Holiday Blues

I love Advent. If there is one season of the liturgical year with which I feel most clearly connect all year long, it is Advent. This is a season of expectation, of hope, of waiting, of yearning. Although, as a feast of the resurrection, every Sunday is a mini-Easter, I feel the spirit of Advent spilling over into every worship service, every prayer, every pastoral encounter I experience throughout the year.

At the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama, both of Jesus’ advents are depicted in stained-glass windows behind the altar. On the left is an image of Mary, holding her infant child, surrounded by cherubic angels. On the right, the congregation sees Jesus descending from heaven, clutching an orb and scepter, led by a fierce version of Michael, the archangel. In between, on a painted reredos, is a crowded rendering of the Last Supper, a portrait of the church, gathered at the table with Jesus, thankful for what has been and anticipating what will be.

For two thousand years, that is where we have lived, in between the first coming of Jesus as a lowly infant and his second coming as our triumphant king. As the proper preface we say in the eucharistic prayer during the season of Advent declares, because God sent the incarnate Son “to redeem us from sin and death…we may without shame or fear rejoice to behold his [second] appearing.” The first advent gives us hope, and the second is what we hope for.

But being stuck in the middle is not easy. Waiting is hard, especially when we have been waiting for so long and when our waiting does not seem to be giving way to anything better. In the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we know that God has already triumphed over sin and death, but, in a world in which suffering is still a daily experience, our full participation in that victory is something for which we must wait.

Waiting is not getting any easier. The world seems to have forgotten how to wait, and, when the answers to most of life’s questions are only a click away, we forget that there is a particular holiness to waiting for the ones that matter most. To a first-century disciple, Jesus’ command to “keep alert” for the day of his coming may have sounded threatening, but, two millennia later, we hear those words as a much-needed pep talk.

Borrowing both from secular culture and our own desire to speed things up, we tend to skip over Advent and jump straight into Christmas. But, when we do, we risk missing the whole point of the incarnation. Jesus did not come to us as a superhero but as a vulnerable child. In God’s perfect way, our salvation is accomplished because, in God’s great power, God has taken upon the divine self our fragile human nature. Christmas, therefore, is not about skipping over the struggles and hardships of human life but embracing them—about God’s great embrace of them.

At St. Paul’s and in many Episcopal or Anglican churches, the altar is blue during the season of Advent. Although that has to do with the history of worship in Salisbury Cathedral, upon which much of our prayer book is based, and not because many of us experience sadness during the holidays, the coincidence is helpful. In a world which only leaves room for bright smiles and happy hearts during the weeks leading up to Christmas, Advent is how we make space for our heartache during this season.

In a way, when we observe the season of Advent to its fullest, every service takes on the spirit of the Blue Christmas service we offer on December 21. Still, we set aside that service on the longest night of the year as a safe space for those who want to meet God in a moment when no one expects them to muster a smile. When those around us ask us for something that we are no longer able to give, it further isolates us from the community of love and support we need. Blue Christmas is a way of reminding all of us that God receives our broken hearts as the faithful offering of ourselves and that our experience of grief does mean that we have lost hope.

The world is being shaped by God into a place where God’s reign is fully manifest, but that work is not finished yet. God is saving God’s people from all that threatens us, but sometimes we find that salvation only on the other side of great loss. We know that our future is certain because of what God has accomplished for us in Jesus Christ, but the present often feels anything but sure.

Advent is our way of acknowledging that and remembering that being stuck in the middle is hard, but right here in the middle is also where God finds us. We do not need to pretend to be someone we are not in order to be worthy of God’s love. God has made us worthy in the death and resurrection of God’s Son. Our grief is not a sign of our faithlessness but a container into which God’s love is poured, and Advent is a season to remember that God’s love is poured out on all who wait for God.

Yours faithfully,

Evan D. Garner

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