Advent

Ever since I was young, probably as long as I can remember, Advent has been my favorite time in the church year. I’m not sure why. I expect some of the reasons have to do with the church and some don’t. I like this time of year when Orion the great hunter strides into the winter night sky and the first snows fall. Although once yesterday’s turned to freezing rain, I was a lot less excited about it. But Advent is also a wonderful season within the church calendar. It is the beginning, of course, of a new year. But beyond that, I think the character of Advent is crucially important to us as Christians. Entering into the meaning of Advent, living Advent as a time of expectancy is a fundamental piece of our lives as faithful Christians. Advent is a time of anticipation, of expectancy. It is a time of promise… a sure and certain promise, but as yet unfulfilled. Expectancy. God’s promise, yet to be fulfilled. In Advent, we spend four weeks waiting, waiting in hopeful expectation that God’s promise will be fulfilled in the time ahead.

That’s not an experience we get to practice very often in the secular world, living in hopeful expectancy of a certain promise. Advent is often heralded as an important antidote to the commercialization of Christmas. But I think Advent’s message goes even much deeper than that, is even more universally needed. How many of you know what WYSIWYG stands for? What You See Is What You Get. The acronym is used to speak of computer programs. What you see on the screen is what you get from the printer. This is generally considered a major advance in personal computing from the "good old days" when what you saw on the monitor was not at all what you expected to get from the printer. But I think in our culture "what you see is what you get" goes well beyond Microsoft Frontpage. We live in a "what you see is what you get" culture. We expect to be able to get whatever we see. We also do not expect to get anything more than what we see. Our is a culture that does not expect more of life than what the present offers, but in the present we see around us, expect instant access, instant results, instant gratification. What we see is what we want, and expect to get, soon. And in this world, at least the world outside the community of faith, we do not expect to get more than what we can see. What you see is all you are going to get. Maybe that’s why we are so eager to get it right away. What you see is all you are going to get.

In Advent we spend four weeks living in a world where what you see is not all you are going to get. We need to live in that world for at least four weeks every year. What you see is not all you are going to get. We intentionally live in that world for the four weeks of Advent. But as Christians we live in that world all the time. What you see is not all you are going to get.

Especially in a world that is often dark, that’s a good message to hear. The first part of the Advent message is acknowledging the dark places, the hopeless places in our lives. There are dark and hopeless places within us all that what we see cannot fill. What we see around us cannot fill the darkness within. It is no accident that Advent comes when the days are shortest. Advent comes, too, to the darkest parts of our lives. The failures and futilities. The losses and despair. The waste. The alienation. The frightened hopelessness. There are deep, dark places in every life. The older I get, the more of that I see and acknowledge in my own life and in the lives of others I am privileged, in part, to share. Advent comes in the dark night of body and soul with the message: what you see is not all you are going to get.

The best the world can offer us is maybe, sometimes, a way to tolerate or manage the darkness. And, of course, that can be very helpful. But Advent promises that light will be born into the darkness. Light will be born in the middle of night in the middle of winter. Light will be born. God’s promise is to create light in the very heart of darkness. God promises to birth himself into the basest, darkest, most forlorn corner of the human heart and soul and to bring light. We can hope for more than we can see around us. We can hope for more than the world can ever give us. We can hope for more than seems possible. We can hope for a better future. Advent teaches us, enables us, to live with hope. Advent teaches us how to live, day by day, with God’s promise that a better future lies ahead, that more is offered to us than the dark we see around us and within us. We learn how to live in hopeful expectancy. An important Christian life skill.

In Advent the promise is given, but not yet fulfilled. And in the darkness of our individual lives we do not know when the promise will be fulfilled, when the light will come. It will come, but we cannot know when. So it is we must wait. We must learn need how to live waiting in hopeful expectation. It’s not easy. We want control. We want instant solutions. The world promises instant solutions. I keep thinking of the advertising jingle: "Call Empire today. We’ll install the next day." New carpet and a life renewed. But the real darkness of heart and soul is a lot harder to fix. And we do not know, and cannot control, when the light will come. That is Jesus’ sobering message in this morning’s Gospel. "About that day and hour no one knows…. You do not know on what day your Lord is coming." But he is coming. Christmas always follows Advent. That is God’s promise. And the living of Advent helps us to trust in the promise. This is why we do not do Christmas during Advent. Part of Advent is knowing that Christmas is not now, but it does lie ahead. We do not have Christmas decorations in the church, but we will. We do not sing Christmas carols, but we will. We light only one candle on the wreath today, but later we will fill the church with light. In Advent, knowing the Christmas is coming, we learn to trust in God’s future promise.

We practice waiting in hopeful expectancy. We learn to trust in the fulfillment of God’s promise. One author has written of Advent: "The season of Advent awakens our anticipation of the future. It prepares us for the nativity of our Lord but also stirs expectations of what God might do in our futures. Advent is rooted in the basic human longing for a better time, a longing as ancient as the Hebrew prophets [who wrote O come, O come, Emmanuel]. After a long season of Ordinary Time, the Sundays before the Nativity excite the human imagination with hope and strengthen us to trust a future in which God meets us…. Ours is a day in which hopelessness often prevails and the prospects of the future appear dim. The biblical passages [for Advent] not only exhibit a yearning comparable to our own but announce a promise that empowers our faltering capacity to hope. The Advent proclamation unleashes a power that recreates the human spirit with its words of expectation" [Robert Kysar, New Proclamation, Series A, 1998-1999].

Can you grab onto and claim the Advent hope? It is, as we say in the burial service, a reasonable and holy hope… this hope for future union with God. Can you trust in God’s promise? God’s promise to come in the future, to bring light into the darkness? It is a reliable, a trustworthy promise. In the calendar of the church year, Christmas always follows Advent. We rehearse the fulfillment of the Advent promise every year to help us trust in God’s promise throughout our lives, to trust that fulfillment does lie ahead.

The Advent hope is something we need very much in the darkness of our lives. But it offers us even more. Not only is the hope a trustworthy promise of a better future, the hope itself can transform the present. Living in hopeful expectancy has the power to transform, recreate the human spirit now in the present.

This is what Isaiah is talking about when he speaks of the nations who trust in the triumph of Zion in the days to come, those who trust in the coming of God. These are the nations who "beat the their swords into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks. The vision of God’s future transforms the present. St. Paul, too, in his letter to the Romans speaks of those who know that salvation is near, that the promise is coming. They live in the day, putting on the Lord Jesus Christ. The future recreates the human spirit in the present.

So it is that in Advent we pray, let us cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light. Our hope in the light that is to be born empowers us now to put on the armor of light. Knowing that God is coming to meet us in the future gives us the strength, the vision, the power to recreate our present, to become ourselves bearers of light. A future hope transforms the present. For great portions of the church’s history the church has sought to use the future to transform the present… but with dire threats of future judgment if behavior in the present is not modified. But this Advent promise is wondrously different. It is a hopeful vision of the future. A vision in which God comes in love just to be with us, just to bring a sparkling light of divine holiness into our darkness… that promise for the future can recreate us in the present. Let us cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light. Now. Let us put on the armor of light and be bearers of the light out into the world’s darkness.