Advent is Not Christmas: And It’s A Good Thing Too!

“What other time or season can or will the Church ever have but that of Advent!”[i]                                         Karl Barth                                                                                                                                                                                (Church Dogmatics IV/3.1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961), 322)

The Challenge                                                                                                   

If Barth is right we are in a heap of trouble in North America. Advent here has been overrun by Christmas, our cultural version of Christmas, giving it no time or attention in our hurry to get to Christmas. Where Advent and the church year have gained a foothold over the last several decades in some traditions Advent has been treated as a prelude or preface to Christmas. Its authentic voice and role in the life and worship of these churches  has been denatured and diluted by Christmas.

Captain Obvious gives us the obvious answer: restore Advent to it proper role and function in the church.

As with all obvious answers, however, the how to do it is never clear or easy. Or even if clear, not easy.

It requires no argument to prove that Christmas begins for us at Halloween and dominates the landscape till New Year. Nor will I provide any here. There’s little point in fighting our culture’s Christmas. We’ve already lost that battle (for good or ill) and fighting rearguard skirmishes to “keep Christ in Christmas” or public displays of Christian Christmas symbolism are a waste of time. William H. Petersen says it well: “While there is scant hope of changing the culture around us, the Church need not be a fellow traveler. The call is for the Church to reclaim for the sake of its own life and mission Advent’s focus on the reign of God and, in so doing, to hone once again the counter-cultural edge of the Gospel at the very beginning of the liturgical year” (cited in Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, Kindle Location 312).

It's not simply that Christmas has been inflated for the sake of commercial interests, though that is part of the story. A bigger, deeper reason lies in the wager that lies at the heart of Western culture. Alan Roxburgh writes, “The modern West is a massive wager . . . a new imagination founded on the conviction that life can be lived well without God. Within that wager God has been inexorably turned into a useful resource for living as the modern West created its own primary agents for modern life: the state, Consumer capitalism, the Self” (http://alanroxburgh.com/2018/06/refounding-communities-of-gods-people/). Run through this filter of state, consumerism, and the self, Advent has had little traction here. Under the influence of this wager, Christmas (and, in fact, Christianity as a whole) becomes a decidedly culture-friendly enterprise.

Advent was not a part of much of this land’s Christianity from its founding and with its culturally dissonant notes of wrath and judgment was unlikely to gain much foothold here. Even when churches began to recover their liturgical heritage in the 1970’s and Advent became a part of the church year again, this recovered Advent was styled as a preface or prelude to Christmas rather than an independent season in the church’s year with its own message and integrity. Thus the challenge we face is to recover Advent as a season of the church year in its own right and not simply an errand boy for Christmas and to honestly face up to the distinctly culturally-unfriendly notes of its ethos and message. (More on detail on the journey of Advent in the West can be found in Fleming Rutledge’s recent Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ and William F. Peterson’s What are We Waiting For?: Re-imagining Advent for Time to Come.)

Advent: The God Who Calls

For some time now I have been pondering the church year and as a pastor considering the enormous potential of this paradigm for church life. I have begun developing an approach under the rubric of “Knowing God Through the Church’s Year.” Alliteratively (I am a preacher after all), my thinking on the church year through the lens of what we learn about God in each of its major days and seasons and the scriptures assigned for those seasons in the Revised Common Lectionary lines out this way:

-Advent: the God who Calls

-Christmas: the God who Comes

-Epiphany: the God who Confronts

-Lent: the God who Cries

-Easter: the God wh0 Confounds

-Ascension: the God who Completes

-Pentecost: the God who Comes Again

-Ordinary Time: the Christian God

                Trinity Sunday: the Christian God

                Christ the King Sunday: the Cosmocrator

Though this piece focuses on the first of this series, “Advent: the God who Calls,” the list gives the reader an idea of the larger context it fits into.

In contrast to the user-friendly Advent-as-Prelude-to-Christmas characteristic of our culture, the reality of Advent biblically and theologically considered is that a world run amok and mired in darkness confronts a God who calls them to his purposes for them and throws them into a crisis of response. This is the chief dynamic marking Advent, a peculiarly Christian dynamic, constituted by the paradoxical reality named by the author of 2 Peter as “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God” (3:12). I suppose we could call this active waiting but I rather like 2 Peter’s paradoxical phrase.

-It reminds us that God’s ways are not our ways and living with and for God is seldom straightforward as we would prefer it.

-It reminds us that discernment is required of us; God’s ways and will can’t simply be read off the way things seem to be.

-It reminds us that being and doing, which we so often separate and  play off against each other, are a tensive unity.

God’s call – originary, creative, commanding, beckoning, beautiful, reality-defining – is the beginning and constant companion of God’s people. It initiates our journey with and to God, sustains that journey, strengthening us, recalling us when we stray, judging us when we refuse to repent, yet promising grace beyond what we deserve or imagine. No wonder Karl Barth claims “What other time or season can or will the Church ever have but that of Advent!”

