Your bulletins say, “First Sunday in Advent.” We lit the first Advent candle—a dark purple one. We began the service by singing, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” And in all this, we’re doing something that, anymore, is completely foreign to our culture. As the essayist Joseph Bottum writes, “Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale. Every secularized holiday, of course, tends to lose the context it had . . . Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to an-ticipate Christmas. More Christmas trees. More Christmas lights. More tinsel, more tas-sels, more glitter, more glee—until the glut of candies and carols, ornaments and trim-mings, has left almost nothing for Christmas Day. For much of America, Christmas itself arrives nearly as an afterthought: not the fulfillment, but only the end, of the long Yule season that has burned without stop since the stores began their Christmas sales.”
In considering this picture, and the escalating insanity of commercial Christmas, Bottum suggests that “maybe Christmas . . . lacks meaning without Advent.” That may sound strange, but I think he’s right. We live in a culture to which spiritual disciplines like self-denial are largely a foreign concept; to our society, the way to prepare to celebrate Christmas is by indulging ourselves in spending, consuming, and celebrating—shopping, throwing parties, shopping, decorating, shopping, eating, and more shopping. The problem is, that doesn’t prepare our hearts to celebrate, and still less to worship God; it just burns us out, leaving us sick of the whole thing. It essentially makes the celebration about the celebration—it makes it a matter of working ourselves up to the proper pitch of enjoyment just because everyone else is, and of making merry because we’re supposed to make merry—and that’s a very empty thing, with no substance to it, and really a very tiring one. Though the church tradition of preparing for Christmas with a season of reflection and self-examination and repentance is quite foreign to our world’s way of thinking, there’s a real wisdom to it if you stop and think about it.
Advent, if we take it seriously, disciplines our anticipation and the emotions that go along with it, in part at least because it focuses our attention on just why we look forward to Christmas; as Bottum puts it, it “prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.” After all, the message of Christmas is that the light shines in the darkness—which means we need to understand the darkness if we really want to understand the light. We need to understand the darkness not just in our world, but in our own lives, to really appreciate what it means that through Jesus Christ, God has caused his light to shine in our hearts. We need to look at sweet baby Jesus wriggling in a bed of straw, cooing and sucking his fist, and realize that that fat little hand is the same hand that scattered the stars across the night sky—and the same hand that reached down and formed the first man out of riverbank clay—and that he comes to us as God’s cosmic Answer to sin and death. Which means that if we’re going to take Christmas seriously, we need to begin by taking Advent seriously.
To do that, we need to begin by facing and accepting the reality that this world is neither what we want it to be nor what it was meant to be, and neither are our lives. It wasn’t always this way. God created the world good, in harmonious order, blessed with everything necessary for life. He made us in his image and gave us the world to manage and care for, to tend and steward for its benefit and our own; he created us for relationship with him, to know him and love him as our Creator and ultimate Father. All he asked of us in return was to accept his authority—to accept that he’s God, and we’re not. What was the first temptation? “Do this and you will be like God. You won’t have to trust him to tell you what’s right and wrong—you’ll be able to decide that for yourselves.” You will be like God. Why was that the first temptation? Because the keystone of the created order was, and is, that God created everything and rules over everything, and all of his creation finds its proper place under his authority. To disobey, to reject his authority, was to break that order and plunge creation into chaos.
With that first act of rebellion, sin and death entered the world. By that, we don’t mean death as loss of physical existence, or at least not merely that; we can see that in both our passages this morning. When Adam and Eve disobey God, they continue living in the physical sense—but they are expelled from the presence of God, for he cannot tolerate their sin. Whether physical immortality in this world was part of God’s initial plan is not the concern here; the concern, rather, is with the effects of sin, and with death as a corrosive power that eats away at life as God created it. The concern is with sickness and corruption, and with the shattering of the harmony between us and each other, ourselves, the created world, and above all, God. He created order and life; we traded that in for death and turned the forces of destructive disorder loose on the world. That’s what Moses and Paul are concerned about, not lifespan, when they tell us that sin and death entered the world through one human act.
That’s the reality of our existence in this world. Adam sinned—and notice, though Eve was the first to disobey, he gets the greater blame; his was the decisive act that confirmed her disobedience and sealed both their fates—and he left us to inherit the mess; he left us a legacy of brokenness, guilt, disorder, shame, and death. People have tried to pretend otherwise, but their efforts have never gotten them (or anyone else) anywhere. We’ve seen all sorts of arguments that human beings are basically good, insisting that all our problems are really the product of economic inequality, or social pressures, or repression of sexual desire, or other bugaboos of that sort; there would seem to be a lot of philosophers and writers who are firmly convinced that we wouldn’t do bad things if we didn’t have authorities running around telling us “No!” Some of them have managed to convince a lot of people they were right; but for all their followers and all their influence, what they haven’t managed to do is set even one person free from sin. And though the disciples of folks like Marx and Rousseau have launched a few revolutions, they haven’t managed to create even one sinless society—just several of the worst and bloodiest tyrannies this world has ever seen.
Paul wouldn’t have been surprised by that. He points out in verses 13-14 of Romans 5 that even before the Law came to tell us what not to do, the world was still full of sin, and death still reigned everywhere. Indeed, he says, it was only when the Law came through Moses that things started getting better—but that doesn’t mean the Law was enough. It could point people in the direction in which they ought to be going, and tell them how they ought to live, but it couldn’t make people want to go that direction or live that way, and it couldn’t give them the ability to do so. In the chaos of a fallen world, it was merely a blueprint for order; in the pathless darkness of our sin-shrouded existence, it was a dim light and a road map, but nothing more.
As Genesis 3 makes clear, however, God had no intention of stopping there; the Law was a necessary part of his plan, but it was only one part. He didn’t tell the serpent who had tempted his people into sin, “I’m going to give them laws to follow”; no, he said, “One of this woman’s descendants will arise and crush your head.” He promised that someone would come who would undo the harm that had been done. And so he raised up Abraham and said, “Through you all the nations of the world will be blessed”; and so he grew Abraham’s descendants into a great nation, and began to tell them of the Messiah who would come, his chosen one whom he would send to redeem the world. Into the chaos of this fallen world, he spoke promises of hope, of one who would lead us out of the chaos; to us who live in the darkness of sin, he promised to send the Light of the World, the Son of Righteousness risen with healing in his wings, as Malachi says, to set us free from the darkness forever. And so the world waited, through long, weary years, for God to keep his promise.
That’s what Christmas is all about: God keeping that promise. And it’s what Advent is all about, too: remembering the wait, remembering that he was faithful to keep that promise, as we wait for him to finish keeping it when Jesus comes again. It’s about the fact that God didn’t leave us to darkness and chaos, but all the way back at the beginning, he gave us reason for hope; and that though this world waited a long time for God to keep his promise, in the proper time, he kept it, sending us his Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. And in that, it points us to the truth that as we wait for his deliverance in one area or another of our life—for victory over a sin that troubles us, perhaps, or for healing of a physical or emotional problem, we can wait with confidence that God will not let us down. He may not give us exactly the answer we’re asking for, but he will give us what we need—because he gives us, because he has already given us, himself.