If you are comfortable in this world, then I encourage you to ignore Advent. Christmas is the holiday for you. Waiting and hoping are just not worthwhile, so jump to the fun stuff. Advent only makes sense if you want something else to hold on to. If you need to believe that as wonderful as the sun, the moon, and the stars may be, when they fall away it will be because a new, brighter, more perfect light has come and we no longer need those things.

Advent is a special time when we anticipate our favorite stories about Jesus' birth, but if we do it right, it's also a time when we look at ourselves and our world and decide that we shouldn't be comfortable. We shouldn't be comfortable that people are starving a stone's throw away and that their starvation will last long past the holiday season when people are feeling generous with canned goods. We shouldn't be comfortable that we stand on the brink of World War III—that's right, you heard it here first—and our own neighbors worship the flag of one aggressor and the oil of another.

The alternative is to trust in the kind of king who gets born in a feeding trough, who teaches that people who trust in God should not be concerned about their status or well-being in this world, and who gets strung up on a cross for telling the truth to people who were completely comfortable with the world as they knew it.