“The Lord is at hand”
Advent is the season of watching and waiting. So we have been saying, over and over again, it seems. Yet it needs to be said and it needs to be heard. There are always four Sundays of Advent that bring us to Christmas but there are not always four full weeks of Advent. This year the Advent season is as long as it can possibly be because Christmas falls on a Sunday. We get the full benefit of the Advent season, if we will take advantage of this time of watching and waiting. We need it for it is the counter to what I sometimes call the ‘frenectitude’, if I may coin a term, for this frantic and frenetic time. Our busyness becomes a kind of mindless madness. I speak, I am afraid to say, from personal experience!
We need the quiet darkness of Advent, especially in a culture of fearful anxiety. “In nothing be anxious,” Paul tells us this morning, literally “be not careful” in its older translation by William Tyndale, meaning be not so full of cares and worries. “Rejoice in the Lord,” Paul says. And, then, speaking to a culture of excess, he says, “let your moderation be known unto all men.” Moderation. And what is the antidote to our frantic frenetic busyness? Prayer. “Prayer and supplication with thanksgiving,” he says. And prayer in its most basic sense is all about asking. And asking is all about questions. And Advent is all about the questions; questions that catapult us into the presence of the one who comes. They are intrinsic to the watching and waiting. They are our watching and waiting. Advent is the season of questions.
What is our watching and waiting? It is our watching and waiting expectantly, our watching and waiting in hope, our looking and longing for something more and better, for some greater good, for blessedness. Advent is, in every way, the season of hope.
What exactly are we watching and waiting for? Advent is our watching and waiting upon God. Above all else, Advent is about the motion of God’s Word towards us. It is God’s coming to us. In the quiet but heightened expectancy of Advent, we await his coming in grace and truth as Judge and Saviour, as the Babe of Bethlehem and the Christ of Calvary. We attend to the motions of his coming in judgment and humility. There is his coming then at “the fullness of time,” “when all things were in quiet silence,” as a beautiful passage from the Wisdom of Solomon puts it, almost in complete contrast to our noisy busyness. There is his coming at the end of time, then, too, for each of us individually and for all of us collectively. There is his coming now in the Word proclaimed, in the Word celebrated; in short, in Word and Sacrament. There is his continual coming, too, in the grace-notes of human kindness and consideration for one another in truth and love, in service and sacrifice.
His coming communicates the great truth without which all our watching and all our waiting would be nothing worth. The motion of God’s Word towards us communicates the knowing love of God for us. Advent is the season of Revelation.
It awakens hope and articulates the substance of our desiring and longing. We look for what only God can give. It is at once beyond all that we can desire and deserve and yet it signals precisely the true fulfillment of our humanity. Advent awakens the desire for God without whom our lives are mere pretense and presumption, without whom our lives are simply darkness and death in the despair of desire. Advent is the great counter to the angry atheisms of our age and culture. Advent is the season of desire.
The American writer Flannery O’Connor observed that “at its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily,”or, perhaps, rather not so happily. There is no happiness really in domesticated despair. And certainly, there is nothing of that greater good which we call blessedness. Despair, whether wild or domesticated, denies the possibilities of grace. It is, in principle, the soul’s strong refusal of the conditions of our creation and salvation. It is the denial of hope.
Advent awakens the desire for God and names the darkness of despair. It would remind us that our despair, too, belongs to our desire. Despair is desire in denial. And yet Advent, meaning both the season and the doctrine, is more than just the counter to despair; it is precisely its only and true overcoming. We are awakened to the truth of our desiring. It is a longing for God in the confidence of the motions of his love for us.
Advent sounds all the notes of expectancy, all the notes of holy waiting, especially in the week of the deepest darkness of nature’s year. Beyond the pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, the Church celebrates St. Thomas, so-called “doubting Thomas.” Better to say, I think, “questioning Thomas,” for his holy questions about Christ crucified and risen complement the questions about John the Baptist and Christ presented with such intensity in today’s Gospel, questions which catapult us into the presence of the one who comes. “Behold the Lamb of God,” the voice in the wilderness cries, pointing us to the one who comes, if we will have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and the hearts and minds to embrace the wonder of what we are given to see and hear.
In Word proclaimed and in Sacraments celebrated, in darkness and light, in hymn and carol, in prayer and praise, we watch and wait upon God that his grace may make its place in us. Then, too, shall we be gracious “according to thy word,” for “the Lord is at hand.” Then shall we rejoice in the Lord.
“The Lord is at hand”
Fr. David Curry
Advent IV, 2011