Advent as the Antidote

Originally posted at Misfits Theology Club.

I quit Lent this year. I didn’t really, but in retrospect, I should’ve. When the COVID lockdown started, it was unsettling. Everything was different. People were dying. The world seemed lost. I didn’t figure it out until Easter, but, in the time of global pandemic, Lent doesn’t make sense.

The liturgical year is a re-enactment of Jesus’ life, a way to tell time that corresponds with the cycles of hope and despair, suffering and salvation, which mark human existence. We observe these seasons as a reminder. In a world that is easily distracted by wealth or privilege or competing attempts to ascribe meaning to self-indulgence, we’re prone to forget reality, if not ultimate reality.

In normal times, at least for us in the wealthy West, Lent is a welcome and necessary focus on the suffering our culture spends so much time helping us avoid. As we walk through the pains of human existence, through the eyes of Jesus, who chooses willingly to identify with the poor and oppressed, we can better understand our responsibilities to each other. We recognize and remember that salvation costs something.

It’s often said that white congregations focus on Good Friday and minorities emphasize Sunday morning. This alludes to the divergent experiences of privilege and oppression. Those Christians who don’t look like me don’t need to be reminded of the cost of salvation, or the very real place of suffering in the human condition.

In normal times, I need Lent. Yes, it’s the epitome of privilege that I can choose a specific season to focus on and attempt to understand the depths of suffering in the world, but it is also reality. Without those intentional periods, despite my everyday attempts to avoid the seclusion and separation to which modern society gravitates, if I don’t make space for suffering and sacrifice, my culture will do its level best to ensure I never see it.

Ideally, we’d be able to focus on all aspects of God’s Kingdom and Christian living at all times. We’d be able to balance the positive and the negative, the suffering, sacrifice, and celebration all together in a messy, but helpful mix. I’ve tried and I’m just not that good at it. I need the rhythms of the Church Year to keep me honest.

Not this year, though. Lent just didn’t make sense. I did not need to be reminded that people are suffering, that the world is not as perfect as I’m led to believe, that peace and justice and equity and salvation don’t just happen. I was reminded of those things every day. More of it on Sunday wasn’t helping.

But its for that same reason I’m really looking forward to Advent. In the same way Lent was the exact wrong season for us to be in a global pandemic, Advent is the perfect time to experience an overwhelming problem that is beyond our control.

Advent is my favorite season – largely because I’m a control freak and I constantly guilt myself into believing I’m not doing enough. I love Advent, because I’m given permission to pass the buck, to admit I can’t solve all the problems in the world – that no one can – and to put all the weight of responsibility back on God.

Advent is the season to shake your fist at the heavens and exclaim, “Why the heck are you letting this happen?”

Now, I don’t believe God pulls strings in everyday life. I don’t think God controls the weather and I don’t think God can keep my car from running out of gas until I get to the next exit. I don’t have a conception of God that lends itself to the unexplained.

I’m also not one to abdicate human responsibility. I don’t think we, collectively are incapable of living and being the people God created us to be. While I don’t think humans naturally possess the ability to bring about our own salvation, I do whole-heartedly support the idea that, as part of God’s salvation of the world, we’re invited and included (and perhaps necessary) for that future to become reality.

We can do what God has called us to do. We have a part to play in the fulfillment of all things. We just can do it by sheer force of will. Like most gospel-related issues, this is one of control. We attempt to tackle, solve, and overcome our problems with power and force. If we give more, work more, try harder, accomplish, then we can bring about the solution to all life’s problems.

Advent is the season where we admit that’s just not true. You cannot conquer your enemies by cunning or guile or brute force. We can only “win,” by persistence. Advent is the season where we remind ourselves to keep our heads down and keep at it. War, poverty, hatred. Racism, inequality, violence. These are the insidious enemies of the gospel and they remain so because we continue to attack them on their own terms.

COVID has shown us we can’t win through bluster. We can’t wish or will it away; stubborn refusal to acknowledge the power of this particular enemy has not effect (or maybe the opposite effect). That does not mean it can’t be defeated. God has promised and given us the power to overcome. It’s just not done the way the world tells us it should be.

We are powerless to defeat real evil, if we expect the victory to come tomorrow or the next day, or even in our lifetime. That doesn’t mean we stop trying, but it does mean we take a different approach. Advent is the season where we let go of our allusions of grandeur and say, “God, your way better work, because ours sure isn’t.”

