It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Have a merry Christmas. Feel the merry. Shop till you drop. Black Friday. Silent night, holy night. All these Christmas slogans wrap around us like a familiar blanket each Christmas season. I, for one, love Christmas, and I don’t mind all the cheesy slogans. Christmas for me means family, means togetherness, means sitting around tables in chairs that were once empty.
Everyone wants, and deserves, some Christmas cheer. Everyone deserves their holiday movie ending — the holiday couple who met serendipitously ends up together, the old scrooge softens, the Grinch grows a heart. Yet every Advent there is the preacher’s dilemma. As beautiful a season as Advent is, each time I ascend to the pulpit I think, “Should I tell them the truth? Should I remind my lovely people that the world is on fire?” As Phoebe Bridgers says in her most recent blue holiday song, “hey butterfly, there’s only so much wine you can drink in one life. And it won’t save you from the bottom of your glass.” No matter how full we fill our glasses this Advent with parties and mistletoe and decorations and mountains of Amazon boxes, the truth is the world is rife with suffering, hardship, and violence.
The church has always known this tension. The apocalyptic poets and artists have always reminded us that Christians live life precariously on a balance beam of the present with two worlds on either side of us; on the one side is the real reality of sin, evil, and death, and on the other is our hope in the second coming of Christ, the age to come, when tears shall be wiped from our eyes. Fleming Rutledge has argued that Advent preaching on the second coming of Christ has gone out of style in the mainline. Christmas sentimentality has creeped into the church’s ancient impulse toward hope amidst death, and has muted John the Baptist, Isaiah, and the scariest book of the Bible, Revelation. Maybe it’s time to go back to the future.
One of most celebrated themes of Advent these days is “preparation.” I myself have already found myself slipping into reminding people, “get ready for the season of preparation.” This year I’m wondering if by asking people to prepare we’re just inviting them once again into works, into earning God’s birth. But the stark reality Advent thrusts upon us is that there’s no amount of human preparation that can stop the shooting at Club Q. I learned this lesson in the early months of my daughter’s life. Her mother and I had been preparing diligently. We watched all the videos, took the classes, followed the right influencers, yet no amount of preparation could’ve prepared us for the pure revelation of human life that is Joanna, our child.
No, this year I will not prepare. I don’t have the time, nor the energy, nor the willpower, to prepare for God to show up in my life. This year my Advent begins with the odd and oft-ignored prophet, Habakkuk,
“How long, Lord, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrongdoing” (Hab 1: 1-3).
As Tom Waits put it, “I still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about all the blood that’s been spilt, will God on his throne get me back home? Tell me, how does God choose? Whose prayers does God refuse?” Habakkuk is faced with the haunting silence and absence of God amid a world of spiraling chaos and violence. In the face of the dark night of the human soul, Habakkuk does not ask his people to prepare. In fact, he doesn’t ask anything of them. Maybe he’s just a bad pastor. After all, Andy Root says that most of modern pastoring these days is asking busy people to become busy in the church that is busy. Harmut Rosa says this is because the thesis of modernity is acceleration. The faster you move, the more righteous and virtuous you are.
I should’ve become an online pastor influencer. When it comes to inviting busy people into the fast and busy church, I am supremely guilty. This whole programmatic fast-paced religion is what Mark Labberton calls, “the church industrial complex.” Even in the reformed tradition, with our low view of humans, we pastors still believe the lie that busy people can work their way into freedom. On most days, if I’m honest, I believe that my pastoring buys me a ticket to Graceland, too.
Habakkuk’s response seems silly in a world where ministry has become synonymous with words like entrepreneurial, innovative, creative, new, and energy. Inexplicably, ridiculously, he chooses to “wait.” “I will keep watch and wait for what God says to me” (Hab 2:1). I can already see the social media pitchforks coming for him. I’m about ready to raise one myself. Does not wait mean “passivity?” Does not wait mean indifference? How does doing nothing solve anything? Is Habakkuk just trying to “thoughts and prayers” his way out of this?
