An Anxious Advent

Homily for the First Sunday of Advent, Year B
Click on the Scripture citations for a link to the readings
Isaiah 63.16b-17; 64.2-7 Psalm 80 1 Cor. 1.3-9 Mark 13.33-37

In case you’re a visitor to our church and this is your first time here, I want to clue you in on something that all of our regular members noticed pretty quickly today: my chair is in a new place; for this season of Advent and Christmas, the presider’s chair is on a different side of the altar – and that one change throws everything off. The servers are sitting in a different place, the Eucharistic Ministers have new furniture to navigate, and everyone has to get used to things looking a little different. Now, this change is just temporary – just for this season – but it’s a great time to do it, because it’s not normal, it’s not what we’re comfortable with. It’s something new. And so is the season of Advent itself.

It’s sometimes hard to grasp what Advent is supposed to be about when the world around us has been celebrating Christmas for over a month now. Advent is a new beginning – it’s a time of preparation and waiting for two things: for the annual celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas and also for the return of Christ at the end of time. Advent helps us look at Christmas a little differently than the rest of our society, but it also helps us to prepare by recognizing the anxieties that we live in. Try to think of it this way. There is no issue that is more on people’s minds these days than the economy. No one is comfortable these days – we’re anxious, fretful, worried about what next month or next year will bring. It’s hard for us to live in the present, the right now. The security that we thought we had in our retirement account or savings plan is not there any more – and so we spend our time anxious about the future, our eyes straining to see what’s going to happen next. The biggest question that we ask every day is: when will all this end; when will the economy recover, and jobs be created, the stock market stabilize, and the anxiety be over? And we can’t wait for all that to happen. That is what Advent should feel like.

Think about it. Advent is not a comfortable season – the readings today challenge us in more ways than one. Isaiah is pretty blunt in speaking to God: “Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful; all of us have become like unclean people, all our good deeds are like polluted rags.” Something is not right in our lives. Advent can be a reminder that we’re not comfortable, because we’re not perfect. But we want things to be better. We need to wake up and get our act together before we can welcome Christ’s birth with true joy. Advent helps us to recognize our anxieties, our worries – we don’t just go right to Christmas, because we need to prepare ourselves. But everything we do this season is oriented toward the future – Advent only makes sense when we preparing for something else – there’s a future out there for us, a future full of hope, and these days of Advent help to get us ready. Yes, Advent is a lot like an economic crisis – it’s not comfortable, it brings anxieties and worries, it’s oriented to the future, and if we really look at our lives, we might wonder how we can pull things together.

But there’s a difference between Advent and the economy. A big part of our economic worries is caused by not knowing what the future will bring or when things will get better – we hope things will get better, but we really don’t know. But with Advent, we do know what’s coming – we know that after four short weeks, we’ll celebrate Christmas; and we also know that, when the time has come, Christ will come back to bring the world to its completion. The future is set for us, and we know that it will be glorious. But it would still be too easy for us to skip Advent and go right to the celebrations. And that’s exactly what we need to avoid. Isaiah was right – we are sinful, “our guilt carries us away like the wind.” That’s where our anxiety and uncomfortableness come from. But Isaiah didn’t stop there, he ends his reflections by remembering that God, indeed, is our father, and that “we are all the work of [God’s] hands.” We don’t deserve Christmas – by ourselves, we are not worthy of the blessings that come from God’s birth as one of us. But Christmas will always follow Advent, because Christ’s birth is God’s gift to us. And Christ’s second coming is a sure thing – it’s not a question of what, but when. The anxiety and newness of these Advent days is not permanent – it’s only four short weeks. Christmas will come and Christ will come – but not yet. In the meantime, we wait and we prepare.