1st Sunday Advent--Darkest Just Before th Dawn
Press Conference - The Dark Knight
(To aid us in our discussion of Advent, we used a quick scene from the movie Batman: The Dark Night. Focusing mainly on the lines, "It is darkest just before the dawn, and the dawn is coming.)
Darkest Before the Dawn
It is always difficult this time of year to not get excited. We look around and there are all sorts of shiny, flashy, noisy, and distracting things everywhere. From stores, to radio stations, and even on people’s front yards, we have already begun to be consumed, swallowed up by the materialism that is the Christmas season.
Get ready for Christmas we often say and we do this by putting up trees, decorating our houses, shopping, and more shopping. We begin to play Christmas songs and we watch our favorite Christmas movies: How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Elf, and A Christmas Story. We look forward to so much this time of year and again, often times ending up getting too distracted.
We lose sight of the “reason for the season” and we buy into culture and society, spending, spending, and spending. This time of the year also can be a difficult season for people who don’t have family, don’t have anywhere to go, and can be difficult for those who may have lost loved ones. It can be difficult for anybody who may find themselves wandering around in large stores looking and searching for the right gift and having just found it, they get trampled on by inconsiderate shoppers and just like that, the joyful spirit goes out the door with a few mumbled words we cannot say and a look which speaks louder than thoe words.
How much do we really get it? How much do we really understand what is going on in the world, our communities, and our lives? We participate in it and not that this is bad but it can be. It can be a distracting and controlling matter which prevents us from being who we are to be and seeing others for who they are too. We prepare for the Christmas season by consuming all sorts of things and often times, because of this consumption, we become over-stressed and tired. I remember growing up and hoping and hoping to get the things I put on my Christmas list, which I worked so hard on. I would spend hours working on the list, searching through magazines and newspapers looking and writing down the toys that I NEEDED. I needed these things or I would not survive. Then when I didn’t get it, I complained, I mumbled, I would try to understand, but in the heart of my heart, I was quite ticked off I didn’t get that N64 or the latest gadget.
I wasn’t grateful for what was there, right in front of me. I longed for more and I wanted more. Yet now, that N64 I so badly NEEDED, sits in the bottom of T and I’s closet, collecting dust and being used maybe 1 time a year.
Yet there is good hope which lies in this time of the year. We get to practice the discipline of waiting. How anxious we grow during this time of the year. When we are little we get excited as we see the gifts pile up under the tree. We get excited as we count down the days to when we have no school. We get excited for the first snow fall. We get excited to see family we haven’t seen in a long time. We get excited for that feeling we get during this time of the year. We have to wait….for a month….for a while.
Waiting is tough especially if we find ourselves in a season of darkness, confusion, uncertainty, frustration, and worry. At some point in 2009 all of us have been in one of these situations. Where we have felt alone, where we have felt lost, where we have felt uncertain, and maybe even, we have felt unloved. How good it was though when those things went a way. When those feelings of despair and deep sadness were lifted. How great it was and how much easier it was for us to breathe when we saw the light appearing in the distance in our lives when darkness was all too present. These seasons may have lasted a good while, maybe a month, a week, or they may have only lasted a day, an hour, or a minute. Yet even in our most frustrating of moments we knew, light would come and darkness would dissipate. We knew these seasons would end and a new one would come to us. Our trust was in the Light, we knew it would appear, because if there is one thing we know that is certain in this world, it is that in the morning, in the dawning hours of the day, light will appear.
What is going on around us? Deep sadness. Deep hurts. Deep confusion. Deep misunderstanding. Quite like a period in time so many years ago. When God seemed to have been absent and people were longing for a Messiah, one to come and heal them. One to come and rescue them. One to come and free them. For so long they waited. They cried out to God and then their crying stopped. They no longer seem to want it. Their hope for the dawn was lost and they were fine being in the darkest parts of their days. Yet even in their hopes for the Messiah, the season they waited for, their thoughts were misguided too. They wanted someone attractive, they wanted someone rich, they wanted someone smart, they wanted someone who was a purebred, they wanted a King, and they wanted a mighty military and political ruler.
And guess what?
They didn’t get it. Instead, they got a baby, born to some peasant mother and father in some house where animals fed out of the same place where he laid his tired head. Jesus the Messiah, the King, the Prince of Peace came in an unlikely way, yet he did more than what any earthly ruler has ever done.
And he will do more than any earthly ruler will ever be able to do.
Christ is coming again and we, during this season of Advent, begin to prepare ourselves for his coming. What will his coming look like? How are we preparing? How should we be preparing? Where will Christ be coming? Who’s coming? What will he be like?
Latin word for Advent is adventus—which means “the approach” or “the arrival”. The verb advenio means—“I arrive. I come. I am coming.”
Christ is coming again and again to us. We must find ourselves ready and alert, attentive to where God has been, where God is now, and where God will be. We must be on guard and not let our hearts get tangled up in a mess of consumerism, greed, and selfish expectation. We must begin to prepare ourselves for the light, realizing that when we have been in darkness for a while and when we finally enter into the light, it often times is overwhelming and can be quite painful. Yet we continue to pray for strength, praying God’s direction and for God to make known God’s ways to us, like the psalmist did. We want to be ready so we may respond with obedience, responsive period, and to be ready to pick up the light and carry it with thus. The great Light of the World is coming, in an unlikely way, to us, an unlikely group of people who although may be sinful, we are redeemable, and God wants us to experience and lavish in God’s love.
It is a dark season, as the Christ candle is not lit. But we come to the table, bringing our own experiences and our own lights of God is with the hope that our candles will be bright enough to get us through the darkest part of the seasons, which is right before the dawn, which is right before the Christ child comes.
