[For Evening Prayer; Psalm 119:81-88]

For a long time, I have loved Advent more than Christmas. Now, I used to think I loved Christmas. My childhood memories feel sparse and patchy, but I remember enjoying lying on the ground behind the Christmas tree to read books. I remember one time as a child when my mom let me go to the 11 pm candlelight service, and being impressed by the sense that as we drove home, it was no longer Christmas Eve, but Christmas Day. And yet—maybe you’ve experienced this—when it actually comes to Christmas Day, or at least the evening of the 25^th, there’s a bit of a let-down. No matter how much and how long you’ve been waiting for Christmas to come, the day itself can never quite match up to our expectations.

As a pastor, I’ve been forced to reconsider what it is about this time of the year that I appreciate. For obvious reasons, like Christmas break, it is not the case here, but in other places I’ve served, everyone has his or her expectations for what makes for a good Christmas Eve or Christmas Day service; what hymns they need to hear; the feelings they need to have when they leave. It’s possible I’ve even been accused of ruining Christmas because I did not choose someone’s favorite Christmas hymn. So there is a bit of a burden attached to Christmas, which seems steadily to increase year after year, partly because of the way the world pushes buying and selling and decorating back into October.

I don’t say that to criticize those people in those churches, as much as to diagnose some of the reasons I’ve come to love Advent more than Christmas. When you come to Christmas and your expectations are not quite met, even if you do get your version of the Red Rider bb gun; when people you love die around Christmas time, or die during the previous year, and your Christmas is never quite the same; when your family doesn’t look like a version of the perfect advertising picture of a family at Christmas; when you’re sick, or struggling, or whatever might be interfering with your ideal Christmas celebration; then you also can see how Advent is much more like real life than Christmas.

The psalmist says, “My soul longs for Your salvation; I hope in Your word.” My soul is exhausted; it languishes; it looks desperately for Your salvation. Our longings and our hopes are not yet fulfilled, not yet seen; they are always less than what we expect or want them to be. In The Chronicles of Narnia, it is “always winter, never Christmas.” For the Christian, in this life and in this world, it is always Advent and never Christmas. We know longing, waiting, hoping much better than we know having, seeing, and experiencing. We are like John in prison. Or like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who said: “a prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that—ultimately negligible things—the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”¹

“My eyes long for Your certain words.” “I hope in Your words.” These are Advent thoughts, where we have not yet seen, but we have hope and longing tied to certain promises, to the assurance of the One who speaks these words. We have hints of that fulfillment when we come to the end of Advent, or to the end of Lent, in our celebrations, but let’s be honest, we didn’t really fast in the days prior to our celebrating. My belt certainly hasn’t gotten looser during Advent.

Even so, on we go, to ends and to beginnings, all the while living in an Advent world that is still much more full of war than peace, or death than life, of sin than holiness, of the prisons we build and that are built around us, than the freedom of the sons of God. Much more longing than longing realized; much more of hope and faith than of sight; much more of hearing than of seeing. We are like wineskins dried and shriveled in the smoke of this world and the smoke of our own sins.

But we have not forgotten the words of our God. Christmas is tied to a promise: the promise of the God who would take on flesh and enter His world, a world we have remade as we saw fit, and save His creation and us with it; the promise of a baby, whose name would be Yah-shua, because He would be Yahweh’s salvation in the world; the promise of that Savior, ascended and invisible, who will appear with all His angels to gather His Church into His resurrection glory; the promise that the Jesus whose birth we celebrate at Christmas is Immanuel, God-with-us, now, as He delivers His word of forgiveness and His body and blood to us; the promise that our lowly bodies will be transformed to be like His glorious body. We have not forgotten the words of God; they are all we have in an Advent world. But Christmas is coming; the celebration of His birth is only the beginning of the celebration that will go on forever; the Mass of Christ as we gather around His altar is only the beginning of the everlasting feast of the Lamb. Advent feels more real for now, but it will give way to Christmas, and then the presence of Christ, our born, crucified, resurrected, glorified Lord will be the only reality there is.

1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Christian Gremmels et al., trans. Isabel Best et al., vol. 8, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 188.