That’s the desperate hope I need during this pandemic Advent season. I pray it’s hope you find for yourselves during this time as well.

Christ has come. Christ is coming again. Come, Lord Jesus. Come.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Advent is my favorite season of the year. I think it comes from my own psychological baggage. I’ve always felt deeply empty – my therapist might encourage me to say worthless. Oh I know I’m a beloved child of God and I’m not out there looking for abuse or anything. I know who I am; I just don’t always feel it.

I heard Ian Morgan Cron speak to Olivet Nazarene University chapel recently – he talked specifically about this lack, this need, this inner sense of emptiness. He called it a universal piece of the human condition and that made me feel better. Perhaps I’m not as alone or unusual as I might’ve thought. I suppose a sanctified Nazarene elder such as myself shouldn’t still be struggling with issues of worth and purpose, but here I am and I don’t think I’m alone.

That’s exactly why I like Advent. Advent is the season that provides impetus for Christmas. Christmas is the celebration of incarnation, of Christ coming to Earth as a cute little baby boy. But that begs the question: why? Love, of course - it’s always love - but more specifically why do we need the kind of amazing sacrificial godly love we see in the birth of Christ?

It’s because we’re in such a sorry spot.

The world is pretty messed up most of the time, and we, the people of God, are far too often in the middle of it. There is pain and violence and abuse and war, depression and divorce and greed and selfishness – and there’s just as much of it in the Church as there is outside. We’re all terribly inadequate, yet deserving of so much more.

It’s that distance, that great divide between who we are and who we are created to be that Christ comes to bridge. That’s Christmas. Advent is about measuring the gap and affirming its impossibility. In Advent we mourn, we lament, we confess, and we beg.

We mourn the great potential of God’s creation and the ways in which we’ve helped to mess it up. We lament the great terrors we human beings have wrought on the world and just how many of them have grown out of control. We confess our inadequacy to tackle even the simplest of tasks without the divine presence of God almighty. And we beg for mercy. Please, Lord, don’t let us go down with this ship!

Advent is the season where we remind each other of how far we have to go, but also of how much God loves us and the absolute, unquestionable salvation that is just around the bend. Yes, we are preparing to celebrate the coming of messiah, but also of his immanent return. We bask in the joy of God’s love – the love spoken of so eloquently in John 3:16 – but we also sit with baited breath, anticipating the culmination of the Kingdom that Christ ushered in with his presence and that we so desperately need.

I love Advent, I think, because this one time of year, in the midst of our holiness culture, there’s permission to be me. I know we like to say we’re not about sinless perfection anymore, but that idea is just such a part of our DNA its shadow always lingers. There’s an unspoken (hopefully) drive to be light years ahead of where we are. Always better. Never satisfied.

Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that… in spurts, but we need a season to escape that pressure and be faulty human beings in need of a savior. It might not sound like Advent is a time for rejoicing, what with all the confessing, mourning, and lament, but Advent can be freeing for people who feel obligated to solve all the problems of the world most of the time.

Advent is our season to give up, to recognize the futility of our strivings, and place all the responsibility on God. The early cry of Advent was maranatha, “Come, Lord,” the only prayer possible when we’re at the end of our rope, when our only hope is THE only hope. It’s true that God meets every need, but we rarely see God’s way through the darkness of our desperation.

Salvation comes in unsuspecting ways: like a baby in a manger when it feels like we need an army.

Advent prepares the way for Christmas, like Lent for Easter. We need the struggle to appreciate the miracle. We need to live in the midst of who we really are before we can approach the awesome majesty of who we’re created to be.

Don’t skip Advent. Don’t make it just four weeks of advertisement for Christmas – Walmart does enough of that for everyone. Sit in the tension of the already and the not yet. Create anticipation for the glory yet to come by recognizing the profound sadness of a world not yet complete.

And when you get to Christmas, enjoy the whole thing. Those twelve days are not just an annoying song. The wisdom of our forebears knew we needed more than just one hectic morning of wrapping paper and pajamas to fully pay off the anticipation of our sorrow. We’ll be back in the midst of the world soon enough. Sing carols on New Year’s. Say “Merry Christmas” during the Rose Bowl parade.

It’s a long year and a long life. We need Advent. We need Christmas. They help us celebrate all of who we are: complex, oft-inferior, and entirely messed up; but also beautiful, beloved, lovingly crafted creations, in the very image of God.

