In the past ten or fifteen years or so, Advent has become popular in places it wasn’t previously. Churches that don’t observe the church calendar, with the exceptions of Good Friday (maybe), Easter, Christmas, and sometimes Pentecost, now have added Advent to the list. There’s something beautiful here. The Tradition is expanding, in some ways at least, and some of the important themes like waiting and longing are, for at least a few weeks, entering the vocabulary and perhaps even the practice of some. But there’s danger here too. For one, waiting and longing, when life is going even relatively well, can quickly become mere sentimentalism. Second, there’s a temptation to celebrate the season but ignore the texts the season gives us. A lot of the texts aren’t pretty. We’re told over and over to “wake up!” and to repent. Advent is not exactly sweet. There is a sweetness to it, of course, but it’s often a difficult sweetness.
Fleming Rutledge’s has given five words to open the season that have become increasingly popular:
“Advent begins in the dark.”1
These are great words with which to enter into this season. In my sermon last night I quoted those words, but also these:
“When God’s presence is taken for granted, it is no longer real presence.”2
It is not, of course, that God abandons us. Rather, when we take God’s presence for granted we begin to locate God’s presence in places (not least, our own giftedness) and one day, like Samson, wake up to realize that the god we assumed was God is of no help at all.
If Advent begins in the dark, this advent begins in lament. The lectionary puts us at the very height of an “extended communal lament.”3 The people are asking God to rip open the sky, come down and do something (Is. 64:1). But God does not rip open the sky. If you’ve ever been desperate for God’s immediate intervention and have not received it, you can relate to the spiritual disorientation of the people represented in Isaiah’s lament. And this, friends, is Advent.
Yet however disoriented, we are never without hope. Not ever. It’s just that hope often comes in ways we do not expect. We often go looking for hope in the place that we found it last time, but hope springs up in various and often strange places. Scott Bader-Saye says it so well:
Our hope does not rely on God’s acting today in the same ways God acted in the ancient stories, but it does rely on God’s being the same God yesterday, today, and tomorrow—a God who hears our cries, a God who does not abandon us, a God who will finally redeem all that is lost in a new heaven and new earth (Isa. 65:17). The tradition of biblical lament does not invoke the past as nostalgia, nor does it dismiss the present in despair; rather, it draws on the collective memories of God’s people as a source of hope for the future.4
Advent – this Advent at least – begins in lament. Not sentimentalism. Not nostalgia. But also not despair. So if you are entering this season in which you normally find great solace feeling instead bewildered – you’re entering it in exactly the right way. This may not seem comforting, but it’s here that we learn real hope. Hope draws on the stories of God’s faithfulness in the past not in order to replicate the past but in order to remind us that God is trustworthy. God is no idol with the appearance of giving us what we want when and how we want it (while actually robbing us blind), God is living and active, moving over here and over there while remaining faithfully everywhere. The hope of Advent is not ‘I found God where I always find God.’ The hope is, rather, awaiting the coming of the God who appears in ways, and places, and faces we never thought to look. And this appearing may take time – but stay awake, because God comes when we least expect God to come. The stories of faith are indeed our stories, but not in the way we think. They are ours not for replication, but for reminder, and the reminder for hope. And what they remind us of is that though God hides, God never abandons. So don’t hold your back your tears, or even your screams. As Patricia E. De Jong writes,
“As a friend has said, this is not a season for passive waiting and watching. It is a season of wailing and weeping, of opening up our lives and our souls with active anticipation and renewed hope.”5
Especially this Advent. And the weeping and wailing are not the opposite of hope, friends, they are the gateway to it.
Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2018), 251.
ibid. 261.
Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Vol. 1, Advent Through Transfiguration, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 2.
ibid. 6.
ibid.
Thanks Phil. Keep up the good work!