Head and Heart: Suddenly it's Advent

photo by tramani_sagrens / flikr

I woke up yesterday and looked out the window. The blood-red tree in my front yard is only half-red. The other half of the leaves ring the bottom of the tree. I look out another window and the wonderful elephant ears in my garden are now on the ground. Dead. It's cold even here in South Carolina. In the twenties. Cold enough to leave our faucets dripping. Up and down the street colored lights are springing up everywhere. On porches. Beautiful Christmas trees in windows. In the bushes. Suddenly it all looks like wonderland. As I moved through the house I remembered: Advent began yesterday.

Advent? Baptists especially came by this word late. I remember when I first introduced the Advent wreath in my first church on Alternate Highway 54. People looked at one another wondering. What's that? What's he come up with this time? I tried to explain the five candles. One for each Sunday up until Christmas. And on Christmas Eve we would light a center candle--the Christ candle. Why? It's a way for us to remember that we are just four weeks until Christmas. It's a getting ready time. One year one of my members thought he would be creative and light all five candles on Advent Two. Well, I finally learned you can't win them all. But this is a wonderful time for us to stop and ponder where we are and remember we cannot always win.

Up and down my street there may be lights galore--but the houses are shut tight. We are all afraid of the virus. Most of the folks we know that became sick weathered this storm and came out all right. Not all. But most. And so we don masks when we go outside or creep into a grocery store. We've never seen anything like this. We have been quarantined since--well, February or March. We missed Church for most of this time. Many of our churches were closed and we watched on YouTube. But it was not the same. We missed people we saw every Sunday. We also missed Lent--which we Baptist preachers used to have to patiently explain.

We missed Easter. We missed Pentecost. But that is only the tip of the ice berg. We had private funerals--just family at the grave and a circle of friends standing apart. We could not visit our loved ones in the hospitals or Nursing homes. We scrapped wedding plans. And then we missed All Saints Day when we would look around the sanctuary and see the vacant seats of those we loved. Surely by Thanksgiving this will all be over. No. We stayed home and zoomed or Facetimed the people we loved the most. This was just another day. And here we are beginning to remember those five candles on the Advent wreath. But most of us will be home even on Christmas Eve which many of us love the most. We hear there may be a vaccine by late December or early January. And after we have vaccinated all those that want we will begin to open stores and dump masks in the trash can and life, we hope will return to normal. This virus has made a lot of us depressed or crazy. Look at the White House shenanigans. And we wonder how long we can take all this. Will this vaccine work?

I remember reading about the terrible black plague in Europe when millions died. And yet life came back not as it was--different--but life really returned. And then I remembered all those Advents when the bombs fell day after day on England. Life went on even with all the deaths and the rationing and all the homes destroyed and grief piled on top of grief. They hated it but they stumbled through those hard days. I also remembered that terrible morning on 9-11 when more than three thousand of our brothers and sisters died. And the days that followed. And how it changed us all, leaving a scar that will remain. Yet life broken and sad went on.

Advent teaches us again that we are to get ready--much like the parable told about the Wise and Foolish virgins. Ready for what? For faith to remind us that though terrible things have happened we will we go on. For hope to strengthen us for the long road. For a holy reminder that love we saw in that barn on that starry night is really the greatest of them all.

That first Christmas there was hate and Herod and poverty and slavery and cruelty beyond belief. And yet the light from that stable and our little candles will always carry us through.