Knowing the Seasons

            Lace up your boots, pull up your work gloves, and strap on your crash helmets. It’s Advent, friends, and anything can happen in this season. Love and comfort, hope and joy, sure, they’ll show up. But so might fire and earthquakes, heavens ripping apart, angels appearing, and the Son of Man himself coming in glory and splendor. It’s Advent, friends, and anything can happen this season.

            Of course Advent is not the only season on our calendars this time of year. We’re more than halfway through the professional and college football seasons. The college basketball season started up a few weeks ago. Autumn has left us in the dust, and winter has taken over long before its official start. And the holiday season kicked off last week with Thanksgiving.

            Seasons don’t just tell us what time it is. They tell us what to do with the time we’re in. The start of a sports season tells us it’s time to pull out the t-shirts, sweatshirts, and jackets of our favorite teams. The start of winter tells us it’s time to turn on the heat, cover the bed in flannel sheets, and get ready for the first snowstorm.

            Our lives are pulled in so many different directions by all the competing seasons that cover our calendars. That’s especially true at this time of year, when sports seasons and holiday seasons and office party seasons and gift buying seasons and gift buying seasons and gift buying seasons overlap and threaten to overwhelm us. It’s why this time of year is so stressful for so many of us. What time is it? Time to stress out.

             Thankfully, for those of us fortunate enough to live in a wealthy nation like the United States, our world offers us yet another season, a season for reducing our stress, for feeling like we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing: buying season! In fact, there are at least six buying seasons in our annual calendars: Winter Doldrums Buying Season, which includes MLK, Jr., Day, Valentine’s Day, Presidents’ Day, and St. Patrick’s Day; Spring Fever Buying Season, which smothers Easter; Summer Celebration Buying Season, which starts Memorial Day weekend and lasts at least through the Fourth of July; Back to School Buying Season, which begins in late July and runs until Halloween; Christmas Buying Season, now starting in August and lasting until Christmas Eve; and “I Didn’t Get Exactly What I Wanted and Everything I Deserve for Christmas” Buying Season, beginning Christmas Day and ending just after the New Year.

            Every buying season works the same way: offer fake sympathy for how stressed, depressed, and just plain under duress you are; destroy your hope for ever feeling any better on your own; and convince you that your only escape is to buy as much as possible of all kinds of things you may or may not actually ever need or use. Then, the kicker: use as many guilt- and stress-inducing tactics as possible so that you just keep feeling worse and worse until you finally give in and buy something.

            Friends, in this day and age, the buying seasons, more than anything else, tell us what time it is and what we’re supposed to do. But the good news today, friends, is that today is the Christian New Year, the first Sunday in Advent. And in the season of Advent anything can happen.

            Advent breaks into the Christmas Buying Season. It starts with the one word that you will never hear in any buying season: Wait. The Christmas Buying Season hucksters frantically yell, “Hurry, hurry! Buy now! Get it before it’s gone!” In Advent the church hears, “Wait. You are in God’s time. Nothing you do can force God’s hand. Wait for God to act.”

            Advent gives us a second word to hold onto: trust. Every buying season is built on lies: The biggest sale ever! The lowest prices you will find! A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! In Advent, we hear, “Trust in the Lord, who made heaven and earth, whose word and ways never change.”

            Advent can be unruly, disruptive, and impatient, like this morning’s readings from Mark and Isaiah, but Advent can also be mysterious, quiet, and still. Advent offers us possibilities the Christmas Buying Seasons can’t even imagine: rest, real rest, from the busyness of the world. Relief from the stress of trying to solve our problems by our own strength or purchasing power. Life that is centered on God and not ourselves.

            I am convinced that the seasons of the church year are our best defense against the brute strength of the buying seasons. I have no patience for people who whine about keeping Christ is Christmas but don’t have time for Advent, Epiphany, or Lent. The Christmas Buying Season is happy to let you keep Christ in Christmas, and it will gladly sell you a $5.99 bumper sticker or a $400 life-size manger scene to prove it.

            We do not need for Jesus just to come comfortably into our settled lives. All of us, whether new members of the body of Christ or lifelong disciples, need something so drastic, so dramatic, so new that we must fall back onto wild metaphors to describe it: open heavens, fire and earthquakes, stars falling, the Son of Man coming in clouds. We are not just waiting to celebrate a birth that happened two thousand years ago; we are awaiting the return of the king, the true and final end of the age of sin and death. The king does not just want to rule in our hearts; he intends to rule over everything, with truth and grace, including the seasons of our lives.

            If you have already succumbed to the Christmas Buying Season, if the stress of the holiday season is already palpable, if maybe you spent Friday hunting insane bargains or you’ve tuned your radio to the all-Christmas-all-the-time station, I invite you this morning to let God’s Advent interrupt your life.  “How?” you might ask.

            Let me give an example. I wrote this sermon on the day we handed out the Thanksgiving baskets. The families were supposed to start coming at 5:00 in the afternoon. A few arranged to come early, just after lunch. I thought I had a good block of time to finish everything I needed to do before heading to San Diego for a week. Then came a knock at the door. A family, arriving early and unannounced. Not even 4:30 yet. No one else in the building, so I got them all set. Then another knock. Two more families. Gave them their baskets and their monthly Food Pantry supplies. Five minutes later. Another knock, another family. And so it went. Some of them were a little gruff; not a lot of thank you’s. Pretty quickly I figured it out: it wasn’t just the people Centre was helping who were coming at an inconvenient time. It was Christ himself, in the faces of the poor, interrupting my routine and my way of doing things. And the thank you’s were rare, of course, because I was the one who should be giving thanks to him, for allowing me to serve him, for bothering with me at all in the first place.

            This is what Advent is about, friends. So lace up your boots, pull up your work gloves, and strap on your crash helmets. It’s Advent, and anything can happen this season.