Holding Our Breaths (Advent 1C)

I was talking to a pastor one time from another denomination, one that doesn’t follow the church calendar, and he said to me rather wistfully: “I kind of miss Advent,” and I said, “well, you can always put some in . . .” as if it's a commodity, like put a little tiger in your tank.  But it’s true, you can put a little Advent in, you don't have to hurtle full-throttle from Thanksgiving right on into Christmas, like some mean, holiday-celebrating machine. My sister and brother-in-law used to plan worship for a little Baptist church in Gold Bar Washington, and even though Baptists don’t do Advent – or Lent or Baptism of the Lord Sunday, for that matter – my sister and brother-in-law did Adventy-kinds of things for a while before Christmas day. But in many Protestant traditions, including my fellow pastor's, Advent has been lost, and to reintroduce it can cause dissension in the ranks.

These days, many of our fellow Christians can’t seem to wait for December 25^th to roll around . . . they want to start celebrating Christmas right after Thanksgiving, just like everybody else. And why not? It’s a festive, joyous season . . . Andy Williams called it the “Hap-happiest time of the year!”  We go out and sing carols, our breaths all puffy in the cold, and come back inside to drink hot spiced cider and eat cookies with those little sprinkles on top. Cities large and small construct mini-wonderlands out of colored lights and people walk or drive through them in great numbers. There’s a state park up the coast from where we used to live in Oregon that lights up the night right up until Christmas Eve, and the combination of Christmas cheer, crashing surf and barking sea lions is stunning and unique.

The fact is that every year, Christmas appears out of nowhere, almost as if someone’s thrown a switch.  The stores pipe carols through their Muzak speakers and lights twinkle merrily on electric shaver displays and if you like Jimmy Stewart, you’re in luck because It’s A Wonderful Life gets the royal treatment from NBC, and every time a cash-register goes ka-ching, another angel gets its wings.

Why would anybody in their right minds want to put this stuff off? Don’t we have a right to be happy? Aren’t we sick and tired of politics, politics and more politics?  Don’t we want a little joy in our lives? Well, of course we do, and truth be told, not many of us will forgo these things entirely in the next twenty-three days. So what’s the point of Advent? Why does the church insist that we stop and linger these four weeks when everybody else hurtles full-tilt-boogie into a winter wonderland?

Well, one answer is . . . we’re not everybody else, or at least we’re not supposed to be . . . and more importantly, Christmas is not everybody else's festival, or at least it’s not supposed to be. It’s our holiday, our story, and it started long before the year of Christ’s birth . . . we believe that God was working divine purposes long before four B.C. or whenever the latest guess at Jesus’ birth year happens to be. We believe that all of creation waits for final redemption, and that we must wait as well, to re-enact the yearning, longing desire for the coming of the Lord.  Isaiah expresses this well: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” He craves that presence, that over-riding comfort, as many of us do, deep down where our souls live . . . we are tired of the fighting, tired of the hate and oppression, and we ache after the spirit-balm of the coming of the Lord . . . can you not feel it? Can you not taste it, blowing on the winter winds? That's what Advent is about . . . it's about the longing, the anticipation, the preparing for the savior of the world. In short, it's about the waiting.

Jesus Christ, the savior of the world . . . who'll save us from more than just our sins. He'll free the oppressed, feed the hungry and we ain't a-gonna practice war no more. The ground-zero beating heart of Christian hope will be born 23 days from now, in a manger, in an out-of-the-way town in a minor Roman province. That's when Christmas is . . . it's not today, it's not next Sunday, or the Sunday after that. It's December 25^th, and until then, there is just the waiting.

But Isaiah also says that God works for those who wait upon the Lord, and this makes lingering, it makes abiding a virtue. Of course, it's a virtue we seem to have less and less of these days . . . advertisements blaring want and desire leave little room for waiting, little time for patience . . . the credit-card industry has been built on impatience, people ruin their lives for the benefit of the CitiBank bottom line. It's much easier to hand over that little piece of plastic than to wait.

