How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? Night and day, we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.
Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.
The Season of Advent begins today. It’s a new season in the church and there’s a new look. The Advent wreath is out. There’s blue or violet stuff on the altar and elsewhere. Out in the world around us, and maybe in our homes as well, things are beginning to look a lot like Christmas. You might have an Advent wreath with four candles around somewhere. Maybe you have an Advent calendar to help you with the countdown. Advent calendars are actually a Lutheran invention; they have been in use since the nineteenth century. Advent calendars have flaps that are opened one by one during the days of December leading up to Christmas. There are 24 flaps for 24 days of Advent, plus one more for Christmas day itself. Sometimes there are pictures behind the doors. Other times there are Bible verses. Occasionally there are little compartments to hide tiny gifts. Advent calendars are a fun tradition that gets it mostly right ― kind of.
The season of Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas. Advent always ends on December 24, but its starting date changes. Its first day is not always on December 1 but can fall anywhere from November 27 to December 3. Sometimes, Advent is 24 days long like the Advent calendars allow, but not always. There can be as few as 22 days in Advent, or as many as 28, depending on the day of the week on which Christmas Day falls. Advent calendars get the number of days right one year out of every seven.
No matter when it begins, or how many days it lasts, the season of Advent looks toward the celebration of Christmas. It looks to the incarnation, when our holy and far off God, the one separate from the grubby reality that we live in; above the pettiness and the meanness, the cruelty and the thoughtlessness that holds us down, and beyond our limited understanding, became one of us. In the incarnation, God was united with us, not in a spiritual way, not just as a metaphor, but in the physical sense. God became one of us. In Jesus, God shared our DNA. In Jesus, God lived the kind of life that we live ― ups and downs, aches and pains, all the excitement and the annoyances too. In Jesus, God is united with us. That incarnation, that union of God with humanity is what Christmas is all about. Advent counts down to that every year over the course of four Sundays. Advent points to that.
But there is more. There is something else that all the Advent calendars miss completely. Not only does Advent look forward to celebrating how God is united with us in the birth, life, and death of Jesus, but Advent also looks ahead to our being reunited. Advent is about union, and also about reunion. In his first letter to the church at Thessalonica, Saint Paul says how much he looks forward to being reunited with the people there. “Night and day, we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.” That same letter goes on to talk about our reunion with our Lord on that day when he will come again.
Advent is a time of waiting ― real waiting. There is more to it than just reenacting the long wait for the birth of the Messiah. In Advent, we are reminded that all of Christian life is waiting for Jesus to come again as he promised. In the Apostles’ Creed, we distill to the bare bones what Christians believe about Jesus. It is hardly a complete list, but it is the essentials. Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus is our Lord. He was conceived of the Holy Spirit, and the Virgin Mary gave birth to him. He suffered, he was crucified, he died, and he was buried. He went where the dead go. And then he rose. He came back to life. He rose up into heaven and took his seat at the Father’s right hand. All of that happened a long time ago. All of that is the story of Christmas and Epiphany and Easter and the Ascension and everything else in between. And it is history; it is ancient history. All of that forever changed the way God interacts with the world. What follows is in our future. Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead. The Apostles’ Creed speaks of what God did through Jesus in the past. It promises what God will do through Jesus in the future. But what about now?
After the phrase “and he is seated at the right hand of the Father”, and before the mention of Christ’s second coming, there is a comma. “He is seated at the right hand of the Father” “comma” “and he will come again to judge the living and the dead.” Right there, in that comma, is where we are. That is our present. All of Christian history has happened in that comma. Nations and empires have risen and collapsed, entire languages have come and gone, the entire life of everyone we have every met has been lived in that comma. A period at the end of a sentence means that the statement is over. A comma means that there is more to come. The kingdom of heaven is here, but there is more to come.
Christ’s love and peace and presence is seen in his people, but there is even more coming. Jesus is with us in everything; in the good times and the hard times, in our joy and in our times of panic, in our triumphs and in our suffering. But there is more to come. We still wait for that time Jesus will be with us more fully than we could ever imagine. We still wait for that time when suffering, loss, doubt, pain, sorrow, and separation will be no more.
Advent is a reminder of that waiting. It is a reminder that Jesus is always calling us forward. Jesus is calling us to grow in faith, and compassion and love. Jesus stands in the future with open arms. All of Christian life is waiting. All of Christian life is moving toward Jesus. All of Christian life is Advent.
Amen.