This Advent, I’m not going to do anything to prepare for Christ to come. That way, when he arrives there will be nothing I’ve done to make it so. This reminds me of two of the wallflower characters in the gospels, Simeon and Anna. They aren’t hip, relevant or charismatic. Quite the opposite, they are old, greying, and frankly, odd. They don’t walk on water like Peter or touch the wounds of God like doubting Thomas. They don’t see the proof of Jesus’ power in healings or exorcisms, nor do they feel the resonant charge of his teachings in Galilee.
What Simeon and Anna do is wait, and wait, and wait. They’ve spent years just waiting for a glimpse of the child of God. And in a moment charged with delight and wonder, after years gone by, God grants them the promise they’ve been waiting for. If just for a moment, they see the child, Jesus, the object of their deepest yearnings. They aren’t the Bible characters likely to make season three of The Chosen, but this year they’re my Advent heroes. This year I will join with Simeon and Anna’s waiting in the temple courts, if just to catch a glimpse of the glory to come. I will, too, sit with Jesus in Gethsemane to wait for God to show up, though I will likely falter and sleep like his disciples, because the holidays are wonderful and tiring, and ministry is wonderful and tiring. In the words of Mumford and Sons’ Advent dance ballad, “I will wait, I will wait, I will wait, for you.” I will wait, because waiting is hoping.
Thank God Advent isn’t about me. It’s about the God who prepares for me to be completely lost and impatient come Christmas. This is the gospel. God can take the light of tomorrow and throw it at the darkness of today. And that’s something worth waiting for.
COMMENTS
6 responses to “Done Preparing for God”
Leave a Reply
Thank you! Just in time!
Wonderful, thank you Joshua!
Yes, of course. Glad it spoke to you both!
I appreciate your emphasis on waiting, and I very much agree with the perspective that churches miss the mark when they’re all about accelerating the busyness in people’s lives.
I do take issue with your aside, “There’s no amount of human preparation that can stop the shooting at Club Q.” I think that’s straightforwardly false and comes across as the very sort of indifference you later critique. More preparation absolutely could’ve stopped the shooting; we just choose as a nation not to do it. If you meant this as a more general assertion that some violence is inevitable in this fallen world, then sure, I can agree with that. But we exist in a world of probabilities, and there’s so much that we *could* do that would make such shootings far, far less likely to happen; this isn’t about faith vs. works so much as responding to the Gospel injunction to love our neighbor. If my neighbors are being regularly shot to death in their schools, at the mall, at a bar, at the grocery store, do I not owe them some “preparation”? Chalking such violence up to inevitability just brings to mind the words of The Onion’s perennial headline after every such shooting: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
Pierre,
Thank you for your honest pushback. Your comments remind me of how hard it is as a writer to bat 1000 when speedily writing an essay, and I receive them with care.
The sentiment I was trying to get across with the sentence you point to is, “As much as we prepare for God, there’s nothing we can do to stop suffering from entering our life.” Obviously, I did a poor job of getting that across. Indeed there is much we can do to put an end to mass shootings in our country–background checks, ceasing the sale of military-grade AR’s, and supporting non-profits like Everytown who work to find bi-partisan legislative solutions. I’m with you there 100%, and I should’ve been more thoughtful with my language.
Indeed, there is much that human love and action can do, especially when in comes to the particular issue of gun violence in America. What I failed but tried to get across is that I often feel a tendency in myself and others to believe that our human action and preparation can close us off from all suffering, that if we just do more outside of God’s action than humanity will progress. I do also think that “waiting on the Lord” is another response (next to legislative efforts) that Christians could have in this violent world. Thanks again, Pierre, and take care.
Thanks for your reply, Joshua. My initial response came off a bit hot only because that shooting was, both figuratively and literally, close to home for me and it’s still very fresh, so I’ve been feeling tender about it. I understand that sometimes a phrase can come off differently that you intended, which is why I presumed – as you then confirm – that your larger meaning was that we can’t prevent ourselves from suffering at all in this life. You’re right to push back on the myth of perpetual progress, that someday if we can just get everything right, there will be no more suffering. I am as susceptible to that sort of thinking as anyone. Thanks again for your nuance and for a thought-provoking piece.