But at Advent, we're required to wait upon God, and that's not a bad thing. Good ol’ Isaiah says that those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength. They'll mount up with wings like eagles, run and not be weary. They'll walk and not faint. God works through the waiting, it’s a means of grace, as theologians put it, and this recognition of waiting is at the center of contemplative prayer.  All the techniques for clearing the mind of clutter, all the ways of meditating on scripture, of rolling images of Jesus or words of comfort around and around in our minds, they're all aimed at one thing – to enable us to wait upon the Lord . . . to clear the mind of the debris of everyday life, all the centipedes of incidental thought crawling through our brains, all the extraneous detail of our full and busy lives. And when our thoughts are cleared, there is room for God to work in them and on them and thereby in our hearts . . . and it's a slow process, which seems much more like waiting than working. I know it's like that for me . . . I'm a product of our can't wait, why-not-have-it now society, and I want instant results from what I do. But when you do contemplative prayer, there’s most of the time no instant effect, no immediate improvements or change, and it can be discouraging.

But I’ve learned that God works in God’s own time, slowly and deliberately, perhaps because things easily gained are easily lost, and with anticipation comes value. As we wait, we have time to savor, to reflect, to integrate the changes fully in our lives, to make them truly part of us. And so at Advent, we're asked to wait for the Lord's coming, and as we do, God will work on us. As we take time to meditate on the season, and to contemplate our need for redemption, it becomes richer for us, and we come to know Christ more fully.

That's how Advent began – 1400 years ago it was a time of meditation and renewal, a time of cleansing and purification, a time for God to work on us before the coming of the Christ. As scripture says, we all become like one who is unclean, we all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, our sorrows, our pain – like the wind—carry us away.

And as the years passed, it came to pass that Advent became a time for contemplation not only of the past but of the future as well . . . it became a time to look forward to not only Christ's first coming, but his second too . . . and so we read passages like the one from Luke, describing poetically the final days. And just as we can't separate Jesus' identity as the crucified one from that of the ruler of the universe, so we can't separate the babe in the manger from the final judge of us all. They are the same event, really—the coming of the kingdom of God.

The great theologian Jurgen Moltmann wrote that the first coming of Christ, on that cold winter's night, makes sense only in light of his promise to come again. God's kingdom reached its greatest expression yet in the person of Jesus. In fact, Jesus is the kingdom personified, as he himself told his disciples – he said the kingdom of God is here among you. And if we had only his first coming to celebrate, it would be hard to believe that our current existence – definitely not heaven on earth – is somehow God's reign. So at Advent, we hold two events together, in celebrated tension, so that we can see the kingdom for the trees, so that we can see that despite all appearances, despite the famine and the misery and the wars and rumors of war, God's kingdom is coming, and it's already here and it will be here and fulfilled in the future.

Christ himself said it to John, in a dream there on Patmos Isle: “I am the alpha and omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” And he stands there, in the center, holding the past and the future together, and so through him is forged our present. Christ – at the center of our lives, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we take advantage of it or not, whether we allow him to mold us or shape us or use us or not. Christ at the center of the universe, within everything, holding together the past of bondage to corruption and sin over and against the future when our redemption is complete.

Christ at the center, in time as well as outside of it, in our world and yet transcending it, coming again – soon! – and yet for the first time ever. And our task over these coming weeks is simple – all we have to do is wait upon the Lord, who will act and has acted in his own good time. And it's a profoundly subversive task, a counter cultural task in the best sense, for it goes against the dominant tide of our culture. “You don't have to wait for anything,” it roars, over and over, time and again, and yet, we Christians – some of us, anyway – wait. We wait because we know it's a virtue, because we know that God will bless those who wait for the Lord. We wait because we know that in the waiting, the thing we await becomes sharper and sharper in focus, that as we meditate and cogitate and contemplate, when it finally arrives, when Christ comes in a lowly manger and in fire and cloud-bedecked glory, his arrival will be all the more sweet. Amen.