Advent thus not only originates the church year but sets the context in which the days and seasons we celebrate unfold. From one Advent to the next then is not a matter of reaching the goal in a linear manner but reaching a benchmark in an ongoing journey. We reach a new Advent and its gifts and graces as a different people at a new place in our journey. A renewed call that spurs us on to a fresh and deeper experience of this God, who he has called us to be, where we are going and how we are going to get there. A spiral is the best image for the church year. We pass through a new Advent and on to revisit the other seasons at a new level and in a new way. Advent generates this new level of journey and, as noted above attends every step of the way to Advent next.

Advent’s God is Missional

A key point here is to recognize that Advent’s God is a missional God – a God who is himself on a journey. A journey from creation to consummation with his creatures and creation. God created us and our world because he loved us and wanted to share his life with us. God didn’t have to create. He wasn’t incomplete or unsatisfied as the triune God who is himself an eternal fellowship of love. God created out of the generosity and abundance of that love. He always intended to come in person as one of us (the incarnate Christ)  to be with us a fully as possible. It wasn’t our sin that brought Jesus here. No, it was his love. And God intends to see that love and his loving creation through to it full fruition.

Of course, we have sinned. We have become what we are not and should not be – rebels who seek to run our own lives and guide our own history. Rejecting God’s love we have brought chaos to reign and unraveled the good order of his creation. But God still intends to come among us as one of us and enjoy eternal fellowship and shared life with us.

God called Abraham and Sarah from the idols of Babylon to a new family, one that will carry the destiny of the world to be blessed by God in itself. This family will not live for itself, however, but for the world God intends to bless through it. This new family, Israel, struggles mightily with their divine call and vocation. They fail regularly and mightily, finally defaulting on it and ending up in exile in both Babylon and even upon return to their own land under the overlordship of Persia.

This is where we find Israel (and ourselves) in Advent. Caught between the call of God, the reality of their default on it, and God’s indefatigable pursuit of his purposes we discover the pathos of Advent. The prophets bring the people this word of hope beyond the reality of their heinous default. The Advent hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” captures this in its first verse,

“O come, O come, Immanuel,
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel
shall come to you, O Israel.”

Advent begins in this darkness (Rutledge, Advent: 4779ff.). Exiled, hopeless, failures, despair, homeless, faithless – Advent catches us up at our worst. Advent is grace – undeserved favor. And grace is the never-ending love of God relentlessly, passionately, scandalously even, descending into our darkness to reclaim and restore us to his good ends for us. But it starts in the darkness.

Every Advent enables us to remember and renew God’s gracious plan and action to be with us. With Israel Advent catches us at our worst. We too have whored after other gods and sought for significance and security in the works of our hands and imaginings of our hearts. In our time, the gods we seek have names like Individualism, Consumerism, and Experientialism: our I.C.E. Age. We meet Advent each year, us North Americans, mired, trapped even, in some measure and to some degree in the clutches of these false gods. Even the church is complicit. They alienate us from God, ourselves, each other, and the creation itself. Loneliness, the Opioid crisis, the growing inequality of wealth, racism, homophobia, civil rights, climate degradation, sexism – these, among others, limn the shape of our darkness at present in this country. This is where Advent begins for us, where God will seek and find us – if we are willing to be found out there.

However, when Advent is denied or treated merely as the run-up to Christmas we rob ourselves of acknowledging the reality of our lived and of be found by the God who is searching for us there, the God who calls us. “The season of Advent,” writes Marilyn McEntyre, “has been cluttered by pre-Christmas commerce and sentimentalized by those who set their sights early and only on Christmas celebration. Even in churches this dark time of the year is often falsely lit by premature festivity and messages of peace and hope that take little account of the dire historical moment in which we live and the urgency of our need for discernment” (Rutledge, Advent: 39-42).

The journey with Advent herald by God begins in the truthfulness of who and where we truly are. Doubtless, this does not please us. We do not want to acknowledge this darkness in us and in the -places we dwell. But that is nevertheless who and where we are and where God seeks us and determines to find us. The Lord Jesus himself in the text for the first Sunday of Advent this year from Luke describes the our situation thusly:

“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars,
and on earth nations will be in dismay,
perplexed by the roaring of the sea and the waves.
People will die of fright
in anticipation of what is coming upon the world” (21:25ff.)

This imagery of societal upheaval, distress, and destruction captures well the darkness we know in our hearts and bones this Advent. Advent is not Christmas – and It’s a Good Thing Too! Christmas can only be Christmas if Advent is allowed to be Advent. The light of the manger only shines truly if the darkness it illumines is acknowledged. For where sin abounds there grace superabounds (Rom.5:20) says the Apostle Paul.  

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