Advent Longings

Passage for reflection: Isaiah 64: 1 - 9

We are about to enter what is my favourite season of the church year, the season of Advent. I love Advent and I love Advent Sunday because it is a time we think about expectation, and hope, and our deepest yearnings. Dare I say I love Advent more than I love Christmas? 

This year perhaps we might actually do Advent. Usually we rush on to Christmas so much so when Christmas comes we are all carolled out. At home for the church year 1995 to 1996, we had a minister serve us from the Uniting Church of Australia, the Rev. Brian Whitlock. Brian was a character who shook us up after we’d had ten years with his predecessor and perhaps we’d become a bit too comfortable. He made us learn Advance Australia Fair and he wouldn’t let us sing a carol until midnight on Christmas morning. He wanted us to sing the fabulous Advent carols in Advent, and then sing the Christmas ones well into January. He had a point. 

We like to rush on in life. I’m terrible in a traffic jam. I hate being late and so I’ll stress when I’m stuck. I get that from my Dad. He’d never sit in a jam on a motorway. He’d turn off at the next junction believing that would be quicker than waiting in the gridlock. He’d often be wrong as all we did was rejoin the chaos a mile or so further along! My mother used to get very cross with him. But waiting is seen as negative, wasting time. There are people who want instant results, and who believe waiting is unnecessary. 

There was a vote this week on Wednesday, November 25 on Radio 1 whether it was too early to start playing Christmas songs. The overwhelming view was it wasn’t. While I was driving about on Wednesday, Nick Grimshaw, playing the annoying “All I want for Christmas is you” for the first time said “come on, let’s get on with it. One month to go!” (I usually am a Radio 2 listener but I can’t stomach Steve Wright in the afternoon so change the station while he’s on!) 

But maybe we need a season of waiting and soul searching and spiritual yearning before God. Maybe we need a time to give God our deepest longings and fears. Maybe to receive what Christmas brings, we need to do Advent. To prepare for God breaking into the world again, we need to be ready. I understand though this year more than any the impatience. We are longing for hope and for relief, for good news as this dreadful year comes to a close. 

None of us dreamt when we were locked down in March we’d still be restricted how we live. We now face tiers. We are in tier 2 in North Yorkshire which means we can open our churches again a week on Sunday very carefully and I can see people again outside or on doorsteps.

 I am sorry for those in tier 3 where so much cannot happen. I understand why the government has given us five days of relief over Christmas but decisions how those days are spent will be hard. Don’t hug your granny! And if we don’t behave we will be back in lockdown in January. So I get why lights are going up early, we are all tired of this virus and we need something to look forward to.

The people of God in Isaiah’s day had their yearnings. After many years away from home in exile in Babylon they returned home having been freed by King Cyrus of Persia. But the homecoming was not the party they hoped for. They found Jerusalem and their beloved Temple in ruins. Standing on the rubble they cried out to God. Where was he? The Temple was the sign of the presence and power of God and it was no more. So they cried out “O that you would tear the heavens apart and come down.” In other words they prayed “don’t abandon us, do something, we need some sign you care.” Perhaps we are feeling like them. 

We long for something good to happen. All we talk about is this virus and we are bored with it. 

We long for healing.

We long for answers to our problems.

We long for light in our darkness. 

Don’t abandon us, God!

The papers this past week have suggested Christmas has been saved. But I read an article in a recent Church Times by a retired Bishop, David Thomson, which suggests we don’t save Christmas, it saves us. 

“ Even if warm hearths and family togetherness are what we long for, they are powerful because they speak not just of a kiss under the mistletoe or a blow-out meal, but of a deeper sense that winter will not have things all its own way — a sense of unconquerable light. We have been celebrating it since Stonehenge, and we want and need to celebrate it now. But just saying “Boo” to the darkness — or, indeed, the virus — and getting on with the party is going to end in tears.”

 “From ancient times, Christians kept fasts before they dived into their feasts. They didn’t take the waiting out of wanting: they knew that a bit of waiting, a bit of preparing, a bit of pondering, would make the feast all the more fun.

Cue Advent: not just the Advent of a boozy miniature a day in December, but the Advent that starts four Sundays before Christmas and takes us slowly and carefully through the Bible’s story of how we got into this pickle we call life, and how God’s plan to join us in it, and raise us from it, came to pass. It’s all those readings you’ve heard at a traditional carol service, but old-school, taken slowly, savoured for all they’re worth. Then, at Christmas, the Great Twelve Days of Feasting can begin.

Hearts that are heavy with deathly fear can resonate poignantly with the Advent warnings of the day of the Lord that are ordinarily too strong a meat for many to take — but with them the assurance that, in the crisis, endings can turn to beginnings, and death and fear themselves flee before the face of God.”

Maybe we need a time to think seriously about our lives and what is missing in them for us to be whole and happy spiritually. 

Maybe we need a time when we can say to God “o that you would tear the heavens apart and come down —- for us!” To say to God actually life isn’t alright - we stand on today’s rubble and we wonder where you are. Or if we still think you do things, stop faffing about and do something. Maybe we need a time to lament at how things are.

Maybe we need a time to refocus to prepare to receive what God might have planned for us. The story of how Christ came into the world surprised all the participants in it. This year let’s not do a boring Christmas with everything the same - let’s be open to being challenged. What’s the heart of it? Let’s take time revisiting the yearnings and longings of God’s ancient people. Let’s hear again the promises shared by prophets like Isaiah and Micah and Zephaniah and Malachi. Let’s get inside the characters who heard Jesus was coming and be as gobsmacked as they were about it. 

Longing, waiting, expecting, all are necessary in a lively faith journey. Let’s be Advent people. Let’s be open with God and open to God in this season so that when he comes we might be ready. 

The book I return to every Advent is “The Coming of God” by Maria Boulding. It’s a classic. This quote for me sums up what Advent longing is. As Advent begins I pray we might find our expectancy and our longing for God again as a church. Perhaps I’m mad but I think we only have a future if we find them... 

“If you want God, and long for union with him, yet sometimes wonder what that means, or whether it can mean anything at all, you are already walking with the God who comes...lf you have ever had an obscure intuition that the truth of things is somehow better, greater, more wonderful than you deserve or desire,...that there is a mercy beyond anything you could ever suspect, you are already drawn into the central mystery of salvation.
Your hope is not a mocking dream; God creates in human hearts a huge desire and a sense of need, because he wants to fill them with the gift of himself.'

Unexpected God, your advent alarms us. Wake us from drowsy worship, from the sleep that neglects love, and the sedative of misdirected frenzy. Awaken us now to your coming, and guide our feet into your way of peace. Amen.