Waiting For Something Good
The 2017 Christmas Season – more accurately called “Advent” – has been really interesting in our household.
My wife, Carrie, is 39.5 weeks pregnant with a due date on Christmas Day. To add to the drama, our youngest was born two weeks early and Carrie has been having tricky contractions off and on for the last two weeks. This has left us living with the constant awareness that no matter what we’re doing, we could be interrupted at any moment. It has been distracting, but in a good way. It’s been teaching us how to move through life while waiting for a big and important interruption.
And that is exactly what Advent is all about.
Advent, which means “Coming,” is all about learning to move through life while waiting for a big and important interruption.
If you listen, you’ll hear this message in the stories that are told and retold around this time of year and in almost all of the best loved Christmas Carols. “O Holy Night” for example is full of a waiting that has finally come to an end:
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Till He appeared and the soul felt it’s worth
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn
Advent is about looking forward by looking back. The people in the Christmas story had been longing for a long time for the Messiah to come – for God’s special person to appear who would make all the wrong things right and all the sad things go away. They were a people who had been living with a sense of expectant hope for generations. They knew what it meant to move through life while waiting for a big and important interruption.
Then that first Christmas what they had longed for and so often looked for had finally arrived in a little baby named Jesus, Emmanuel, “God with us.”
This was only partly true though. Jesus coming that first Christmas was more like an engagement than a wedding; more like conception than delivery. The wedding and the delivery are still ahead of us. We live in that in between time where we know for sure that something good is on its way and we know what it is, but it’s not here yet.
God is still just about to make all things new. At any moment God’s Good Kingdom could be born into this world and make all the sad things come untrue. Any moment the bridegroom, God, could arrive and wipe every tear from our eyes. Because of that first Christmas we know that the Dream of God is here, and also not yet.
For now, Advent reminds us, we are learning to move through life while waiting for a big and important interruption.
– – –
Other Christmas Posts:
No Comment