Advent as Practical Theology

By Kreigh Knerr

I’ve got to be honest: I couldn’t wait for Advent 2020. I was feeling every inch of “Lord Jesus, quickly come,” and I couldn’t wait because I knew I’d get to read Fleming Rutledge’s exquisite Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2018) alongside a group of fellow parishioners. I knew they would relish the season as much as I did because they too were already living within it.

I might be the wrong messenger for an essay on Advent. I am a seminary dropout—a “sometime seminarian,” no longer fitting after over half-a-decade without taking a course for credit—and I can’t say that my understanding of the season is as wide and deep as it should be. Even when I was taking courses at Nashotah House, I didn’t get a significant idea of the season. 

This is not a critique of the seminary, and that part of my formation eventually did take hold.

Yet, as I’ve spent time reflecting on the season—with Church Fathers, the Daily Office, and the writings of Advent dynamos like the Rev. Fleming Rutledge—reading this last alongside fellow parishioners has taught me as much about Advent as a matter of practical theology as any of my independent readings.

The Practice of Advent

One of Rutledge’s many Advent sermons contains what’s almost a throwaway line: “It takes some practice to get used to Advent.” I think this is right—although, and I think she’d agree, I don’t know if you ever truly get used to the disorienting nature of Advent. It’s the season of dislocation, which makes its application to practical theology quite useful.

I grew up thinking, as Rutledge writes, that we were pretending “that Jesus hadn’t been born, so that we would be more excited when Christmas came.” The church where I grew up hosted an entire Bethlehem Marketplace thingamajig, so I got pretty good at pretending, to be honest. As I grew older, I also got pretty good at imagining how the Jewish people must have felt, waiting for their Savior. Good thing he came, right? Guess he can get around to coming again whenever he feels like it, right? I mean, isn’t the merriment of Christmastide year-round?

One of the odd cultural things that sticks in my brain is that people often think of Elf as the quintessential Will Ferrell Christmas movie. But I don’t think that one truly captures the American experience of Christmas—at least it’s not the one that best captures the way many Americans, Christian or not, think of Christmas. No, the real Will Ferrell Christmas movie is Talladega Nights. Listen to this reflection and see if it does not accord with a very real heresy that afflicts the contemporary American church:

[Ricky] Dear Lord Baby Jesus, or, as our brothers in the South call you, “Jesus,” we thank you so much for this bountiful harvest of Domino’s, KFC, and the always-delicious Taco Bell. I just want to take time to say thank you for my family: my two beautiful, beautiful, handsome, striking sons, Walker and Texas Ranger, or TR, as we call him. And, of course, my red hot smokin' wife, Carley, who is a stone cold fox . . . I also want to thank you for my best friend and teammate, Cal Naughton Jr., who's got my back no matter what. . . . Dear Lord Baby Jesus, we also thank you for my wife's father, Chip. We hope that you can use your Baby Jesus powers to heal him and his horrible leg. It smells terrible, and the dogs are always botherin' with it. Dear Tiny Infant Jesus, . . .

[Carley] Hey, um, . . . you know, sweetie, Jesus did grow up. You don't always have to call him “baby.” It's a bit odd and off-puttin' to pray to a baby.

[Ricky] Well, look, I like the Christmas Jesus best when I'm sayin' grace. When you say grace, you can say it to Grown-up Jesus, or Teenage Jesus, or Bearded Jesus, or whoever you want.

[Carley] You know what I want? I want you to do this grace good, so that God will let us win tomorrow.

[Ricky] Dear Tiny Jesus, in your golden-fleece diapers with your tiny, little, fat, balled-up fists . . . Look, I like the baby version the best, do you hear me? I win the races and I get the money.

[Carley] Ricky, finish the . . . grace!

[Ricky] OK. Dear eight-pound, six-ounce, Newborn Infant Jesus, don't even know a word yet, just a little infant, so cuddly, but still omnipotent, we just thank you for all the races I've won and the $21.2 million dollars . . . LOVE THAT MONEY! . . . that I have accrued over this past season. Also, due to a binding endorsement contract that stipulates I mention PowerAde at each grace, I just wanna say that PowerAde is delicious, and it cools you off on a hot summer day, and we look forward to PowerAde's release of mystic mountain blueberry. Thank you for all your power and your grace, Dear Baby God, Amen.

That sort of a Jesus is how you end up with an Advent calendar of beers—24 days’ worth, of course. It’s how you get a parent emailing you wondering about doing 24 days of book gifts for her son: the endless Christmas-of-Baby-Jesus in Advent. Now, consider that preceding dialogue against this powerful reflection from Rutledge:

The rhythm of the church’s seasons turns out, in this as in so many other ways, to be theologically profound. If we began with the nativity and then moved to the last judgment, we would be so softened up by that little baby in the manger that we wouldn’t be able to take the second coming of Christ in power seriously. The solemnity and awe do not lie in the fact that the baby becomes the eternal Judge. What strikes us to the heart is this: the eternal Judge, very God of very God, Creator of the worlds, the Alpha and the Omega, has become that little baby. [emphasis added]

Do We Want a Will Ferrell Christmas?

Do you see the difference? Do we want a Will Ferrell Christmas, or do we want to keep the actual Christ in Christmas? If we want the actual Christ, we might need an actual Advent season of something other than post-WWII Advent calendar treats — maybe something more like a long journey to Bethlehem.

Still, I think there’s something to be said for considering Elf as an equally peppy and insipid reflection on Christmas. At least it’s a benign reflection compared to Talladega Nights’, or so my memory suggests. But if we live in the candies and gumdrops realm of Elf — if that’s our idea of a robust Christmas season — we might not land in heresy, but we will certainly land in vacuous territory. 

