Advent: the Hope is in the Waiting

Waiting For the Hour, William Tolman Carlton, White House Art Collection

The painting above hangs in the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House. It depicts a Methodist church meeting on the evening of December 31, 1862 as they await the New Year and—more importantly— the date on which the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

They are waiting. Expecting. Hoping against hope that their freedom is just a few ticks of the second hand away. The long night of their slavery is at its end. There is nothing they can do to make the time go any faster, nothing they can do to make the morning come any sooner, nothing they can do but wait, and hope.

I like rollercoasters, but I hate waiting in line. Waiting is powerless. It is vulnerable. It requires you to recognize your inability to solve your problems immediately. Waiting is being eliminated from our society, we can get same-day delivery from Amazon, food delivered within the hour, and grocery pickup to ‘skip the line.’ If you value most what you spend your time and money on, we value convenience above almost everything.

Advent is completely and utterly opposed to this because God doesn’t work on our timetables. Advent is skipped because Christmas is fun and we can queue up the Christmas music and “haul out the holly” whenever we want. We don’t have to wait for anything, so why should we have to wait for Christmas?

We drink iced coffee in December, have tomatoes in February, and can stream any movie we want, whenever we want, on the phone in our pocket. We have curated our lives and arranged them to be as convenient and painless as possible. Our cities are organized for ease of travel and ample parking. In doing this, we have lost the ability to be bored, and—what might be more harmful to our souls—we have lost the ability to deal with not getting what we want.

Advent was originally a little Lent. We don’t know when the first Christians started observing it, but by the early 5th century, it was a common practice. Even then, Advent was an intentional reordering of life as a response to what God had done for humanity. Even our ancestors needed to be reminded to wait, to slow down, and to remember that the whole story wasn’t about them. Over 1500 years later, we who have invented the somehow-not-obviously-problematic phrase “church shopping” are all the more in need of the reminder.

In Advent, we remember the three ways Christ comes to be with us. The first is as the baby in the manger, wrapped up in swaddling clothes with donkeys and horses and whatever your kids’ pageant director can imagine. The second is in the Spirit. This is how we encounter Christ in our daily lives. Where has Christ made Himself particularly available to you in your life? In the church, in the sacraments, in your prayers. The third, and this is where Advent gets wild, is the final coming of Jesus Christ to earth as its judge and king. This is why our Advent readings for the first week are all about the end of the world. This world has an expiration date, as do our tears, and Jesus will one day come back and make all things new. This is the hope of Advent. The hope the Church should be shouting from the mountains is that Jesus came once, is available to you now, and will come again.

The hope is in the waiting. The hope is in the difficult act of denying yourself the thing you think you want so you might be given something better. When we wait, when we learn to focus our attention on our hope, we begin to notice how even in the darkness of the depths of winter, the smallest light begins to spread. We light candles to show how even a single flame can conquer the night. This is why Advent services sometimes seem both happy and sad at the same time, hope takes into account the reality of the darkness while recognizing its impermanence and longing for the light to break in more fully.

May we, like the figures in Waiting For the Hour, wait with bated breath for the announcement that our freedom from death and pain has been granted once and for all time.