Don't Waste This Advent Season
We all know this has been a trying year in our city, in our country, and around the world. 2020 so far has been a year filled with a once-in-a-generation pandemic, protests, and political uproar. And now, here in Minnesota, we’re entering the dark days of an increasingly cold & snowy winter. Everyone seems to be waiting for something. Waiting for science to save us with an effective vaccine. Waiting for the government to save us with the policies we believe in. Waiting for that new media or technology to drop to offer us an escape. Waiting for the calendar to turn, for the next season to warm us again in the Spring.
But there is another season coming just around the corner where the whole purpose is a Godly waiting… in hope. You remember right? Advent. Don’t we need Christmas more than ever this year? As Pastor David Mathis says in his new advent devotional… I’m not talking about the “gifts and goodies, new toys and familiar traditions, indoor coziness and outdoor snow.” What I’m talking about is the supernatural, out of this world reality of what Christmas means. “What lies at the heart of Christmas… is the most stunning and significant fact in the history of the world: that God himself became one of us” (The Christmas We Didn’t Expect: Daily Devotions for Advent, David Mathis, 2020).
Advent is a season of waiting for an arrival, for the coming of a Savior… and we really need the calvary this year. The official start of Advent on the church calendar isn’t for another two weeks… but I want us to start thinking about it now. How are you going to observe the special season of waiting this year? For yourself? For your family? I’d highly recommend David’s new daily Advent devotional “The Christmas We Didn’t Expect,” we’ll include a link to it when we post this online this week. Perhaps in a year where our gatherings with family & friends may look different than normal, not how we’d like, this is an opportunity for us. Advent is an invitation to slow down, to take a deep breath, inhaling the ancient air of a promised Messiah who promises to return a second time on a white horse. We remember the words of the familiar carol, and we long to sing them, feel them, believe them all the more this year:
“O come, Thou Day-Spring, Come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death’s dark shadows put to flight
Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, o Israel.”
The exhortation this morning is that we not waste this Advent season in 2020 waiting on worldly solutions, but instead to “turn our gaze to Christ and ready our hearts for the feast to come. (Mathis, ibid.)”. And this reminds us of our need to confess our sins, pray with me.