I love the kitsch, the cheesy songs, decorating the tree (anyone's tree, really...I've helped with 4 so far), cookie baking, Muppet Christmas Carol (which I can probably quote from start to finish), geekin' out to Amy Grant and Michael Buble, I just discovered Cee Lo Green's Christmas album and stinkin' love it!
If Christmas could be a love language, it'd be this gal's.
Now, advent, however... is a whole other thing.
The incarnation. The intervention of God in humanity. The One who was thought to be some divine impersonal Logos becoming a person with skin and hair and guts. The answer to humanity's longing and crying for a solution to the human sin condition.
For those who don't know what it is, Advent is the time that Christians take during the weeks before Christmas to take on the posture of the Old Testament Jews and "wait for the Messiah." We wait as those who have already received the Messiah in Jesus Christ, but in doing so we wait for Him to come again when He will restore all things, and everyone will know Him as the true King.
Most of my Decembers for the 10 years that I've been observing Advent have seen me waiting on God for...something. An answer, direction, a truth, an epiphany, something like that.
On this side of the resurrection, we already know the end goal. Christ CAME. Yeah, there is the waiting, but mostly there's the thing that's been waited for. The prize. The end. The change. The incarnation. It's happened, and we wait with hope because...the mystery's been solved.
HOWEVER...I've been missing something significant (not the first time that's happened :/).
In viewing waiting this way, I've made waiting a period of latency and passivity.
But it's not just what we're waiting FOR.
It's the waiting itself, y'all.
While the end is what gives the hope, it's the longing in the meantime that makes the juxtaposition of the unrealized/realized hope so powerful.
This year I've come to see Advent as kind of a mini lifetime. A microcosm, if you will.
If one could take a lifetime with all of its experiences and lessons and events and joys and sorrows and concentrate it down into one month, it bears a remarkable likeness to the Advent season:
~We've got a promise of the coming King
~There's lots of fellowship
~Times of loneliness and joy feel extra hard or extra beautiful
~The hurts and lack of justice in the world are augmented
~There are lots of distractions with materialism and missing the point altogether through the love of secondary or created goods
And, just as in my life, if I am to work out my salvation with fear and trembling, the Advent season as a concentrated lifetime should see me laboring even more to be like Christ...not to just wait passively.
Now, the end is, indeed, GLORIOUS! A perfect prize--the first coming of the incarnation as well as the time when He will come again and establish His kingdom on earth.
...but He delays. He makes us wait. Why?
So that people who don't believe may come to repentance, and so that we who are regenerate might be made more like Him.
II Peter 3:11-12
"...what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God..."
I've been faced with this question this Advent: What sort of person ought I to be, and am I becoming that? Because I'm becoming something, whether I know it or mean to or not.
C.S. Lewis speaks to this in Mere Christianity:
"...every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature...
To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.
Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other."
So this Advent...I've been called to actively wait and work out my salvation, basking in the beauty of the incarnation while warring against my flesh and selfishness.
He has come, and He is coming. Wait well with me.
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