Advent and the Pain and Promise of Waiting
I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!
Psalm 27:13-14
Advent is about waiting. Traditionally, this season in the calendar of the Church has been about leading believers to live faithfully in the present, and to do this, the attention of believers is turned both to past promises fulfilled and to promises made for a bright but unrealized future.
During Advent, Christian waiting is shown to be not a passive exercise in keeping busy while staying put, but an intentional practice of keeping faithful while moving forward. As we approach Christmas, we look back on the world as it waited in desperation for the Son of God. The posture and the prayers of God’s people then, who would leap for joy at the birth of Christ, become the posture and the prayers of God’s people now, who are waiting for the day of his return. The fulfillment of past promises becomes the fuel of present hope.
This sounds easy enough, but waiting is difficult, perhaps never more so than in the culture we live. In its pace and its relentless commitment to immediacy, our world seems to loathe both waiting and the conditions that can make it fruitful. The rose-colored lenses we look at our past through only make the present more painful. So nostalgia drives our history. Rather than learning from the pains of the past, we only inherit its false promises. “Those were the days,” means these aren’t them. The best Christmas season is usually behind us.
Without a promising present, we then might barrel forward into the future. If we cannot recreate the past, we just might be able to surpass it. The next Christmas season can be the best one. The present thus passes in a snap. Pulled to the past and the future so forcefully, we never seem to find enough time to linger in all the unique joys and frustrations and hopes of today.
Christian waiting turns the directions of these currents completely around. It is not blind to the past or ignorant of the future, but neither is it living in either of them. Christian waiting does the pulling. It takes the prayers and the posture of faith’s past and the vision of faith’s future as the substance and the mandate of faith’s present. This is active work. It requires reflection and intention and patience.
I think this can be hard for us for a lot of reasons. One of them is the pressure to make the Christmas season culturally profound. We have a vision for what Christmas should be in front of us for weeks. In the shows we watch on our TVs, in the speakers at the shops whose aisles we drift through – the world has an idea of what the season should feel like, and our options seem to be experiencing that or accepting the failure of our exhaustion or poverty or loneliness or hurt.
But this is a worldly pressure that we often accept, one that Advent invites us to shed. It is in waiting where we discover that the pain our seasonal consumerism attempts to numb actually holds the key to the joy we’re truly after. By inhabiting the story of the past, we can cherish God’s present faithfulness as we anticipate His promised future. You don’t get to truly savor what you haven’t anticipated. And it is in this often painful or frustrating waiting where the joy of the Lord grows sweeter.
This is ultimately the promise of Advent. Rather than uniting us around one culturally-driven vision of a successful Christmas, like the people of Whoville singing around their tree, we find that the joy of the season gathers around us – right where we’re at, right as we are. I like what James Smith says in his book How to Inhabit Time:
While God is eternal, creatures are seasonal, and thus our relationship to God is characterized by a seasonality that is natural, expected, and good. In the same way that you relate differently to a parent when you are eighteen versus forty-eight, so it is natural to relate differently to God at different points in the journey of creaturehood through time. In some ways, this might be experienced as an ebb and a flow, with varying waves of intimacy and distance, enthusiasm and struggle. When one cultivates some expectation of this, the seasons of ebb and distance need not be alarming, even if they might be difficult and puzzling. But the seasons of relating to God might also be varying dynamics of how one experiences God's presence… God's nearness looks and feels different depending on the season you're in.
You are surely waiting on something right now. You are experiencing the groaning of anticipating Christ’s return. You are longing for all things to be made new as you see things in your life still old or aging or unfulfilled, things awaiting resurrection and renewal. This season in our culture will tempt you to look away, to numb your waiting and your yearning by crafting a perfect Christmas that looks like a nostalgic past or a vision board future. But Advent invites you instead to see clearly, to feel deeply, and to let God find you in the picture imperfect of your life. We will see the goodness of the Lord. He has always kept His promises. He is keeping them now, even as He keeps those who depend on Him. Waiting, in the end, is our act of faith.
- Caleb Saenz