The world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket, but it’s ok to think that it is once in a while. That’s called Advent, and it’s my favorite season of the year.

Cynicism Keeps Hope Alive

So, last night I took a few minutes to listen to my college roommate preach at our alma mater. His introduction talked a lot about cynicism and hope. He used the example of Debbie Downer, a Rachel Dratch SNL character he's been known to enjoy. He's also been known to associate her with me, enough that I was legitimately worried I'd come up in the sermon (I didn't). It did start hitting a bit close to home, though, especially as he defined cynicism (he might have quoted the dictionary) as something like "the belief that all human actions are fueled by selfishness."

At first I wanted to be upset (even though, it should be pointed out, there was no direct or indirect condemnation of me, that was all in my head), but I just couldn't muster it. I'm not embarrassed by my cynicism. Maybe I should be (at least my brain thinks that might be true), but I'm not. I don't have a heavy conscience over it and I could (and will - keep reading) defend it.*

That whole process took a very short amount of time to work its way through my nervous system and psyche, mostly shaped by his explanation of cynicism and hope as opposites. If cynicism sees the world shaped by selfishness, hope is the belief that things don't (and won't) always have to be this way. Hope sees the truly selfless moments that do exist as speaking to some greater truth about the world, while cynicism sees these moments as anomalies.

I am certainly a cynic, absolutely. I think it's a realistic was of looking at the world around us. People are, in fact, pretty selfish, myself included, most of the time.

I am also (or at least try to be) a person of hope. I have a strong belief in the ultimate consummation of the world - that this world, birthed and nurtured in love, will eventually find the fulfillment of that love in the end. I've dedicated my life to that notion. So even if (and I do agree) cynicism and hope are opposites (a really great way of juxtaposing those things, by the way) - they are not mutually exclusive. It's part of the fun in living among the intersection of two worlds.

Christians profess that Jesus Christ changed things - that the world before his life, death, and resurrection was different than the world after. In my view, this doesn't mean there was a total sea change, but rather that the influences dominant in the world have shifted. Selfishness has been overcome by the selfless love of God. Not that it has been defeated, but that it has begun to die. So we live in a world, yes, birthed and nurtured in love, but also sewn with selfishness - and while that love is purging the selfishness from the world, it's power and affect** remains.

We need both, of course. We need hope to sustain us in the midst of despair. We're pretty good about doing that, though. You can google all the pictures of flowers growing up out of sidewalks to get the intimate human connection to hope. But we need the cynicism, too - especially in culture of denial. My comfortable, white, American existence insulates me from a whole lot of the effects of selfishness in the world. I rarely have to see poverty, homelessness, mental illness, or violence (outside of maybe tv), I don't generally have to deal with addiction or hunger or true anguish. My society has constructed itself specifically so I'll forget the ills of the world and be content to consume and be entertained.

That atmosphere kills off hope, but it also kills of the effect of hope. Without real examples of pain hope is less of a motivator. It becomes denuded, inert - at least it can feel like that to me.

That's why I need cynicism. It keeps the emotional receptors alive. Cynicism and hope together build compassion. Too often it seems, our insulated world of complacency removed the ability to feel. When people are confronted with starving children on some unwise commercial appeal, their gut reaction is horror, but their actual reaction is ignorance - we pretend the pain doesn't exist because we're incapable of either cynicism or hope.

Apathy. That might be the real enemy.

It certainly seems to be what I'm afraid of. I've not ever thought about it this way until right now, but it makes sense. I want to keep feeling. I need to feel deeply to maintain hope. It's so easy in this world to give up the notion that things can be better (especially because they're already pretty good for me and most of the people I see everyday). It would be very easy for me to lose hope. So I remain cynical. It's my way of reminding myself that the world in which I culturally occupy isn't the world I physically occupy.

This might not be the best way to accomplish this task, but it is effective. I'm not saying it's right or recommending it to you, but this means does, in fact, serve a very important end. Regardless of what means you pursue it, the end is vitally important. We have to keep feeling - and feeling deeply.^

I appreciate my cynicism. Not all the time, of course. I don't really enjoy being Debbie Downer (although there's something deeply comforting to me in those sketches, which is itself probably worth three years of therapy), but at the same time, I think this healthy*** dose of cynicism, I think, is what helps me see terrorists and child molesters as human beings. Cynicism is, in large part, contrarian. Yes, it's a bit of a downer to see pain in what everyone else sees as joy - but it's kind of a blessing to see love in the midst of communal anger, to see hope when others see selfishness and cynicism.

