Advent is my favorite season in the church year. It doesn’t start with fanfares like Easter or involve repentance and fasting like Lent but it’s not ordinary or lacking character either. As the beginning of the church year, Advent holds a sense of hopefulness and renewal. But most of all, Advent is a time of expectation and waiting. In contrast to the retail world that blasts jubilant carols as soon as we hit November and covers every available space with gaudy decorations, Advent is a season of quiet and calm, a time of preparation. The readings are edgy and slowly build up tension, calling for us to keep awake, telling us of voices crying in the wilderness and of the sudden appearance of angels. Advent is a time of stillness and silence, but that doesn’t mean it’s boring. The stillness is one of withheld energy, like a five-year-old in a church pew, and the silence is full of crackling tension, like the moment between when smoke wafts out of the oven and when the fire alarm goes off.
As darkness swirls around, growing deeper and longer, we light candles in a month-long vigil, keeping watch and waiting, listening to the voices crying in the wilderness, waiting for the angels to appear. Advent is a stripping down, a fresh start. Our songs are simple and build up slowly week by week as we light one candle to watch for Messiah, then a second, and a third. We reduce down to the most basic elements—light and dark—as we wait in the emptiness, totally still. We cry out for guidance: O Wisdom, come teach us; O Adonai, come and redeem us; O Root of Jesse, come and deliver us; O Key of David, come and free us; O Morning Star, come and enlighten us; O King of the Nations, come and save the human race; O Emmanuel, come and save us.
This is what Advent is all about—it’s not a long windup to Christmas, it’s not a countdown of how many shopping days are left, it’s not an empty space, it’s not those four Sundays we have to sit through before we can get to the fun stuff, it’s not that month where we get a piece of chocolate in our calendar every day. It’s a time when everything else is stripped away and all that is left is our waiting, all that is left is our cry: O Emmanuel, come and save us.
O Emmanuel, come and save us.