Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas, and ends on December 25th. The word “advent” comes from the Latin word adventus, which means “coming” or “arrival.” Advent is a season when Christians look ahead to the celebration of our Lord’s birth on Christmas. We also anticipate the second coming or “advent” of Christ. And finally, we look ahead to how Christ might arrive in our hearts and lives in new ways. Advent is a season marked by waiting for what is yet to come.
A part of me has dreaded the arrival of Advent in 2025. I do not like waiting to begin with. And this past year has brought way too much waiting already. After evacuating my home on January 7th, I had to wait for word on whether my family’s house – and houses belonging to neighbors and congregation members – had made it through the fires intact. Then came the many days of waiting for word from our insurance company on how much of our loss would be covered. I waited for word on aid applications, mattress orders, and bids from architects. The waiting felt endless and often infuriating.
One reason I don’t like waiting is the powerless it entails. It reminds me there are things in life I cannot make happen. I have to simply wait on the actions of other people and institutions. Word will come when it comes. And it does not matter how many calls I make to my insurance adjuster to try to make that word come sooner. All I can do is wait.
The powerlessness I often feel in waiting can be a hard – but healthy – reminder of the nature of salvation. As the book of Ephesians remind us, it is “by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” A core conviction of the Christian faith is that God did what we could not. God freed us from sin and death through the coming of Christ. It is by the life of Christ poured out for us that we know the remission of sin. And it is by his rising from the dead that we have the promise of life to come. It was in Christ’s ministry – that blessed gift from God – that we glimpsed God’s kingdom come near. We witnessed what the justice, compassion, mercy, love, and radical welcome of God looks like up close. And we were given a foretaste of God’s promised future when all will be made just, right, and good. Waiting – like the season of Advent itself – can remind us of how utterly dependent we are on God for life, salvation, and hope for the future.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was thinking about Advent while he was locked in a Nazi prison cell back in 1943. He was awaiting word that his incarceration might come to an end. That word never came. But while Bonhoeffer waited, he wrote this to a friend: “A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, does various unessential things, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.”
I do not like waiting. And so I do not welcome the annual reminder Advent brings of my own powerlessness in the face of things that matter. But I do love what Advent calls me to recall and savor. I may be utterly dependent on the actions of God and others from my life, survival, and thriving. But thank heaven, the gifts on which I utterly depend – the love of God and community in Christ – have come to me in a child born in Bethlehem. And one day, that savior will come again to make all things new. It is for that savior – and that coming day – we watch and wait this Advent.
–Pastor Matt