directions.”
A third man, Yakoub, a soldier, had not been paid anything for eight months, and his six-year-old daughter was in dire condition from malnutrition. Waiting by her side in a clinic, he said, “We’re just waiting for doom or for a breakthrough from heaven.”
Rutledge says this is precisely the Advent situation: doom on one hand, deliverance on the other. She adds the fact that the Yemeni are Muslim opens up a global dimension for a whole world in need of a “breakthrough from heaven.” That’s a reference to the prophet Isaiah, “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down” (Isaiah 64:1).
Advent is the cry of those who recognize they have come to the end of themselves and need nothing less than a breakthrough from heaven to deliver them. It’s for those who experience the LORD making a way when there didn’t seem to be a way (Exodus 14:14).
It’s an addict finally raising his hand for help. It’s admitting, “I can’t,” realizing the most precious gift we can receive is the gift of desperation. That’s Advent.
Or, just as likely, it’s the addict’s spouse or parent when the person they love doesn’t raise their hand, and they feel powerless to help the ones they love. That’s Advent.
It’s a cancer diagnosis. Again. When it almost killed you the first time. And you just don’t feel like you have the strength to walk that road again.
It’s a man, past the middle of his career, unemployed, wondering how he will invest his remaining days when he feels like he still has so much to give. But who’s asking?
Tish Harrison Warren recently gave us another wonderful resource for entering into this season, Advent: The Season of Hope. Warren writes:
“Advent is a time to ready ourselves for the celebration of the incarnation, and this is no small task. The way we celebrate Christmas can easily become sentimental and trite. We are so familiar with the story—the little lambs and the shepherds, the Christmas star and the stockings—that we fail to notice the depth of pain, chaos, and danger of the world into which Jesus was born. Christmas with its compulsory jollification and insistence on being the “hap-hap-happiest season of all” devolves into saccharine escapism if we do not first take note of the darkness in the world and in our own lives. Part of why we observe Advent is to make Christmas weird again, to allow the shock of the incarnation to take us aback once more.”
She encourages us to enter into the larger story of redemptive history, to imaginatively experience the captivity and yearning of Israel, so that we might experience anew that holy night in Bethlehem.
I’m not saying you have to be in a desperate situation to experience Advent. I’m saying that sooner or later you will be in one of these situations, if you haven’t already or aren’t in one now.
Your situation might not be anywhere near as dire as that Yemeni father wondering how he will feed or care for a sick child. But sooner or later we will have our own Christmas version of “and a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:35).
There’s no way to sing out, full-throated, “Glory to God in the highest,” (Luke 2:14) without having allowed yourself some version of, “How long, O LORD, will you look on? As for me, my feet had almost slipped. My eyes have grown dim with sorrow” (Psalm 35:19; 73:2; 6:7).
Just as the joy of Easter morning will be saccharine and insubstantial without having passed through the awful dread of Friday afternoon and the silence of Saturday, so, in the same way, the joy announced on Christmas morning will be thin gruel indeed without giving yourself permission to grieve, and deeply, your season of waiting in the dark. That’s Advent.
Discomfort is the price of admission for a deeply meaningful Christmas. No Advent, no Christmas.
In our cotton-ball shepherd beards with our felt-board nativity scenes, let’s not forget the context of Jesus’ first coming, in all its hoping against hope. Let’s not forget that down the road from the infant’s cries in Bethlehem are always the loud tears of our Savior on a cross, and that the glory and joy we crave can come through no other road than one of our own pain, confusion, and threat of hopelessness.
2 – The Coming of Christ in the Second Coming
How many Advent sermons have you heard that focused on the Second Coming? Because of some bad books and, historically speaking, bizarre theological notions surrounding it, the Church today, at least in America, has lost a robust appreciation of what Christ’s second coming means for how we face the present day.
But for most of its history, the Church has known better. They knew that celebrating Advent, like real estate, is all about location. Celebrating Advent with a Scriptural imagination requires knowing our place.
The missionary statesman, Lesslie Newbigin, gave an interview near the end of his life. The interviewer asked him whether he was an optimist or a pessimist. Newbigin replied, “I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!” In some traditions, you’ll hear recited weekly, “Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.”
