Advent begins

Once again Advent has come. This is our second Advent of the Coronavirus Pandemic. It is a second year of disruptions in our lives and our ways caused by a rapidly-spreading illness. There was a time when I thought that part of my job as a preacher was to help people to understand and associate with how radical the hope of the Messiah had become in the time before the birth of Jesus. People had been talking about the Messiah for generations. The idea circulating among faithful people at least since the time of the prophets was that God would come to redeem Israel in a dramatic way. But year after year passed with the people experiencing layer upon layer of oppression and autocratic rule. Even after the people began to trickle back from the exile, foreign governments continued to rule over Israel. The tiny nation was passed back and forth between world powers, but never granted its own autonomy. The hope of a religious solution to the political problems of the country seemed far-fetched. The donation of the wealthy over the poor seemed too entrenched to be overcome. Hope could not be based in easily-observable phenomena. People had to reach for hope that defied what they could see.

That deep-seated longing somehow seems more obvious this year, as we come to Advent bracing for the worst as a new variant of Covid-19 spreads in a widening circle of nations, sparking frantic talks, travel bans, new quarantines and rules. Israel, the modern nation built on the principle of hospitality, is expected to put in place a total ban on foreigners entering the country today.

We are longing for some kind of return to what we think of as normal - some kind of return to the way things were before the pandemic. Will we forever be wearing face masks and unable to see the smiles of our friends and neighbors? Will the fear of illness and death hang over us as more and more people become infected and more and more people die?

The first Sunday of Advent is the Sunday of hope and we are asking, “Where is our hope?” Maybe we understand the longing of the ancients better this year than ever before.

As we planned for this first Sunday of the new year in our church, we have been talking about the feeling of homesickness. Could it be that our longing for return is a sign of the beginning of our preparation for the incarnation? We often talk about Advent as a season of preparing. Perhaps our preparations are born of the longing that we feel. I never experienced much homesickness. I grew up at church camp, so my first experiences of being a camper without my family took place in a location that was familiar and beloved by me. My first summers of working away from home were at my cousin and uncle’s farm where I had long believed that I belonged. I do remember a sense of a radical change that came from my first semester of college - a feeling that there was no going back now that I had moved out of the town where I was born and raised, but it is hard for me to describe that feeling as homesickness. When we moved to Chicago for graduate school, I knew that I only had to endure nine months of the city before we would be back in the mountains for summer. Even now, as an old man who has moved away from the Black Hills of South Dakota, the longing I sometimes feel for the familiar isn’t something I would describe as homesickness.

Maybe the analogy of homesickness falls a bit short for me personally, but I can identify with the longing for a world free from pandemic, ever spreading mutations and variations of the virus, and the persistent fear of others becoming ill. It is perhaps that longing that is the starting point for the season of Advent for me this year.

There was a time when Advent was longer in the church calendar - it started as a six-week season, just like Lent. It was, for the faithful, a long stretch of praying, fasting, study and self-denial in preparation for full membership in the church. That season was later shortened to the four weeks we now observe, but the sense of watching and waiting remains.

It is pretty clear, however, that we live in a culture that doesn’t like to wait for anything. I stopped by Tractor Supply to pick up a few small pieces for our son’s farm yesterday and there were Christmas carols blaring throughout the store. The bells of the Salvation Army are ringing from the doorways of the grocery stores. Our neighborhood was lit up with Christmas lights before Thanksgiving. People don’t want to wait. They want Christmas to come right now. Just being patient and waiting is a counter-cultural discipline for Christians in our culture where the Valentines Day displays are already in the storerooms of the shops ready to go out on December 26.

it seems right to allow Advent to begin slowly this year. I am looking forward to Christmas with its family gatherings and special treats for children, but I am willing to wait. We got out our Christmas boxes yesterday so that we would have our Advent wreath to light a candle this evening, but it will just be a single candle, not string upon string of lights adorning the outside of our home. I’m not ready to rush to Christmas. There is so much to think about, so much to consider, so much to ponder. It is going to take time.

Our hope is a light to our lives, a light that shines in the darkness of a world that has been obsessed with Black Friday. It is a light that reminds us that Coronavirus is not the only truth of this world. That light shines in the darkness. The darkness will not overcome it.

Made in RapidWeaver