Of course there are total cynics - people who see despair and greed and selfishness even when everyone else sees those things - but those people are straight nihilists - they might even be insulted by the label "cynic." That's much deeper than Debbie Downer and her ruining of birthday parties and Disney World. That's something completely devoid of hope - although, the cynic in me has managed to keep alive a robust understanding that nothing - no person, no situation, not even that depressing nihilist - is truly devoid of hope.





*It should also be noted that Jeremy took this sermon in a slightly different direction than this post. There's nothing he said that would directly contradict what I'm saying here and this isn't at all a rebuttal. I just got thinking about this because of that. Nothing more.#

**I know "effect" makes more grammatical sense there, but I wanted to emphasize that both the result and influence remains and I wasn't exactly sure how to best communicate that without making the sentence ungainly long - thus a reference only the best theologically trained grammarians might hope to understand.

***Healthy as in robust, not necessarily as life-affirming.

^Incidentally, this is why Lent and Advent are so important - they help us wallow in the reality of our situation, so we can better appreciate the joy and hope of Easter and Christmas.

#That being said, he very well may disagree with what I wrote here, so don't construe the last statement as somehow expecting an endorsement of this post from him.

Advent

So, Advent is my favorite time of the year. I grew up in a typical evangelical congregation, we light candles in the wreath each week, but Advent was basically a countdown to Christmas. There were carols in worship and it was, essentially, a sanctified version of the busyness most people engage in between Thanksgiving and December 25th. That may not be what was really happening, but it was certainly my perception.

Later on, in Seminary, as I began to explore the broader tradition of the Church, I came to understand Advent in its uniqueness. It has always been my favorite time of the year (not least because it almost always includes my birthday). I like the anticipation of it. I'm an anticipation guy. I'm usually much more excited for the build up than the event - and that doesn't just apply to Christmas, but to almost anything. I'm far more excited about the road trip than the destination.

Advent is a time of anticipation.

Part of that is recognizing the world around us. I often preach from the Old Testament passages during Advent because I like being reminded that the world is imperfect, that we're waiting for something. The problem is, often these sermons can be a bit of a let down. Too much focus on hope and fulfillment and it feels like I'm shortchanging the unsettledness, the anticipation of the season.

I think I've been missing a step. To those who've sat through those often conflicted sermons of Advents past, I apologize. I will get it better next time.

You see, I've always tried to make Advent special, to set it apart from Christmas - and that's important - but what I've failed to do is place that special, separate season within the context of the larger Christian narrative. We have a "Church Year" for a reason - because the individual seasons are a part of a larger story. I've often missed that.

Advent is about digging deep into the well of sorrow, about recognizing the pain and confusion and hurting and wrongness that exists in our world. That's absolutely true. But it is also, absolutely, about taking that depth of pain and from it painting a glorious picture of hope. We all have an idea, even if it's vague and shadowy, of what the world should be.* Advent is a time to immerse ourselves in the yawning gap between reality and possibility. We're intended to use this season to create a vision of hope, peace, and love so impossible large it overwhelms the senses.

This is a season for dreaming big - about all the things we're too scared to dream of the rest of the year. This is when we dream of families reunited, of wounds healed, diseases cured, hunger satisfied, and abuses reconciled. Advent is the season of impossible dreams, dreams we believe possible only by the thinnest, most outrageous strings of hope and faith.

We do this in preparation for Christmas. So that when we encounter a crying baby, in a cold crib, in a forgotten house, among lowly animals, we are bowled over by the juxtaposition.

We need a grandiose Advent to prepare ourselves properly for the shocking revelation of Christmas - that this giant, impossible dream of everything set right, hopes fulfilled becomes possible because of an impoverished infant, born in a lowly manger, two thousand years ago.

The contrast is jarring, especially in a world where power gets things done. To think that God's plan for bringing earth-shattering (literally) transformation is the weakest, most impossible little baby. It's such a confusing reality that we spend the rest of the year attempting to wrap our heads around this apparent paradox.

Advent is already half over this year - but fortunately it keeps coming back around. Remember, as you struggle to slow down, relax, and wait at a time when everyone is rushing to Christmas, that love really does beat power, weakness tops strength, that beauty really does save the world.

Be present this Advent and don't forget to dream big!


*My friend Justin McRoberts wrote a great piece about Advent Hope this week - check it out.