Advent is paradoxical in its marrow: it inaugurates the liturgical year and arrives as the secular year is coming to a close. The time of Advent is in many ways a microcosm of the entire year, encapsulating its pressures and burdens in an especially potent way. It is a condensation of the time between the times that the followers of Christ find themselves swept up within.
In prior centuries, Advent Sundays were devoted to the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.
There is never a time (so long as Death and corruption stalk us) that we are not awaiting the return of the King. It is fitting, then, that we narratively-shaped creatures appoint a season of calendar time to the consecration of memory and anticipation, in order to bolster our vigilance. We look backwards, forwards, and at the present time, knowing that Christ is coming again, but finding ourselves singing the laments of those who awaited his first coming.
I am enormously grateful that Advent seems to be enjoying a resurgence in popularity. However, I have a slight caveat.
The trouble is hidden in plain sight. It’s the focus that many Christians place on the happier valences offered in the candles of the Advent wreath, a relatively novel addition to the practice of Advent. Is there anything wrong with it being relatively new? Absolutely not—nor am I against the candles symbolizing hope, peace, joy, and love.
But I want to draw attention to the traditional focus of the Sundays of Advent, not simply because they are traditional, but because of what they bear witness to. There is substance here that can nourish us now if we will attend to it. In prior centuries, Advent Sundays were devoted to the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.
It’s not that I think Advent has nothing to do with the values named by the candles of the wreath: far from it. The problem is that concentration on these four things often coincides with a relative forgetting of these other, older four. Grace is dialectical in nature, as two things that appear contrary are twinned in service of God’s love and our need. And so, as I have argued before, death and life accompany one another. God’s mercy is extended only to those who have failed. The God who exceeds all things comes for our rescue in the fleshly constraints that define us. Grace takes root in the manure of our world. And hope, love, joy, and peace are ours in grappling with the realities of death, judgment, heaven, and hell.
Our fallen, split subjectivity, however, flattens complexity and seizes one side of a dialectical pair. We reduce the numinous and diminish the wonderful by attending to only one note of a chord. There is a dissonance within this harmony, but it’s one that serves the chord progression and propels the song. Look again at the candles. We crave hope but shun the death that secures it. We long for peace but shudder at the judgment that ratifies it. We thirst for joy but cringe that heaven’s joys accompany heaven’s Lord. And we starve for love but conceal from ourselves the hell of our own making. We say we want help but insist that we and only we know what is wrong with us. We are scandalized by the advent of grace.
We routinely settle for vanities that reflect only one side of that pair. We want to feast at all times and never fast.
We need training to recognize its coming because we routinely settle for vanities that reflect only one side of that pair. We want to feast at all times and never fast. The forces of commodification are only ever happy to superficially treat human wounds and say, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace (Jeremiah 6:14). Capitalism makes false promises by providing tens of thousands of objects that cannot satisfy our desire or make us whole. Consumer products provide an exterior hook upon which we momentarily hang our self-deception. This thing outside of me solidifies the illusion that there is something I can acquire that will at last complete me. “You will not die,” the parade of images promises, “You will be like God.”
Our attention is demanded everywhere by things that sap our hope and lead us to forget our first love. Not only products but completed versions of ourselves are held out in front of us in stores and on screens. “Hope that is seen is not hope,” Paul cautions us (Romans 8:24). We cannot treat the substance of hope as a possession, as another commodified object we buy and can produce to show off to others. The hope that is grounded in the reality of Jesus Christ is one that acknowledges an essential, defining lack at the core of our being, one no item can repair or fill.
Advent is a time of urgency: it has no time for pretending. Advent is a time for telling the truth. It is a furnace into which we throw the very real troubles of our life and of the larger world. We do not cast them away to deny their existence but to fuel the fire of hope, to refine it and melt away the substitute hopes for sale around us. In that fire the pressures that deform our resoluteness and our peace are redirected, and our sorrows are reforged as holds for future hope.
