It is 2020.
This coming Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent (!). Our cities, our nation, our world remain in the grips of a 100-year event; a global health crisis that has displaced us from familiar rhythms, spaces, assumptions and social norms for nearly 10 months, now. Promising vaccines appear forthcoming - thanks be to God! - and there is renewed hope that NEXT year will be different; healthier, and brighter. However, we stand now on the cusp of winter, and what lies directly before us in the next few months is daunting. Tired as we are, a deep valley remains to be crossed. The cold, and the dark, the isolation and uncertainty will threaten to wear us down, before the end. It is a season and a path that will demand perseverance, discipline and faith. These are months that will require us to come to grips with the true nature of HOPE, perhaps in ways that we have never experienced before.
As the Apostle Paul exhorts us: “…Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (Rom 8:24) And, the author of Hebrews spurs us on, from hope to faith: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb 11:1) Hope, by its very nature, stands apart from us, rooted in a future and a promise; clung to, yet not possessed. Hope abides BEYOND the valley; it is the promise of an end to the struggle, and the presence of God with us in the midst of it. Hope does not permit us to avoid the journey and its challenges, but it offers us the strength to faithfully endure, to persevere, and find faith rewarded with joy. Hope is the vibrancy of life, in the MIDST of tension, not apart from it. Hope is the seedbed of joy and love found in the midst of struggle, not in avoidance of it. Hope lives in the journey, in the waiting. Our culture, built as it is to run upon the fuel of immediate gratification, so disinclined to wait for ANYTHING, has very little opportunity to experience genuine hope. We’re too busy getting to abide much waiting, and hoping. “Tension” seems to us a discomfort, to be done away with as quickly as possible. And yet, here in 2020 a pandemic has stormed into this very space, interrupting our activity, robbing us of our diversions, inflicting uncertainty and tension upon us, daily. And now, ten months on, having suffered so much disruption and loss already, fatigued and facing months of winter ahead, perhaps our greatest frustration is simply that this season refuses to be RUSHED to resolution. We are long done with this crisis; we struggle to accept that it is not done with us. We are an impatient people, in an impatient culture, being forced to wait. Forced, to plumb new depths of hope in order for life to remain tolerable, if not joyful. May we consider: There is a work that the Lord purposes to do in us, here, if we would receive it. May it be that in the midst of all this fatigue and frustration and fear and loss, here in this valley we might come to know the presence of the Lord with us in a whole new way. May it be that his promises come to new life. May it be that we learn what it means to HOPE, and do so joyfully, patiently.
Faced as we are with a winter like no other, and the prospect of a Christmas like no other, it strikes me: in 2020, more than perhaps in any year in recent memory, what we need is hope.
What we need, is ADVENT.
If Christmas is the celebration, Advent is the preparation. If Christmas is the “experience”, Advent is the expectation. If Christmas is the wedding, Advent is the courtship. Where Christmas is the consummation, Advent is the hope.
In the Christian “year”, Advent is a season in which we invite the Holy Spirit to form our hearts through an experience of LONGING; abiding in the tension of a promise not-yet-fulfilled. During this season we enter into the scriptural story and into the profound longing of Israel for their long-awaited Messiah, King. Overrun by foreign powers for generations, exiled from their land and national honor by the Lord himself as a consequence for their unfaithfulness, the spiritual experience and identity of Israel at this time remained defined by their HOPE upon the promise of God, that He would one day restore their fortunes, send them a righteous king, rebuke and defeat their enemies, establishing an everlasting Kingdom of righteousness and justice. Christmas, of course, is the day we celebrate that coming, the birth of that very King. Advent is the season in which we embrace the long years of WAITING, and the longing; the tensions and the questions and the faithful hoping. A patient season, a confessional season, a tense and prayerful season, enlightened by a joy rooted in faith in the promises of God… Advent is a spiritual schoolhouse of hope.
Christmas, when it arrives, will be a celebration, and rightly so. But in light of our current season and circumstances, I believe we may well find that ADVENT and the lessons it holds for us proves to be the true gift, this year.
May we embrace this season ahead as the gift to us that it is; in patient faith, in enduring joy, and in genuine hope.