While many Christians swiftly disavow any health and wealth gospel inclinations, I think we can all easily find backdoors to that message, especially the health part. We also find a backdoor via the easy Sunday School answer of “Jesus!” to any problems that arise around us. To those struggling with various afflictions, we can be too quick to paraphrase Philippians 4:13 with a sort of robotic inanity—“You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you!”—while ignoring the very verses preceding it. We utter our “uplifting” messages in the same manner as the most unwelcome neighbor found in Proverbs 27:14, and our ill-seasoned blessings are (perhaps rightly) taken as a curse.

Advent is not the season for these inanities. Advent is the season for seeing the darkness—not simply the darkness of “olden times” but the darkness before our very eyes. Advent is the season for sitting with the bereaved widow, the mother of the miscarriage, the depressed who cannot feel the light of God in their hearts though they know they believe, the questioners who recognize that the problem of evil is not a mere theologian’s puzzle. 

If our churches do not have room for the questioners, we fail to appreciate the Psalms themselves. While praying the Psalms as our own petitions may be a distant third on the list of reasons Christians read the Psalms with such regularity, it is still on that list. Do we fear praying with the psalmist, “When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart”? For without the truth of those words—if they are mere inanities uttered by feckless hearts and not by true Christians—Psalm 73 doesn’t hold together. If we are practicing our Christianity alongside others, sometimes we have to sit quietly with others in their bitterness, waiting for God’s light to break through. Sometimes we have to recognize such bitterness in ourselves. This, too, is part of the Advent season. 

Advent is for Endurance

Advent is the season of Christian courage. Yes, Christ has come and conquered sin, but while the great enemy has lost the day—his greatest triumph, the most Pyrrhic of victories—we experience continued skirmishes while we wait for Christ’s return. Advent is the season that recognizes the “betweenness” of our Christian faith most deeply—the “already and not yet.” Innocents continue to be harmed in the world. Not-so-innocents, such as ourselves, continue to face sin and the perils of this day. 

The already-but-not-yet refrain regarding Christ’s kingdom is one I’ve heard regularly since my freshman year of college. But, just as it is a cruelty to place a treat on a dog’s nose and constantly caution “not yet” and eventually remove the treat in a giant tease, never allowing the dog to taste the treat, it is even more a cruelty to act as if the unresolved “not yet” of Christ’s return doesn’t matter, as if everything were copacetic, as if we don’t feel that incompleteness in our very flesh. Advent is the season that unflinchingly grasps this already-but-not-yet tension.

Advent allows for Christians to ask the questions that they were told as children they should “ask when they get to heaven.” As true as that phrase might be—though I often wonder whether I’d care to ask, overwhelming as heaven must be—some people don’t want to wait to ask those questions. They might be willing to wait on an answer, but they need to know that their questions are real, questions normal Christians ask. (Ones, I might add, that non-Christians certainly ask.) Indeed, in my own church’s Advent group, one of the participants noted how refreshing it was to realize that he wasn’t the only one with these thoughts. 

There’s a concern, of course, about reveling in such questions too deeply, to an extreme that becomes unhealthy. Yet, I’d also observe that Advent is a mere four weeks, so even were such contemplations to run near to an unhealthy revelry, the season’s own boundaries act as a buffer against such foolishness. And without allowing for those questions and grappling with them in light of true Christian hope, we might find ourselves near another extreme: toxic positivity, a sort of false happiness that we impose on others. While we needn’t use “toxic positivity” to describe false happiness, extreme and ill-timed blessings are neither pastoral nor edifying. Advent allows for the practical addressing of what it is to live in our sin-weary world now, not merely the sin-torn world of yesteryear.

Advent is for Dwelling in Darkness

Because of the pandemic, the idea of dwelling in darkness—of feeling separated from our Lord even when, theologically, we know otherwise—wasn’t something I needed to call to my fellow parish readers’ imaginations. The idea of desiring our Lord’s return wasn’t something that seemed like “Well, I guess that could be neat when that happens, but America’s pretty grand in the meantime.” We were all waiting in expectation. We continue to wait in expectation. We aren’t reenactors, pondering remote “biblical times.” We are living in biblical times, in the theological tension of the already-but-not-yet. And, frankly, it stinks. There is so much darkness, so much pain. 

And yet . . . the “not yet” remains. The promised hope is there. When Jesus returns, things will be fully put to rights. We can endure the darkness, the pain, and the sin because He will come again. We can also endure the darkness, the pain, and the sin because the Comforter is already here with us now; we could not endure without the Holy Spirit to support us in this season. 

Advent enables us to look closely at the tension in which we live. Advent prepares us to give thanks. Advent lets us attend closely to Philippians 4, rejoicing in the Lord always—even in this season, the season we are physically in until He comes again.

Just about everyone I talked to at the start of the pandemic noted how it felt like we never left Lent when Easter arrived. As for me, I felt like we had all finally entered Advent and were forced to reckon with it. And so the eight-week course on Fleming Rutledge’s book that my parish hosted for Advent, leading into and continuing through the Advent season, helped orient me and many others to what the already-but-not-yet meant. And it forced us to consider how we might live as an Advent people, what it means to be practicing Christians. 

Rather than being those who, in William Wilberforce’s words, set up “the glory of God, and the possession of His favor” as a “vigorous, habitual, and universal principle of action,” we too often instead “set up for ourselves: are become our own masters.” Advent, helped recently by a pandemic’s devastating reminder, calls us back to our “universal principle of action,” to the source of every good deed, to the source of our rejoicing. 

This is why Advent serves as a source of practical theology. It dislocates us from ourselves so that we can find ourselves once more in Christ.

Kreigh Knerr remains paused halfway through his MTS degree at Nashotah House Theological Seminary. His vocational pursuits range from classical education to tech startups.