Hope is less a force we exert and more the name of our perseverance. Hope’s engine is the persevering one, Jesus, who alone has defied and thwarted the inhuman powers that overwhelm us. The powers of the Devil, of the Roman Empire, and of Jesus’s acquiescent countrymen are not far removed from the forces of futility that exhaust us in our time. There are still Caesars and CEOs and techbros that crave power and glory at our expense. Such powers, in addition to the sheer gravity of existence in a fallen world, spent their wrath upon Jesus and were exhausted in turn. So if you would persevere through our world’s absurdity and against the fatigue that accompanies trying to endure, then you must cling to him.
There are many promised sources of relief from this exhaustion. But “aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward” will not supply it. We cannot invest in or manufacture wholeness. Reels will not bring the relief we are starving for. Neither will new shoes or Stanleys or a strong drink (or four). We don’t “need” these things. Vice is not a coping mechanism: it is a deadening. It cannot give what it acidically eats away.
This is why we must keep oil ready for our lamps (Matthew 25:1-13). We are creatures of limitation. We get tired in the best of circumstances, even more so in the pressure cooker of life at the present. We are accustomed to settling for counterfeit hopes hawked by influencers because we think we see an outcome we can buy our way towards. There is some part of us that knows this, but we ignore it when the strain of living feels like it is too much. If we light the candles of hope and peace but return home and live out the wine mom cliché or retreat to our man cave or otherwise numb ourselves against the indignities and hurts that make modern life so hard, then we are children playing with matches.
If you’re alive, you are a pilgrim on your way to somewhere. So it pays to be mindful of the way you are going and to change your course if you find the stars are wrong and you’re nowhere near your destination. Of course, you may feel quite assured you’ve arrived where you think you ought to be. None of us lack for voices in our social circles and in the broader culture that assure us, “You’ve got this, king!” or “You lack nothing, Queen! Slay!” when we are actually wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked (Revelation 3:17).
The time we sense approaching in Advent is not chronos but kairos, the dense time of momentousness and judgment, the revelation of what is truly real.
We promote ourselves constantly as something more than we actually are. We pretend not only to the world with our posts and our profile photos but to ourselves. We project boastful words and images of being something when often we are better characterized as nothing. There is light that breaks through this darkness periodically and that will one day make every sad thing untrue, but the source of that light isn’t our being brave enough to see it. And we most certainly are not the light. We are not the ones we have been waiting for.
None of us has life in ourselves. We are mysteries even to ourselves. All of us continually hang over the abyss of nothingness. That we exist at all is a gift of the God who holds onto us over that nothingness. All of us need our courses set in motion and continually reassessed by the One who stands in no need whatsoever, who has no potential awaiting actualization, who has no need of coordinates from anyone else. This One not only knows the way but is the Way.
We feel the desperation of our situation crackling through the gamut of distresses ranging from deadlines and quotas to polarization and warfare. Each of these are tears in the wound of our world, testifying that this is not how things are meant to be. In them we sense that precipice upon which our lives hang.
We sense how different this is from the time we are accustomed to, the empty time of sequence. Our lives are pervaded with that time—the insistent, relentless flight of seconds, minutes, hours, and days demanding output as product, as billable service, as entries on a spreadsheet that translate to materials used and money spent or earned.
But the time we sense approaching in Advent is not chronos but kairos, the dense time of momentousness and judgment, of the revelation of what is truly real. The time we rightly sense carries a choice between meaning and emptiness, between wholeness and desecration. There are “kairos choices” behind and within the discrete “chronos choices” we are given to make in this season. This is the time that shows the truth of even Hallmark movies, in which returning home is an apocalyptic event, disclosing the truth of one’s life, in which calling that boy or girl or seeking out a long-estranged friend may, in truth, represent the choice of a lifetime to become who you were meant to become.
We may not realize it but we need and yearn for judgment because death, heaven, and hell are real—more real than the troubles that plague us and more real than the trifles we try to substitute these things for. So as you take up the hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” let your imagination be quickened by the Son of God who came, who comes, and is coming again.
We who dwell in the misery of exile plead for you to come quickly, to wrench us out of hellward spirals, to lighten our gloom and put living death to flight. Reach into our wounds, O Lord, and extract our fear. Open to us a new horizon freed from doubt and sorrow and numb, sinful stupidity. Shut forever the entryway into darker selves we never want to become and regret having ever become. Make safe the way that brings us to you. Unlock us, Key of David, to become what you created us to be. We ask this now and for the future, until the world is healed. Amen.
