Starting this Sunday, I’ll be offering brief Advent devotionals to all my paid subscribers. Now, I know some of you hear “$40 a year” and immediately feel led by the Spirit—to close the browser tab. In honor of Black Friday, I’m offering a deal so good it will be illegal in California.
For the next seven days, you can subscribe for 80% off, which means you get everything I write for $8 a year. Yes, eight dollars. That’s less than a frappe-latte-matte and far more edifying.
Pull the trigger. Your wallet will forgive you. Your soul might even thank you.
If you pursue this outrageous discount and support my substack, I will do my very best to woo you into my world of Puritan theocracy and liturgical pushups. If Advent/Christmas/Epiphany monologues bother you, I would urge you to hit pause and return after January 6th. By then, I will have everything off my chest, including the wreath, Isaac Watts, and nursing home carols.
Nevertheless, dear friend, if you appreciate these timely meanderings, I urge you to stick around and cheer me on in my endeavors. I will try to make your reading worthwhile while irritating certain blocks of hermeneuticians. I don’t have the guts to do No Quarter November, but I do have the guts to work through my November quarters.
You’ve been warned.
Why We Don’t Long for Advent: No Longer Longing
No one likes to long for things. No one likes to wait. We are consumerist beings expecting everything to be hand-delivered, not one second too late, preferably one second earlier. It’s for these and other reasons that we hate Advent! It’s perhaps for this reason that we also join the Advent and Christmas seasons conceptually. We don’t grasp what Schmemann called the “bright sadness” of this Season, so we would rather incorporate it with a happier season.
But we usually don’t hate Advent intentionally; we hate it emotionally, almost like a visceral reaction. We hate it because words like “longing,” “waiting,” “expecting,” and “hoping” don’t find a comfortable home in our hearts or vocabulary.
Longing to Long
So, I propose we begin the process of unhating Advent. But we can’t simply un-hate something we have long hated. It takes time to undo our habits. We must try to see Advent for what it really is— a season of practice. It’s a season to warm up our vocal cords for the joys of the world and to strengthen our faith for the adoration of Christ, the Son of the living God.
Few of us treasure the practice time, rehearsal, the conductor’s corrections to our singing, and the coach’s repetitive exercises before the big game. Ultimately, we hate Advent because we don’t like to practice.
Sometimes, however, the solution to stop hating something is to reframe how you think about it. Imagine you sit under a tedious professor who reads from his notes with no modulation in his voice. To make matters worse, he rarely, if ever, looks up to engage your eyes but buries himself in his manuscript. While the material is lovely, you long for that intimate connection between the content and the character. The next class rolls around, and suddenly you have an engaging lecturer eager to connect with you. He will add a couple of funny lines to ensure you are awake. Those professors almost always make a more significant emotional impact than the tedious lecturer.
Longing with Perspective
Advent is like longing for an engaging professor who not only enjoys teaching but looks at you and seeks to connect with your eyes and heart. If adventing (waiting) were only a process of listening without engaging, it would be a duty without pleasure. But Advent is being guided by someone who looks into the eyes of affliction and speaks from experience.
So, yes, it’s about perspective. To Advent is to wait actively, to long hopefully, and to engage the dynamic prophets who prophesy and proclaim Messiah Jesus.
If we begin to see Advent as an engaging practice for Christmas, our distaste for the season before Christmas will suddenly decrease, and our longing will be more meaningful. Perhaps we won’t hate Advent after all. We will long together with the prophets and those first-century saints who practiced well and embraced Christmas with sounding joy.
Nuntium
CREC Florida Rising
In early January, I am headed to Central Florida to speak at this Youth Conference on the sacraments, and then have some meetings with potential CREC congregations in Tampa Bay.
