In Need of Advent

The Lotus Crypt at Tao Fong Shan, Hong Kong - Feb 2012

I needed Advent yesterday.

What I got was Christmas. A big, bright, beautifully premature Christmas. 

The strains of “Joy to the World” and an uptempo rendition of “O, Come All Ye Faithful” flowed past. Empty and dissonant, to me they sounded as if they were resounding gongs and clanging cymbals.

I’m not normally a stickler for liturgical details. I can understand and appreciate the historical, cultural, and theological reasons why the churches I attend in Sabah view worship, all worship, as an upbeat Celebration. And yet yesterday I was left wanting. . . Yearning for a tradition that allows the darkness to linger - that names it, that claims it, and that lights feeble candles to ward it off.

As Qoheleth tells us, there is a time to laugh and to dance and to do so unabashedly. There is also a time to weep and a time to mourn. Yesterday, for me, was one of those times.

I needed a Word wrapped not in gold and silver but in straw and muck - proclamation not of a distant God above that we must strive to appease but of a God who is with us - a broken people and a nation whose land is soaked with the blood of innocents lost. 

As my homeland grieves, I find myself in a foreign place in need of prayer. Prayer for those who were killed, prayer for all of those who weep or mourn, and prayer for those of us who wonder how we could have let this be and what we must do now so that this does not happen again. 

There is hope and there is joy in the world and there will be a time to proclaim that all with the stamping of feet and the blowing of horns. But what I needed, what I still need in this moment of grief, is but the whispered promise of One who came, One who does come, and One who will come again. 

In a word, Advent.