Advent Meditation

Give me Advent because I am not expecting Jesus.

‘Tis the season for writing about Advent. This is good—and this is also harrowing. How many more words does one need about Advent, given the growing body of published work on the subject? And what if, in actual fact, we’ve gotten the whole season wrong, as Winn Collier suggested in his Advent meditation last week?

“We’ve somehow arrived at Advent bougie,” Winn writes. “The Powers of Enterprise have proven they can employ absolutely anything in the service of the holiday blitzkrieg.”

Have a blessed Advent—and buy on!

I don’t really want to be writing about Advent, if I’m honest. Maybe I, too, am failing to understand its fuller truth. And these days, I have so very little hustle left in me. Surely there are 63 other posts that are more theologically thoughtful and better written than this one.

Still, so many of you read here, week after blessed week, and I feel it’s only fair to be writing about Advent, especially as I enter into its wonder-full invitations myself, invitations to grapple with the real-ness of hope. To face the substance of my own sin. To return, one more time, to my bare neediness of God, a neediness that would beg him to come—and come again—to rescue a poor sinner like me.

Advent might be a song on repeat, but isn’t it repetition that forms us? You are, after all, reading here about the habit called faith.

I’ve been rereading the Servant Songs of Isaiah as part of my own Advent meditation: Isaiah 42:1-9; 49:1-7; 50:4-9; 52:13-53:12. These are the songs that describe the One who is yet to come, the One whose coming heralds comfort for the people of God in their exile of sin. Christians have long read these Servant Songs as foretelling the advent of Christ, this divine Servant who is chosen, upheld, delighted in, endowed with the Spirit, commissioned to bring justice, made a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles; this Servant who is radiant with divine splendor, honored in the eyes of God, made an instrument of salvation, given a well-instructed tongue; this Servant who suffers and is yet vindicated. (This is the list I’ve begun in reading these songs, and for sure it’s incomplete.)

It’s the last point—about suffering—that reminds us of what seems absolutely foolhardy about God’s plan for this salvation that will “reach to the ends of the earth” and be accomplished through this Servant (49:6). God will become a baby, setting aside his divine privilege for a manger, a towel, a cross. God will empty himself to carry the pains and griefs of the world. What is this story? And is this the story that we are telling today in our bougie, kitschy versions of Advent? Is it the story we are telling when—as The New York Times reports—young men flock to certain forms of Christianity, drawn by the appeal of its strength, its severe demands, even its perceived “masculinity”?

Every year, Advent wakes us from our forgetfulness, rouses us from our willfulness, and asks us to look again at the way God does his work in the world. It is rarely as we expect. “God’s way, always, is to use servants,” the late Eugene Peterson writes in The Jesus Way. “Servants: men and women without standing, without accomplishment, without influence. The core element in a servant identity is not being God, not being in charge, not taking the initiative.”¹ This truth about servanthood is a hard sell for your next purchase of scripted wall art.

And permit me to notice something else here—that historically, servants have been associated with women, not men. The powerlessness of the servant is far more associated with the underclass of women who have shouldered so much of the invisible, dirty work of the world. To be clear, I’m not trying to make a feminist argument but a theological one. Anyone who is reading tough, “masculine” overtones into the gospel of Jesus Christ is not reading the Servant Songs in Isaiah for Advent.

I think about Advent, how it comes to us, year after year. It’s not the novelty of Advent that we need but the humdrum sameness. Give me Advent every year—because every year, I will need reminding that the thoughts of God are not my thoughts, the plans of God are not my plans, the wisdom of God are not my wisdom, the ways of God are not my ways. Give me Advent every year to remind me that God is always doing the miraculous and marvelous in the inconspicuously small, that his power is made perfect, not in brute force, but in weakness. Give me Advent to shake me from the slumber of my own cramped and too-small expectations for what God is up to in this world, in the recklessness of humility.

Give me Advent because I am not expecting Jesus.

The Servant Songs, Peterson points us, do not simply foretell the coming of Christ; they are also Songs that commission each of us into this role as towel-bearer and foot-washer. Servant, not master. As Peterson reminds us, a servant is about the affairs of another, and he carries them out, even when those affairs proceed strangely. “All the while he is aware there is far more going on, both good and evil, than he has any knowledge of. He lives, in other words, in a mystery but not in confusion.”²

Oh, what a blessed sliver of significant difference in those two words.

To be honest, I can feel a mystery that tips toward confusion in the steady stream of my own published words, especially when it means writing another Advent post. Yet am I not called to be a writer who understands my work as a servant, commissioned to follow the Greater Servant? Jesus teaches us all, in whatever work to which we’re called, to serve faithfully, without faltering. “He will not falter or be discouraged,” (Isaiah 42:4). “My reward is with my God,” (Isaiah 49:4). “Because the Sovereign Lord helps me, I will not be disgraced,” (Isaiah 50:7). “After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied,” (Isaiah 53:11). A servant serves God—and that makes all serving meaningful and eternally significant, if also largely unnoticed by the general public.

“The cross on Golgotha,” writes Peterson, “is unrepeatable—but cross-bearing is not. The uniqueness that is Jesus does not exclude us from participation in his servant ways. We can — we must — participate in Jesus’ work the way Jesus did it and does it and only in the way Jesus did and does it, obedient and joyful servants as we follow our servant Savior who ‘came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many,’ (Mark 10:45).”³

It makes me wonder at least this much. Can we escape distorted forms of Christianity—and corrupted forms of Advent—when we remember that our King came not in regalia but swaddling clothes? Not as Master but as Servant? That’s the question that has merited one more Advent meditation on yet another Monday.

Because it’s repetition that forms us.

1. Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way: A Conversation on the Ways that Jesus is the Way (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 174.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid, 179.