This may come as a surprise to some of you considering that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has well passed, but we are not in the Christmas Season right now. If you take seriously the traditions of the Church, the period shortly after Thanksgiving and before Christmas Day is the Advent Season (Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas). While I am sure many people would say, “Whatever. Who cares?” I believe it is important for the witness of the Church and the spiritual formation of Christians to recognize and take seriously the difference.Advent matters because it teaches us not only to wait, but to wait in hope of Jesus Christ. Admittedly, I am not very good at this. It is not so much the waiting part that trips me up. Certainly, like most Westerners, I have gotten used to instant gratification. With Netflix I can watch nearly whatever I want whenever I want. In a world of cellphones I can call or be called in my car, in a restaurant, or even in a pristine national forest. It does drive me crazy, too, when it takes more than half a second for a webpage to load. But in spite of those examples—in the big scheme of things—I have gotten better at waiting.
For me, it is what I am waiting for that I still struggle with. If you asked, I could tell you a nice, orthodox cognitive response about how what I am waiting for is the final day when Christ comes and fully restores all of creation, makes everything right, and I get my full head of hair back. However, in my day-to-day life and the way I live it, I am waiting for all kinds of things, but God is quite often not one of them.
What I find myself waiting for is something amorphous and unclear called “better.” And I sometimes fear that “better” is not coming. As a single person in my late 30s, I am waiting to meet a woman that would be dumb enough to marry someone like me. I am waiting to feel like I am doing something meaningful with my life (I am also waiting for clarity on what that might be). I am waiting to find the motivation to do more with the gifts and opportunities that I have before me, instead of squandering them as I frequently do. I am waiting to no longer feel so lonely.
Aside from my self-center, middle class white people problems, I am also waiting for people to stop starving in a world with a ridiculous amount of food and resources. I am waiting for governments and political militants to stop using violence and killing—most of which they get young poor and working class folks to do—to achieve their goals. I am waiting for children to stop being molested and beaten and for men to stop raping women. I am waiting for people to treat animals a little more like responsibilities and less like things and commodities. I am waiting for me to actually do something about the things for which I am waiting. And when the sense overwhelms me that none of these things will ever come, I find myself waiting to die; if nothing else comes to pass, this surely will.
What the above self-indulgently dark words show is that I am waiting and wallowing in my own story with little reference to God beyond lip-service platitudes about “seeking God’s will” that I do not mean but have to say because I am a Christian. I end up waiting in a fragmented life that will end like every life ever has. And this is precisely why Advent matters.
Advent is the ultimate reminder of what is worth waiting for. That it is called Advent—Latin for “coming”—reminds us that life is not simply “one damned thing after another” heading nowhere. God is coming to finish making what is wrong right. We as Christians have faith that God already started this 2000 years ago at the first Christmas with the birth of Jesus the Messiah, God incarnate. He came to live among us, show us more fully the nature and character of God, and to liberate humanity from sin, which has manifest itself both in individuals and corporately in the deification of empires, the love of money, and domination games that the powerful play over the weak.
While this in-breaking of God into the material world has thus far not eliminated sin, it did conquer the inevitability of Sin’s power and its resultant eternal death and separation from God. That God will not abandon humanity to decay and nothingness is evidenced in God’s son, Jesus. What has been done in him and through him in his new life and resurrection body will be done for those who are in him and for creation (cf. Rom 8; 1 Cor 15).
Of course, we must wait till the return of Jesus for this current age to wrap up and be followed by a new one in which all of creation is whole, in communion with God, and death, suffering, and selfish ambition are no more. But perhaps the supreme beauty of the first Advent is that it means not having to wait for the second one to start living under the reign and healing power of God that will eventually complete what God started in Christ’s resurrection. In God’s imperfect Church—through the power of the Holy Spirit—loneliness, fear, greed, lying, and idolatry can begin to end now.
And that is what Advent is all about, Charlie Brown.
