Who Cares About Advent?

Have you ever wondered why Christmas Day can seem like such a letdown sometimes? Sure, everybody does the presents thing, you get the day off from work and school, families get together to eat and watch some TV…maybe your Uncle Teddy has a little too much eggnog and passes out in the tub. But with all of the hype surrounding Christmas, with all of the effort we go put into making it a really big to-do, there are times when the day itself just seems sort of…empty. For all the hype surrounding Christmas, we’re often left trying to manufacture joy on Christmas Day, sitting in our living room surrounded by half-opened boxes of gifts and wondering along with Charlie Brown what all the fuss was about.

Why is this? Why do we get so excited around Christmas time, but feel so utterly confused when Christmas actually comes? Why do we get the sense that we’re like dogs chasing a car, unsure of what to do once we finally catch it?

The answer is simple. If we want to understand Christmas, we've got to understand the significance of Advent.

According to the church calendar, Advent (which means “the arrival” or “coming”) is a season celebrated in the weeks leading up to Christmas Day. Advent is a time of expectant waiting, a season that defined entire generations of Jews leading up to the birth of Christ. Interestingly, many traditions consider Advent a season of fasting, functioning much like Lent before Easter Sunday. Now there’s two words you don’t usually see in the same sentence: Christmas and fasting. If anything, Christmas in America is about the complete opposite, right? We eat too much. We spend too much money on too many gifts. We’re too busy trying to do too many things for too many people in too short a time span. And we wonder why Christmas morning can feel like such a letdown. We've robbed the day of it's meaning.

It’s the hard work of Advent that makes Christmas a day worth singing about in the first place. Advent isn’t a countdown clock for how many shopping days are left in the season: it’s about longing, desire, that which is on its way but isn’t here yet. Think of a baby being born. In the nine months prior to the birth, a mother experiences great pains and sleepless nights. Sometimes she says things like, “I just want this baby to be born.” And eventually, the day of the baby’s birth comes, filled with joy and laughter because amidst all the pain and struggle that filled the last few months, this was worth the wait. Christmas is worth the wait.

Advent is a time to live in the tension that things are not as they should be, and we are in need of a Redeemer. And so we wait for Messiah to come, struggling through the pains that come from living in a broken world but pregnant with the Hope that will ultimately save us. I love the idea of fasting along with Christmas because it is so counterintuitive to our attitude of gimme-gimme-gimme. I’m tired of waking up on Christmas Day and feeling like I missed a really great party. Do you think people would send out cards and take a million pictures if having a baby took fifteen minutes? Of course not. The wait itself gives the whole thing a sense of delicacy, a mysterious sort of beauty that only comes by waiting.

This Christmas, embrace the season of expectation that comes before childbirth. Don’t move so fast these next few weeks that Christmas Day becomes a celebration that you’ve completed all your tasks and not a celebration that Christ has come. Take time to wait expectantly for the long-expected one. Wendell Berry once said, “It gets dark and darker, and then Jesus is born.” When we remember this, we begin to see that the hard work of waiting during Advent makes Christmas a day worth waiting for.