Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down…to make your name known…so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
Have you ever felt that strongly about the coming of God?
I suspect you have, whether you’re thinking about it right now or not. Longing – hoping – waiting – praying for the coming of God, for the moment when all wrongs are righted, everything is made clear, the bad guys get what’s coming to them and the good get their reward – has been a lifelong habit of God’s people for not just generations, but millennia. 2500 years ago, Isaiah was neither the first nor the last of God’s people and prophets to express this powerful longing for the coming of God.
The ultimate coming of God, the big and final one, is not likely to be easy or quiet. Isaiah talks of wildfires and quaking mountains. Jesus tells his disciples about the falling of the stars and the end of sunlight – the collapse of eternal and life-giving universal constants.
But still, we’re supposed to want this. To long for it, as the prophets and disciples did.
And in fact, most of us probably do want this, whether we think about it this way or not.
Does your heart yearn for a time without wars around the globe; without the threat of violence breaking out nearer to home?
Do you wish – casually or fervently – that we weren’t divided by the evening news, religious differences, economic status, or the strange imaginary lines we call race?
Do you want to love your unlovable neighbor,
want to know that you’re doing what’s right, without a daily struggle of compromise and discomfort,
want final proof that the bad guys don’t win?
Then yes, you – like the rest of God’s people through the long centuries – are waiting, hoping, longing for the coming of God.
And maybe you – like me – have given up any practical expectation that it’s coming in your lifetime. Maybe heaven is like that, we think, but here…? Next month, this week, even a decade or two – seems wildly unrealistic. It’s not something you expect to have to plan Christmas dinner around, is it?
And yet Jesus said it’s happening soon. So soon that we have to stay awake for it. (I can barely stay awake for the end of a night game). It’s coming any minute, but no one – not even Jesus – can say when.
It’s exhausting to try to wait like that. To stay constantly fully alert when we don’t know when - or quite what - we’re waiting for. Human bodies aren’t built to maintain that fever pitch of anticipation that has us pacing at the door, or glues your nose to the window, eager to spot the first sign before anyone else.
But we’re supposed to. Still, we’re supposed to – all these years and centuries after Jesus said that. And waiting at that pitch all the time can turn it into anxious habit that dulls our awareness instead of keeping us alert.
So instead, we Advent.
We put this season on our calendars, three or four weeks as the days get shorter every fall. We create a season to wake ourselves up to the longing within us, the longing and waiting of the earth itself, for the coming of God.
Advent is our way of bending God’s time to our time – of borrowing from eternity those moments right before God comes, when the air crackles and sparkles with anticipation, to wake us up in the dull here and now. Every year, we borrow that expectancy from some unpredictable place in God’s calendar to a predictable place in our annual calendar, so that we can train our hearts in eager patience and keep them ready for that moment when God at last bends our time to God’s time in that final, disturbing, glorious, arrival.
In the church, we practice this bending of time by the scripture we read – scripture that challenges us to expect the King of Kings when we see the familiar baby in the stable; scripture that’s meant to stir up the quiet, rarely-conscious longings within us. We practice expectation by lighting candles one by one on a wreath that promises completion within a few short weeks. We practice expectancy in prayer and song.
And we do all this, of course, while the world outside our doors is practicing an expectancy of another sort; one filled with shopping and baking and chores and travel and the universally known deadline of December 25.
Every year I’m torn. Every year my December sense of anticipation is caught between the anxious rushing and deadline responsibility and sugary delight of the Christmas shopping season, and the lively patience, radical openness, humility and peace of Advent waiting, Advent expectation. I can’t seem to settle to one or the other.
So every year, I’m grateful when someone, somewhere, reminds me: Even though it’s true that the secular Christmas rush can obliterate Advent, it doesn’t have to. In fact, it can nourish Advent in us.
The December assumption of universal generosity and love is just what the world needs to practice so that we’re ready for the absolute presence of God. Our job - as Advent people - is to immerse our hearts in that generosity even when the lines are long and the traffic is bad. Our job is to hold on to, to demonstrate and share, the traditions and choices that help create eager patience, open-hearted love, humility and peace in our own spirits in the midst of the busy world around us.
I find choosing Christmas gifts overwhelming with both anxiety and delight. I love to get it right - and I really really want to get it right (without, of course, overspending my budget), and so… without knowing it, I start to listen differently. I pay close attention to what I know about people’s delights and passions and fears and hopes. And I think Jesus would love it if I did that year-round – if we all did that daily. That attention to the other is the heart of God – and this is a time of year when the secular world teaches us to practice it.
Maybe you love to bake, or worry about baking at this time of year. The delicate timing or finicky precision of traditional cookies could be a chance to immerse yourself in expectancy and gentleness.
If you are the person who loves - or worries about - Christmas cards this time of year, that’s an opportunity to get wrapped up in the web of relationship and connection that Jesus loves. An opportunity, in other words, to practice love, practice receiving as well as giving it – right in the midst of the hunt for addresses and the calculation of postal deadlines.
If you love decorating, or if decorating makes you anxious, maybe God is helping you to see the signals of eternity in the scent and sight of pine – or in the endless knot the tree lights got tangled into! Maybe God is helping you to notice the ways we put hope, generosity, and love into shapes and things, and place them around our homes to create an atmosphere of patience and expectancy that nourishes the soul.
This year, let’s let the Christmas rush remind us of our deeper longing for the coming of God - not on December 25, but for always, and in all ways. Let’s have Advent even more at home, at work, in the mall and the grocery than in church; let’s immerse ourselves in the bending of God’s time to our time, so that we are ready not just for the wonder of the baby in the stable, but for the sudden eruption of God in all power and glory into our ordinary time, and the waking of our hearts for eternity.
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