Advent as Joyful Celebration

By The Rev. Danny Hindman

Campus Minister for Reformed University Fellowship

The University of Wisconsin – Madison

“Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for my soul.” 

Ps. 66-67; Ps. 116 117; Is. 11:10–16; Rev. 20:11—21:8; Lk. 1:5–25

There is precious little in my time and place—the Upper Midwest in 2020—that helps me to remember what kind of season Advent is.  As we enter into these high, holy and ever expanding days of devotion to American consumption (I’m already receiving “Holiday” shopping deals as I write, and it is only just November), it is challenge enough to simply remember—never mind embody, inhabit, participate in—what sort of time we are in. I suspect I am not alone in this, and the readings for today help redirect us toward what it is this Season is about.  

The first is this: Advent is a time of joyful celebration for God’s fidelity to a faithless people.  “Come and see what God has done: He is awesome in his deeds toward the children of man.”  Psalm 66 invites us to remember, to rehearse even, what God has done for his people in history.  Of course, all His mighty works pale in comparison to and, in some sense, find their deepest meaning in the first Advent: the incarnation of God in Christ.  God has come, he has made us one with Him in his living and his dying, in his rising and in his session in heaven.  “What shall I render to the LORD for all his benefits to me?” asks the psalmist in Psalm 116.  “I will lift the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD.”  The gifts of God are for the people of God, both now and forevermore; Alleluia, let us feast on them together.  

There is however, another aspect to this time of year, and for many of us I wager it hits closer to home.  Advent, for all its bent toward joy, is a season for us to cultivate a longing, to feel our lack and redirect it toward hope in our certain end. This kingdom which has arrived in truth, this reign of God over all he has made, has yet not arrived in its fullness.  We know this well when we walk the streets of our cities.  We know it, too, when we hear the voices of the suffering and chronically oppressed cry out for justice; we know it in the bodies of the sick and the dying; we know it in the absence of a loved one from our tables, an absence that this season can so painfully amplify.  We know it most terribly when confronted with the horror yet within us.  Yes, we know it well, and we look for some deliverance from this body of death.  

Let us remember in this season, then, that “the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.” (Ps. 117:2) Let us remember what has been promised, the first fruits of which we taste even now: Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again to make all things new.  In this season, we cultivate our specifically Christian hope: that in spite of it all, He is coming to dwell with us forevermore.  To be a Christian is to hope, even in a year like 2020, that there will be a day when, as St. John received and passed on to us, “He will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4) Amen, come, Lord Jesus! And help us as we wait.