Advent marks the time between, the space we inhabit, between Christ’s first coming and His second coming. It’s so much more than marking the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas and “When can we open presents?”
You could say that of all the seasons of the year, it’s Advent that most clearly resembles our daily lives as followers of Jesus. We live in the time between. We look back to the King who has come, who has already made peace through the blood of His cross, securing our eternal redemption. It is finished! Jesus has been raised from the dead as the first fruits of the promised restoration of all creation.
And, we look ahead, in hope of a guaranteed future, waiting for our King to return and make all things right, and set the world and all creation free from its groaning. This too is Advent.
The two passages which head this essay capture the Advent situation. What time is it? “You know the time,” Paul writes (Romans 13:11). It is still night, still dark, though the night is “far gone.” It is not day yet, though “the day is at hand.” We are close. Closer. Salvation has drawn “nearer to us now than when we first believed.” But it is NOT YET fully arrived.
Until that day, we are now to cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. We are to conduct ourselves as if it were day, living as children of the light, even though the darkness around us is deep, as well as the darkness within us.
A little-known verse from 2 Peter captures the Advent dynamic precisely: “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God” (3:12). That’s what we do in Advent. We wait in hope like the famed watchman (Isaiah 62). And we hasten. But we do not hasten by the efforts of our own hands, as if there were anything we can do or need to do to move God’s hand.
We hasten by living as people of hope, abounding in hope, serving “the God of hope” (Romans 15:13), as we navigate this time between the old age that is passing away and the new age that is to come. To say it simply, Advent is apocalyptic. Apocalyptic Advent.
Rutledge points out that up until the Protestant Reformation, and including Martin Luther, the Church has long turned its focus at Advent not primarily on Christ’s first coming but on His second coming, to give “A song of hope; a weary world rejoices.”
To those wondering what a healthy and viable church looks like today, we need to recover this apocalyptic edge of Advent, to rescue the Second Coming from its bad press, and renew our theological imaginations towards reorienting our present lives around our sure and certain hope of Christ’s return.
3 – The Coming of Christ Today in Word and Sacrament
Finally, there’s the coming of Christ in our present moment through the Holy Spirit, through the Word of God, preaching and the sacraments. Let every heart prepare Him room.
As I’m writing this, a dear older friend has been waiting for results of a scan to tell her if those spots found on her liver are cancerous. That’s an Advent prayer.
My ten-year-old son and I recently watched a video about a ten-year old boy in Ukraine and his mother. The shells had been coming closer and had hit the house next door. They were preparing to evacuate to God knows where. That’s an Advent prayer.
There’s a widower dreading Christmas, feeling not just the absence of his beloved wife but what feels like the absence of God to his cries in the night. That’s an Advent prayer.
Advent asks us to look back and immerse ourselves in waiting for God to rend the heavens and come down. Advent asks us to look ahead and cling to the promise that the Sun of Righteousness will return and make everything sad untrue.
But today, Advent asks us to inhabit the present moment with a wintry joy that takes all facts into account and still finds a reason to sing – all the notes – and be still and know that God is with us, here and now.
If you’re the sort who likes to watch a movie on Christmas – then I recommend the film about Mr. Rogers, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. It’s the story of a cynical magazine reporter from Esquire, more wounded than he realizes, given an assignment to profile Fred Rogers.
In one scene, Mr. Rogers asks the man what he does with all his feelings, especially the dark ones. Rogers says, “There’s a lot you can do with those feelings. You can pound wet clay. You can play all the low notes on a piano at the same time with both hands…BONG!”
Over the course of the movie we learn that Rogers is truly a kind man. And that this does not come easily to him. He’s not a saint. He gets angry, his wife says. And we learn that his relationship with his own son has been strained and this causes him a good deal of pain.
In the final scene, after a very emotional story arc – and this is not a spoiler, this is after the big climax – Rogers is sitting alone on the set of his television show. He sits down alone at the piano. The lights dim. Then he lifts his hands. And he hits those piano keys. Bong! With great force. Several times. He sits alone in the darkness. In the moment, we feel the toll of the pain he carries, for himself and others. Then the lights come up, he plays a sonata on the piano and the credits roll.
That scene – that’s the arc of Advent. Give yourself permission to sit in the darkness so you can sing, full-throated, this Christmas.