Here’s a guest post from my friend Paul Pastor. We invite you to enter the pain and expectation and join our Advent movement; The Weary World Rejoices.
“…Let earth receive her king.”
In recent years, many low-church Protestants have embraced Advent as an opportunity for reflection and renewal. We have found new meaning in ancient symbols, and begun to integrate the season into our worship as more than just a lead-up to Christmas, but as a way of entering through the calendar into that holy space beyond time where God waits for us.
But we have not yet rediscovered the fullness of this season. While we focus on the past anticipation of Jesus the Messiah, we skip what our Catholic and Orthodox siblings place at the center of the Advent season: the present and future expectancy of Christ’s coming. And, in a weary world, it is that present and future expectancy that brings rejoicing. Advent, in its fullness, lets us receive Jesus in past, present, and future expectancy. Like the three ghosts who haunt Scrooge into new life in A Christmas Carol, the truth about the Christmas season both lies in a place beyond time, but intersects time too—and it can carry us with it.
The past of Advent hope is easiest for us. Every nativity scene and Christmas carol becomes an opportunity to remember the mystery of the incarnation of Jesus and celebrate it.
Similarly, the present asks us how we are relating to the mystery of Christ’s appearance now—and how we are helping realize that appearance in the life of others.
But it is the future sense of Advent that, for Protestants, remains the great forgotten frontier. How is Advent a forward-looking season? Can it be?
It can, and it must. Because the hope of Jesus, as so many of us preach and believe, is a paradoxical hope: both here and coming at the same time. But it will not remain that way forever. Advent is the time of year Christians are invited not only to look back, or to look around, but to look forward. To look in hope to the future coming of Jesus.
While we can (should) set aside end-times speculation and the brand of rapture-oriented folk-religion that has soured the taste of “The Second Coming” in the mouths of so many, we cannot set aside the truth. Scripture, the Creeds, and the Spirit all bear witness to the same thing—our Christian story is not over. We live Advent not only in remembrance, or in experience, but in expectation that Jesus is not done with us. We do not need to understand the details of his return. But we do need to await it in expectant preparation.
Christ came once. He is coming again. What was begun will be ended. What was planted will be harvested. The King we set on a throne of straw will thresh our earth with the word of his mouth. The Master will call his stewards to account. His hosts will again be seen over Bethlehem, but with happy war-cries, not songs, springing from their lovely and inhuman throats, for they come to enforce the manifesto of liberation that the King preached the last time he walked here.
We wait for this! We sing for this! Christ has come! Christ is coming again! Advent is the joyous time we take on our lips the rebel prayer of Mary, who felt an impossible Christ move in her belly and said:
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
But has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
But has sent the rich away empty. (Luke 1:51-53 NRSV)
It is the time we light candles in the dark, feeling the hair rise on our necks as we sing,
O come thou Dayspring, come and cheer
Our spirits by thy advent here.
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadow’s put to flight…
We comfort one another and contemplate. We encourage and expect. “This is not over. It cannot be over.”
During the season of preparation for Christmas, we Christians sing to the Light of the World during the darkest part of the year, call for heaven’s Dawn as the earth wheels at the far, cold limit of its orbit. Eternity mingles with December.
And in doing so, we join centuries of Christians in the celebration of a great secret: that this present darkness—seeming so dark today—cannot long remain, for Christ is rising, like a strong man about to run a race, like the very Dawn of Righteousness.
What waits for us in the Advent season is more than past remembrance, it is future expectancy. It is the message, just as offensive and bizarre as the Incarnation, that we who celebrate the Christ-child are still awaiting “his coming in glory.”
He is coming! He is coming! What and when that means for us, I do not fully know. But nonetheless, I tremble and rejoice.
I need that this year. I need that, I expect, every year.
But I choose to believe that one year, I will need the expectation no longer. For the Fullness, in all his furious joy, will have once again kissed this earth with love.
Paul J. Pastor is a writer living in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. His writing on Christian spirituality has won numerous awards and critical recognition for its beauty, insight, and biblical depth. He is the author of The Face of the Deep: Exploring the Mysterious Person of the Holy Spirit, and a multi-volume devotional project titled The Listening Day: Meditations on the Way. With a M.A. in Biblical and Theological Studies from Western Seminary, Paul brings his passionate style to life as a frequent speaker at churches and universities. Paul and his wife Emily serve as Deacons of Spiritual Formation at Theophilus Church in Portland, Oregon.