Advent Has a Purpose (Candle Lighting Isn’t It)

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. (Acts 17:26–27)

Everyone has a way of getting ready for Christmas. This hardly needs unpacking; but since you’re here and because we’re all, in fact, getting ready for Christmas (four weeks away), it would be imprudent not to.

Christmas is such a cultural phenomenon that it would simply be too much to turn up to December 25 ready for action. Can you imagine if we treated it like Labor Day? Think about it. How bizarre would it be if we remembered the day before that it was Christmas and showed up on someone’s doorstep ready to go with sweaters on and a few gifts under our arms for the lucky few we remembered to shop for? It just doesn’t work. Christmas has a gravitational pull that’s bigger than we are.

We’re used to this in other areas of life too, spaces that need the buildup and are, in some ways, bigger than the thing itself. We don’t get to Super Bowl Sunday without several rounds of playoffs and a bye week, we don’t get to a presidential election without a year of nonstop coverage, and we don’t get to a Taylor Swift album without a giant marketing campaign and two singles dropped (except for her edgier material, naturally). So of course we don’t get to Christmas without the ramp-up — it’s too rich not to.

And we all have different ways of getting ready for it.

Some of us let the sports calendar guide us home with bowl season, the College Football Playoff, a wind-down to the NFL slate, Christmas Day NBA lineup, and so on. Others go the Mariah Carey route. We won’t talk about those who’ve had trees up since Halloween.

The long runway to Christmas is a thing, and it’s needed. It draws us out of the everyday humdrum of meetings, chores, commutes, and home life. We need Christmas and all that’s wrapped up in it. We need the build up, we need the parties, we need the anticipation. We need the nervousness about seeing your in-laws or your mom’s left-wing aunt or your dad’s right-wing brother. We need a space for life to not look like the first week of October or the third Saturday in April.

If at this point you think I’m setting you up for a “Keep CHRIST in Christmas” diatribe, you can relax. We need these cultural touchpoints, and it would be inaccurate to act like they don’t exist or they don’t really work for us. What I am interested in, though, is the Jesus part of Christmas and where his part in the build up meets your own.

There seems to be one or two times a year when people buy back into Christianity or search for it to begin with. Lent, in its build up to Easter, is one of these. Its perceived rigor and raw honesty about our finite lives is often used to draw yourself out of yourself and into a more idealized version of “you.” With that, there’s certainly more than a small element of “if I buy back in on God, maybe he’ll buy back in me.”

Advent is one of these times too, and to some extent I’ve seen it treated like a more jolly version of Lent, trading holly for ash, colored lights for the darkness, and festive cocktails for sobriety. We go through the rituals of lighting candles of certain colors in a certain order, reading Advent devotionals, opening Advent calendars for 24 days to bingo. It’s all well-intentioned and serves the good purpose of going alongside the football, the lights, the shopping, and the eggnog in a spiritual way.

I’m for all of this, by the way. I’m a card-carrying Advent observer, but I also want to caution us here. Because at the end of the day, lighting candles at dinner isn’t the point. In those one or two times a year when we buy back into Christianity, there’s usually a reason why we’re knocking on the door; otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it, because there are a lot cooler things we could be doing.

You see, none of us comes to Christianity hoping for a few more small things to do with ourselves. We turn up because there are usually one or two things in our lives — either external factors or internal personal patterns — that we’d like to see changed. And to one degree or another we find, or we hope, that Christianity can help with that endeavor. And more than that, we hope that God will hear our longings. And if all that Christianity seems to offer are candles, calendars, and well-meaning devotionals, well … that’s pretty dry toast.

It’s no secret that people have been longing for more since the beginning. The people of Babel longed to climb to heaven. Noah longed for dry land. Abram and Sarai longed for a son. Moses longed for a promised land, and in the latter stages of the Old Testament, God’s people longed for home.

And when we turn the page to the New Testament and find John the Baptist coming onto the scene — Jesus’ cousin and hype man — we find God’s people conquered again, this time by the Romans. More than that, though, they had not heard from him in a very long time, confusingly because it was in God himself in whom they found their whole identity.

One has to wonder what their longings were — specifically, I mean. They’d certainly rather a Hebrew king rule them, not a Roman Caesar far away (albeit they’d been through worse). They’d have liked to not have to worry about which Jews were on their team and which ones were tax-collecting wolves in sheep’s clothing (looking at you, Matthew).

Most of all, I bet they just wanted God himself to be near them again. They wanted him to speak to them as the prophets had of old. They wanted God to send them the anointed one they’d been promised for hundreds of years, who would establish himself as their king forever in a way that David and his lineage never could. They wanted to know that the maker of heaven and earth — their God — had their back.

With this longing in view, it’s easy to see why all four Gospels recount John the Baptist’s lightning-bolt declaration, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Anyone who has ever said those six words out loud is either crazy (do you believe the guy with the sign and tin-foil hat?) or they have something real to offer.

But John meant it, and he was right. When God’s people heard those words, John’s legs submerged in sacred waters — the same waters God’s people crossed the first time they made landfall in the Promised Land — everyone rushed down to him; they couldn’t get to him fast enough.

Why is that? You see, they were ready for the real thing to come, ready for the real thing to change their lives and change their circumstances. They were ready to be the people they longed to be again. They were people who likely had one or two things they’d like to see changed in their lives, and apparently no one else but God himself could help. And guess what? The real thing came, and the world hasn’t been the same since.

Now, in the one or two times a year when people decide it’s time to buy back into Christianity, they really are looking for something. I’m glad that’s true because we do need those on-ramps. There’s no doubt that Advent is one of them and here’s why:

By December, any sort of self-improvement plan we made for the year has likely gone by the wayside, along with attempts to reboot it.

It’s no secret too that this is a lonely time of year, particularly if what you want is a person with whom to share your life. Or if your friends and family perceive you as a burden. Or if life hasn’t gone the way you thought it would.

And we all, to some extent, get to the final stretch of the year tired of our own stuff, baggage, neuroses, and subtle reminders that we’re not the people — at least not entirely — that we want to be.

What we’re after, then, is the real thing.

We’re after the real thing that touched down on planet Earth a little over 2,000 years ago. We’re after the real thing that has real power, real substance, who sees our real souls, knows our real thoughts, what we’ve done and haven’t done and isn’t afraid of any of it. We’re after the real thing that can make dry bones live, and if he can do that, then surely he can handle what we’ve got going on.

If we’ve come to this point of the year with Jolly Lent in mind, thinking that if we buy back into God with some Advent practices then maybe he’ll buy back into us, it’s best that I go and say now that we’re probably going to miss some devotional days in our books, forget to light our candles at night, maybe mess up the order, and enjoy the bourbon-laced eggnog a little too much one night. What I’d hate for us to get from that (and any of those things are bound to happen) is to feel we’ve messed this hand up and that we must wait for Ash Wednesday to get dealt back in.

Because the truth is that if we think we need to buy back into God so he’ll buy back into us, we’re wrong. He’s already all in. And he doesn’t just come around once a year like a comet, he is coming again one day for good. And in the words of St. Paul, he is actually not far from each one of us.

So as we light the candles (I’m going to, unless I forget), read our devotionals (I’m sure there are some good ones), watch the College Football Playoff, avoid left- and right-wing family members, buy trees and string them up, may we head into this Advent season knowing that our deepest longings are really for him, Jesus the Messiah, the real thing who can actually meet them. And perhaps in these weeks and beyond the Big Day, we might seek him, tell him what’s going on, and perhaps feel our way towards him and find him.