ADVENT DRAWS NEAR

Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.

mark 13:33

Last year at this time, I was serving as Interim Rector of St. James Episcopal Church in Painesville, Ohio.

It gave me an opportunity to revive a practice that I had enjoyed when I was in active full-time parish ministry – the creation of an Advent Devotional developed by the parishioners themselves. They wrote the reflections based on the readings taken from the daily lectionary.

Many congregations engage in this Advent exercise and with good reason. It gives parishioners a chance to wrestle with Scripture, deepening their knowledge of God’s Word and enriching their faith as a result. I am reminded of Paul’s words to his young disciple, Timothy:

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

2 Timothy 3:16-17

Now that I’ve reentered retirement, I am filling my extensive leisure time writing a weekly blog post each Wednesday. But during this upcoming Advent season, having no parishioners to inspire, my goal is to write and post a daily reflection each day, beginning with the First Sunday of Advent, December 3rd.

Again, the daily lectionary will be my springboard, except for Sunday, when I will use the assigned Revised Common Lectionary readings.

Advent calls to mind a line from the Carly Simon hit recording of the 70’s, “Anticipation.”

We can never know about the days to come,
But we think about them anyway…

Carly Simon

The song became the soundtrack to a popular ketchup commercial with the tagline, “The taste that’s worth the wait.”

I’ve used this example often in the past, so my apologies to those who have read it or heard me say it before.

Advent, in many ways, is like that ketchup bottle. It’s all about the waiting.

However, waiting goes against the grain of our society and its practices.

You’ve no doubt noticed how, with each year, those Christmas commercials seem to appear earlier and earlier. Stores begin decorating even before Halloween. Black Friday sales have begun weeks before Thanksgiving, to which has been added Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday.

And it’s not just the retailers.

Non-profit agencies have joined the parade with “Giving Tuesday,” as if not wanting to be left out of the consumer craziness, soliciting donations for every imaginable cause.

Even the ketchup company appears to have gotten tired of waiting, scrapping the upright glass bottle that required much pounding and shaking, for the much quicker and easier plastic squeeze-tube variety.

It’s so easy to get so caught up in the frenzy of the cultural pressure to have the perfect Christmas, buy the perfect present, cook the perfect dinner, that we can lose a sense not only of what Christmas is supposed to mean, but actually lose a sense of ourselves.

This whirlwind of commercials and charity drives raises the level of consumer guilt, along with family pressures and worries about money. All of which can numb us to the fact that we can become separated from God and each other.

Amid the impatience, the mayhem and the brokenness of the world we live in, Advent invites us to wait, to slow down our frenetic pace and focus on the coming of the Messiah.

It is a time when Christians are called to think more fervently on that mystery of faith that we proclaim each week in the Eucharist:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

Though we don’t know when Christ will return, we hold on to that hope. As Jesus counsels us in the Gospel reading for this coming Sunday, “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.” 

Martin Luther was once presumed to have said, “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would still go out and plant a tree.”

In other words, he was so confident in God’s promises that he would not alter his current state of being but continued to live as a beloved child of God, for whom Christ died and for whom Christ now lives.

As Christians, confident of God’s love and sure of God’s promises about the future, we can also invest in the present, in the everyday and the ordinary, in the people and causes all around us, not in a frenzied way, but with patience and anticipation of that on which all our hope is grounded – that Christ will most certainly come again.

Because of that assurance, we can live in the present, confident in the hope that we need not fear when that day comes.  

Advent gives us the time and space once again to believe in and live out this reality.

I invite you to join me as I reflect daily during this season of anticipation.