Why Advent?

I grew up going to church with my grandma and eventually with my parents. For the most part the churches we attended celebrated the Christmas season - decorations, Christmas pageants, Christmas Eve services, etc - but being that the tradition I grew up in was on the lower end of the liturgical scale, I really didn't encounter the idea of Advent until a couple of years ago. At first, talk of Advent made me cringe, but in the same way I came to appreciate the beautiful riches of higher liturgy I came to appreciate celebrating Advent. I know that some within my own tradition will criticize this as trying to make a certain time of year holier than another, as focusing on the consumeristic side of Christmas, and while I think they have legitimate concerns I think there is also something good about celebrating Advent.

Over the past decade I have come to a greater appreciation of the liturgical calendar. As Lauren Winner speaks of in her book, Mudhouse Sabbath, when she writes about the rhythm of the week in - week out celebration of the Sabbath, these things lend to our lives a rhythm that works to remind us of the story that we are in. Advent reminds us of the first coming of the Christ, of God becoming man. But Advent also reminds us that Christ is coming again. Advent is about hope. It is about remembering the promise that has been given and the story that we are in. Not some fairy tale full of elves, jolly old men and nine reindeer, or of a painless childbirth and a baby who did not cry, but the true story of Jesus, the son of God, being born in the same way as you and I, dwelling on earth as a real man; the true story that did not end 2000 years ago, but in his resurrection from the dead promises that he will come again.

My prayer is that we would not get caught up in the pull of thinking we live in the midst of some idyllic Thomas Kinkade painting where all is perfect, that we would not be in denial of our need, but that we would remember that our true hope is in the king that has come and who will come again.

A professor reminded us this week of a Christmas carol that reminds us of just this:

Joy to the World - Isaac Watts, 1719

Joy to the World, the Lord is come!

Let earth receive her King;

Let every heart prepare him room,

And heaven and nature sing.

Joy to the World, the Savior reigns!

Let men their songs employ;

While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains

Repeat the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,

Nor thorns infest the ground;

He comes to make His blessings flow

Far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,

And makes the nations prove

The glories of His righteousness,

And wonders of His love.