Advent Reflections

Back from traveling, gearing up for the mad rush of stuff-to-complete-before-Christmas. On the way back from my sister's house in OK (an 11-hour drive), my partner and I processed several hours of conservative evangelical podcasts covering a range of fun topics. Our conversations about those topics gave me notions for half a dozen things to delve into and write about here.

For now, though, I'm moved to put that on pause and recognize that today is the first day of Advent, the lead-up time to Christmas.

Growing up in the Southern Baptist Church, Advent was unknown to me. Starting around Dec 1, our church would start in on the Christmas hymns--a whole month of them. The very fist hymn I learned to play as accompaniment was "Away in a Manger." To this day, I adore Christmas hymns (the doctrinal ones especially) with a passion impervious to the requisite yuletide pessimism about consumerist takeovers of the holiday. I'm ready for Christmas--and Christmas hymns--starting, roughly, February.

It was a shock for me, then, to join a church which celebrated Advent, which is intended as a kind of buffer zone before Christmas, a time for Christians to focus on and prepare for Christ's coming rather than to celebrate his having already arrived. Oddly enough, the church where I first encountered Advent was the university-affiliated Baptist church I've written about previously--the one where my father served as custodian instead of pastor. I didn't really get it except to note (and lament) how there was a lot less Christmas hymn-singing than I preferred.

Joining the Methodist church meant confronting the reality of Advent more overtly. No Christmas hymns at all until, oh, the week of Christmas Day--if that. Instead Methodists have a whole other ("other" from my Baptist perspective, that is) subgenre of hymns dedicated to Advent ("His Promised Coming" as the hymnal puts it): "O Come, O Come Emmanuel"; "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus"; "People, Look East"; and frankly more that I don't really know well. Indeed, a lot of the hymns we sing are newly written, as if the Methodist church has only recently decided that Advent is for a different kind of hymn than Christmas carol.

I remember being a bit resentful of Advent, partially because the festival reinforced to me everything foreign in the Methodist church. I had a bit of pride as a Baptist in knowing how the church year worked, knowing how the hymnal worked, knowing how services worked--in general knowing Baptist stuff pretty well. Being a Methodist meant starting almost from scratch. A Chrismon tree (see here)? The wreath with the candles (see here)? That awful, sing-songy "Light the Advent Candle" ditty (see here)?

And no "Away in a Manger."

My parents in their respective services would generally arrange a kind of read-through-the-Christmas-scriptures (i.e., a service of lessons and carols) in which they could pack in all the favorite hymns in one super-service. So we did eventually get to sing Christmas hymns. But it wasn't the same as the month-long celebration of favorite carols I had loved as a child.

As I've grown older and perhaps more patient, though, I've come to appreciate Advent on its own merits. Actually, what helped me to appreciate Advent most was my having to become familiar with another bit of orthodox liturgy--Lent. Lent, of course, describes the forty days prior to Easter in which Christians meditate on and prepare for the Redemptive Act of Christ's suffering, death, and resurrection. It kicks off with Ash Wednesday, which I privately think of as a kind of Christian Apocalypse Day, on which it is appropriate to contemplate one's own mortality, the fragility of life, and the grace that passes understanding.

Advent, by contrast, struck me (strikes me still) as a kind of anti-Lent, by which I mean a dialectical complement to Lent. If Lent is the Last Supper, the Night in Gethsemane, the Holy Saturday--the time of tense waiting when hope seems stripped away--then Advent is a happy expectation, the sunlight at the end of a long tunnel, the welcome pregnancy. Like Lent, it deserves its stillness, its holy moments of pause within the bustle. But those moments are moments of thrill, of getting in touch with the excitement of the Good Work, the New Thing that is coming. It is hope, hope, hope that makes the celebration--the fulfillment of that hope--meaningful.

I recognize that, as a Christian, much of my theology rides on the Holy Week of Christ's redemptive act and of Christ's resurrection. But what really inspires me about my faith is the fact of Incarnation, that my God gave up godhood to be with me on Earth. That Event of God-With-Us is itself an act of divine atonement--at-one-ment--with humanity.

Advent reminds me that, if sober reflection on my sin and need for reconciliation is part of my faith, so too is the command to watch hopefully, to seek hopefully, and to find and rejoice.

For that reminder to hope, I can learn a few new hymns.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.

More tomorrow,

JF