I Advent – November 28, 2010
Every year about this time the branches of the Church that choose to observe the seasons of the Christian year find themselves more or less at loggerheads with what most people around them are doing: acting like Christmas is already here, when it isn’t; the season of Advent begins today, and it has almost four weeks to run before it’s over.
Not that Advent isn’t a good time to get ready for Christmas—a good time to do your Christmas shopping for that matter (or finish it up, for those of you, unlike me, who are ahead of the game)—after all, the word “Advent” is a construct from the Latin and means literally “the arrival” or “the approach” and points to something beyond itself.
Advent acts as a signal, and, depending on your particular standpoint, it either signals that Christmas is on the way or it signals that we’re on the way to Christmas.
Either way, Advent signals that it’s time to get ready.
So it’s perfectly appropriate to do your Christmas shopping during Advent.
(You already knew that!)
Unfortunately, Christians who choose to observe Advent are in the minority these days, which means that it is very easy to confuse what is going on in the malls right about now—the Christmas-shopping season—with what doesn’t actually begin until December 24th and is supposed to last until January 5th: the Christmas season itself.
Of course, we all know that one of the best ways to get people to buy things is to get them to feeling good, and what better way for someone to feel good than to be led to imagine that Christmas is already here?
(None of us is really all that good at practicing delayed gratification anyway!)
Now, I’ll have to admit that persuading already harried merchants here in the United States to give Advent a chance is probably unreasonable and unfair, even though the word “Advent” is actually a far less sectarian word than “Christmas” and has been used to designate this time of year in many European countries for years; I remember as a student in Germany having to look for “Advent cards” in the stores, when I wanted to send Christmas greetings to friends and family back home.
Still, somehow, “’Tis the season to get ready to be jolly…” doesn’t quite cut it.
No, we can go against the tide by choosing to observe Advent, but there’s no way in the world we’re going to change the direction of the tide.
All we can hope to do is to offer people a perspective on some things that is different from the one they may be used to.
—Which is one reason why we Episcopalians, as well as other Christian denominations that favor the use of formal liturgies, find ways to tone down the character of our worship at certain points in the year.
For quite a few centuries the liturgical color of choice for Advent was violet or purple, which, clearly reminiscent of the season of Lent, serves to emphasize the need to repent; in fact, there was a time when the season of Advent was largely viewed as offering one the opportunity, soberly and penitently, to prepare to be baptized at Christmas or on the Feast of the Epiphany the way that the season of Lent offered one the opportunity, soberly and penitently, to prepare to be baptized on Easter Day or on the Day of Pentecost.
Recently, though, more and more congregations have taken to using the color blue as a way of distinguishing the season of Advent from the season of Lent.
For some time now, for a good thirteen years, we in St. Andrew’s have been dressing our Advent liturgy in blue, the color of hope and expectation, rather than violet or purple, colors which have come to be associated not only with royalty, but also, and increasingly so, almost exclusively with an attitude of penitence.
If, thankfully, the atmosphere of Advent no longer needs to be unduly “colored” by the atmosphere of Lent, what Advent still offers is another way of looking at Christmas.
You and I are all too familiar with the hectic pace of the holiday season.
It won’t relieve the stress of that hectic pace, I fear, but Advent can help to make sense of it by reminding us of what the coming of Jesus Christ into the world meant then and means now.
So, next Sunday, as we do every year, we’ll be putting up the Jesse Tree, and we’ll be decorating it with ornaments that the children of our church school have made.
This is the tree that we prefer to put up at this time of the year instead of a Christmas tree (which we will eventually get around to putting up, of course), and this tree serves a unique purpose.
Each ornament that we hang on the Jesse Tree symbolizes a special moment in the story of God’s people as chronicled in the Hebrew scriptures, when God and human beings came into particularly close contact with each other; all of the ornaments point ahead to that wonderful moment when God and human beings came into perfect contact with each other at the birth of the Christ Child.
Another way we have of “not jumping the gun”, so to speak, is to sing Advent hymns, which stress the coming of Christmas, rather than Christmas carols, which we try to hold off on for as long as we can.
(Usually, for several reasons, waiting to sing Christmas carols until the Fourth Sunday of Advent is about the best we can do.)
So it’s time to get ready.
Our lesson from the Gospel according to Matthew for this First Sunday of Advent clearly stresses the importance of being ready:
“Keep awake,” Jesus says to the disciples, “for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.”
The event that Jesus is referring to here has come to be called “The Second Coming”, the moment when the Lord will return in great glory to judge the world, the moment when everyone will be asked the question: “How have you used the new life you were given?”
Who could possibly be ready for such a moment?
The truth is that with the possible exception of Mary and Joseph no one was ready for the Christ when he came the first time.
Jesus’ birth only began to be celebrated hundreds of years after it happened, once the implications of his life, death, and resurrection finally led the Church to be more concerned with the nature of his origin.
Being ready for the in-breaking of God’s kingdom into our lives is obviously a relative thing.
If almost no one was ready for the Nativity and if the crucifixion was over before anyone realized its significance, then how could anyone be expected to be ready for Christ’s return?
For that matter: How can anyone be expected to be ready for one of those moments in life when God and human beings come into direct contact?
You see, we really don’t have to wait for the end of the world as we know it for Christ to come again.
It doesn’t need to take place in the midst of a natural disaster, like the flood in the time of Noah; it can be during an upheaval in your personal life; it can be during an earthquake in your soul.
It can even happen when it seems like nothing much is happening in your life at all.
(It’s often in those moments when nothing much seems to be happening or when things aren’t going that badly, but really not that well either, that the presence of Christ in our lives can be so hard to detect.)
“Therefore you also must be ready,” is what Jesus said, “for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
So we’ve got to be ready.
But how ready is “ready”?
Surely, none of us is ever completely ready for moments when Christ suddenly appears at the center of our life.
How ready is “ready”?
There will be times when we will simply miss the boat, when we will be totally unaware that the light of Christ is breaking in upon us; the light will be there, but we won’t see it.
There will be other times when we will be ready enough—ready enough; that’s the key—when we will be ready enough to recognize the Lord when he comes.
“Keep awake,” is what Jesus tells us.
We may not always be able to recognize when Christ comes into our lives; sometimes we will not recognize him at all.
And we will certainly never ever be able to predict the moment he will arrive.
But if we can learn to recognize more often than not those blessed moments when Christ’s presence does touch our lives in a special and profound way, then surely we will be all the more ready to recognize him when he comes again in power and great glory.
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