The first season of the Christian church year is Advent. It begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas.
Advent is a season of "expectant waiting."
We wait. We expect something. Something better! In particular, the season is waiting for the birth of Jesus or, in other words, Christmas.
But most of us do not like to wait. Most of us are not particularly good at it. Most of us are no longer the child who can hardly wait until Christmas arrives to see what presents we will get from Santa and others. Instead, we fill the Advent season with mad Black Friday shopping, figuring out what gift to get each person, putting up the Christmas tree and other decorations, sending out the Christmas cards, wrapping packages, and preparing treats and other foods. Individually, some of these activities are pleasant if not favorites. But in total, they can leave us a stressed-out mess.
We tend to do the same when expecting a new child, especially a first child, in the family. We gather and read books on how to take care of a baby. We get the baby's room painted and decorated. Then there is the purchase of a crib and a multitude of other items the new baby will need. We prepare birth announcements and compile the list of people to send it to. Others may host baby showers for us. Again, these are all good and often enjoyable things to do. But the rush of activity also hides our inability to wait.
This is not what Advent is trying to teach us. Advent teaches us to wait expectantly. In a word, "expectant waiting" is patience. The birth of a child is not going to come any sooner just because we want it to. Christmas is not going to come any sooner just because we want it to. We simply must wait. Yet, we can wait with hope.
Perhaps the terrible experience of COVID-19 taught us something about how to experience Advent. We so wanted it to be over, and things return to normal! But except for a few scientists working on vaccines, the vast majority of us could do little to help restore normalcy. We could take essential steps to make the impact of the pandemic less severe and doing so saved lives. But that was not the same as the pandemic coming to an end. For that, all we could do was wait. We could have chosen to wait patiently, even as our lives were disrupted. We could also have chosen to live in the hope that the future would be better. I suspect that most of us struggled to live through the pandemic with patience.
Advent is also the time in the church year, where Christians are to focus on Christ's second coming. It is evident in the scripture that the first Christians thought this event would happen soon--as in their lifetime. Today, across Christianity, there is a wide variance of beliefs about the nature of this event. But that is not relevant here.
The relevance is that here we are 2,000 years later, and that event has not yet happened. Nevertheless, Christians still in faith wait expectantly for that event. Even after 2,000 years of waiting, we still believe. That is patience. That is Advent.
