My thoughts about Advent

Have you made your new year’s resolutions yet? We are at the end of the church year, ready to begin a new church year with Advent. We are awaiting with hope and promise of our savior, the Christ, to come and liberate us from the bondage and despair of sin. Advent is the season pregnant with promise and expectant hope. We wait in anticipation of the coming of Christ to us. We end our church year on Christ the King Sunday with the same expectation and promise of Christ’s coming again. We are in the mean time of promise and expectation. We anticipate God’s promise of Christ’s future return and we celebrate the historic promise and expectation of Christ coming to us as a child.
It is unfortunate that Advent is now obscured by our secular and commercial rendition of Christmas, where all spiritual substance is drained away to be replaced by commercial avarice beholden to the almighty dollar; idolatry writ large. We are all familiar with Christmas carols, but how many of us appreciate Advent carols? These carols are beautiful and heighten our awareness of the coming of Christ among us; they are lyrical in their expression of hope, longing, expectation. But Advent carols get overshadowed by the canned Christmas carols that we begin to hear, now around Halloween. The real tragedy is our missing the celebration of the 12 days of Christmas that follow Christmas Eve. We have 12 days to celebrate the coming of our Lord, the Word of God made flesh and dwelling among us. Our society, our culture, tear down the decorations the day after and immediately resume normal activity as if Christmas never even existed. Yet we have 12 days to celebrate the joy of the Christ child coming into our world with family, friends. We can renew the joy of Christ in our life and our acquaintance with the child like joy we first experienced at Christmas time. We renew a childlike hope and faith with this arrival of a young child of hope, promise and redemption. This is the joy and love of Christmas; we celebrate Immanuel, God with us, in the form of a little child, so innocent, so frail, yet gifting us with the promise of God’s redemption for us. Thanks be to God!