W. David O. Taylor
The beginning of the church year arrives yet again.
After a year of pestilence, violence, vigilante justice, economic volatility, political unrest, racial protests, religious division, social anxiety, and mass deaths, Advent arrives just on time.
Oft-nicknamed a “Little Lent” because of its invitation to repent in order to prepare for Christmastide and the time of feasting, Advent is a season in which we meditate on the coming of God.
From the Latin adventus, which is the Latin translation of the Greek word parousia—a word frequently used to refer to the Second Coming of Christ—Advent asks, How does the original coming of God to earth and the future, eschatological coming of God inform our experience of God’s coming here and now?
Instead of seeing God’s coming as a distant idea, fossilized in the past, or far-flung in a seemingly perpetually receding future, Advent re-orients our sense of God’s coming in our own day, and it does so in fresh ways each time.
If we’re honest with ourselves, however, this fact might actually terrify us, as it often did the protagonists of Saint Luke’s story. If God wishes to come into my life today, what does that mean? What does it look like? What will I have to do? Will I recognize his coming? Will I actually welcome it? Will I be found distracted when he comes or faithlessly, anxiously protecting my life from any divine interruption?
It’s important to remember here that the season of Advent is not interested in a generic coming. It is interested in a very particular form of coming—in the coming of the triune God.
Such a coming demands an extraordinary amount of waiting, an experience of anticipation that resists our urges to predict the work of God in a manner that excuses the need for a vulnerable trust, and an arrival that always surprises—even if in retrospect it remains perfectly consonant with the character of God.
In more specific terms, the coming of God in the form of a baby in Bethlehem defies every one of our expectations. The God-Man baby who is born to a teenage girl confounds all our metaphysical assumptions. The teenage girl and the tradesman father who raise this Incarnate God-Infant as their own deviates from the plot as we had imagined it.
The figures who welcome and worship the Christ child, sheepherders and astrologers both, fail to meet our standards of propriety—that is, who we think should properly have welcomed his arrival. The means by which the Spirit of God discloses the purposes of God, through dreams and visions and ecstatic proclamations, frustrates our desires to master and manipulate the ways of this God.
And yet, in retrospect, it all makes sense. The coming of God happens just as it should have happened. And we could now not imagine it happening any other way.
But that does not make the waiting for the coming of God today any easier. It simply reminds us that waiting is hard work. It reminds us that God’s coming always exceeds our capacity to forecast the manner of his arrival and that trust is required every single time.
What Advent does, at its best, then, is to strengthen our waiting muscles, which are muscles that we require in all domains of our life—family, work, friendship, ministry, politics, study, economy, health, and so forth.
All-too often, though, and despite our best wishes, we succumb to a hopeless waiting. We wait hopelessly because we have been beaten down by an often-cruel world. We wait hopelessly because the cares of our lives have become burdensome to us. We wait hopelessly because we tire of waiting for things that we have longed for our entire lives. We wait hopelessly because the changes and chances of life have worn us down.
And if this hopeless waiting is allowed to occupy our hearts long enough, it results in a low-grade form of despair that in turn births a “grinding it out” or a “settling for whatever will do” mentality, which inevitably makes us feel sick of ourselves and sick of waiting.
How long do I have to wait?
How long must I wait for that for which I have hoped?
How long must I wait for that toward which I have worked?
How long must I wait for that about which I have prayed?
How long must I wait for that for which I have yearned so intensely that it hurts?
Advent reminds us that God does in fact arrive. In Christ he arrives to a first-century peasant girl betrothed to a blue collar worker. In the Spirit he arrives to a hundred and twenty of the most unlikely bedfellows, gathered on the day of Pentecost. And by his active, consoling, sanctifying, presence-mediating Spirit, and through the hands and feet of his Spirit-filled people, he arrives here and now, in this time and place, to you and to me, to minister and to comfort and to bless.
He arrives just on time, even if it takes him a day or two, or thirty years, or four hundred, or even a thousand to arrive on the scene.
The season of Advent, then, is an opportunity to reckon soberly with the actual condition of our enfeebled waiting muscles. It is likewise an opportunity to discipline our hearts and minds, our bodies and our wills so that we might become, together, a people who wait for God’s coming with hope.
So, today, yet again, may we anticipate with faith the unpredictable manner of Christ’s coming in our lives. May we welcome his coming into the tired and painful places of our lives with courage in our hearts. And may we together welcome his coming with joyful anticipation for all that he shall yet do in our lives—even in this trying and troubling year.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
This article is adapted from a piece that originally appeared at wdavidotaylor.com.
W. David O. Taylor is Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of several books, including Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide for Life (Thomas Nelson/Harper Collins, 2020), Glimpses of the New Creation: Worship and the Formative Power of the Arts (Eerdmans, 2019), and The Theater of God’s Glory: Calvin, Creation and the Liturgical Arts (Eerdmans, 2017). He has written for The Washington Post, Image Journal, Calvin Theological Journal, Christian Scholars Review, and Books & Culture, among others. An Anglican priest, he has lectured widely on the arts, from Thailand to South Africa. He and his wife Phaedra have produced a set of Illustrated Psalms Prayer Cards and a set of Illumined Prayers For Life. He tweets @wdavidotaylor and posts on Instagram @davidtaylor_theologian.
Image: Phaedra Taylor, Annunciation