Advent in a Minor Key

It's Advent! I have resolved not to bah humbug when I hear a Christmas hymn the first Sunday of Advent in worship , instead of sticking to only Advent hymns at least for the first two weeks. Our children will never learn those Christmas carols unless they hear them in church since in many schools these songs are no longer sung. I also just go ahead and put up the Christmas decorations right after Thanksgiving as I have done in my home this weekend. I have two Christmas parties this week, and I get to wear my cheery sweaters and jackets and put on my ornament earrings with the little clappers in them that make sound every time I move my head. Yippee!!

But oops. Try as I might to celebrate Christmas with everybody else, in my heart I still know it is Advent. It is the season of the Christian year that I feel like I need to most. Waiting is not my best thing. I too often buy into the instant gratification (literally) and read the last few pages of a book just as I start, which ruins everything. So my waiting is too often marred by my doing those things which I really don't want to do in order to get what I thought I wanted which really is not what I wanted at all. Maybe you do not resonate with this sullied sort of waiting. Maybe you do. Knowing this about us, still God gives us a chance to wait with integrity again, not jumping to the end, even though and especially though, we already know what the end of the Advent wait will be.

I really don't think the point of Advent is about the fact we already know what will happen at Christmas. I think it is about learning how to wait, examining our own messing up that waiting by putting our emPHASis on the wrong sylLAble. Which makes Advent not always happy clappy time. Advent has its moments of facing the fact we who like to be in control of the timing of our lives even though we really aren't. That's not fun. And we so often remember our times of forced waiting in the past. Waiting for that phone call after the job interview, waiting to see that car come down the street that carries our children and their families as they arrive for the holiday, waiting in the hospital waiting room after surgery on our loved one, wanting the doctor to come out and talk, but so worried what he might say.

This morning, I was at North Spring UMC to preach. The first thing that happened in the service, with no introduction or words spoken, was that a young boy, probably ten or eleven, came up to the music stand on the chancel with his violin and played I Have Decided to Follow Jesus. He did a fine job, and I thought this song really appropriate for the first Sunday of a new Christian year which starts us on another cycle of Christ's birth, teaching, death, resurrection and the celebration of the Holy Spirit. And yes, we must decide to follow Jesus, once again. But when Trent, our young man, got to the chorus and the last two lines, "no turning back, no turning back," I was a bit startled to hear that last "turning back" to be played in the ominous minor key, not the bouncy major key that you always hear. I thought at first that he had just accidentally played it that way, but over and over again, when he came to that last "turning back" he went to the minor key.

Waiting we are, and there is no turning back. In that waiting, we again come smack up against ourselves and our imperfections, our need to rush things, our need to be at the helm of everything we do, our need to control ours and others lives around us. It is a bit of a minor key season, yes. And no amount of almond bark or tinsel can turn the minor key into a major one.

In the end, though, we do not merely wait. We really anticipate. We look forward to. We yearn. We asked the watchman to tell us when the night will be over; we ask Emmanuel, God with us to come. We see a rose blooming in the desert. We hear the Baptist cry, and we know there will be an end to our waiting, an end to our anxiety about the ruts of sin we have lived in, and in fact, Love will come down at Christmas, Paradise will be opened, and through the bounty of God's grace, He comes again.