Thoughts on Advent

I love advent. We find ourselves reflecting, hoping, and expecting. We find promises fulfilled and the long-awaited coming to fruition. We find an answer to our groaning and sighing in the desert.

O Come, O Come Emmanuel is one of my favorite Christmas songs. It conjures images in my head of an exiled Israel gathered along the shores of the river, longing for home and clinging to nothing but their stories and promises of a Messiah. Can't you hear their cries? Can't you feel their desperation? Exile brings a darkness and loneliness that is only lit by the hope of promises that have lingered thick in the air for generations.

Fast forward to a first century Israel, still waiting, now oppressed by an unjust Roman government. Into this darkness, hope is born in the dark, dank forgottenness of a Bethlehem stable. After a gestation of years of wandering, of Exile, of being overlooked and oppressed, hope was birthed in the feeble cry of a newborn baby. And that hope was fragile, breakable, weak, and needing to be held close and fed and cared for so that it could grow into the fullness of its strength and power and meaning.

I find that advent is time where hope is born anew in my life. It is often a messy business. A birth in a stable is hardly a glamorous beginning-dirt, hay, animals,and the pain of a young girl with only the help of her new husband. We see this precedence hope breaking into the most unexpected of places. And so I am finding hope in response to my exile, in answer to my groaning, and breaking forth in the midst of my unpreparedness. Perhaps I should have been expecting it all along.