God WITH Us

I came to Advent rather late to the party. I didn’t hear about Advent until I was out of college and into my theological education. Advent is something new to me in the grand scheme of things and as such I pay special attention to the aspects of the season. The four Sundays prior to Christmas each have a designation: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. All of these are aspects of the miracle of Christmas, “God with us,” and so we wait for them. After all, Advent is the season of waiting. And so we must wait for our hope, wait for peace, wait for joy and for love.
But as we found in Isaiah, Advent is not about simply waiting. Anticipation brings forward what we are waiting for. That is the deep truth of Advent. We wait, but we experience the miracle of Christmas even now. We wait for a time when Christ shall return and all manner of things will be set to rights. When Christ returns, our hope will be complete, peace fully realized, and so on. But even now, God is with us. It is not the fullness that we will experience upon Christ’s return, but God is with us. So we may have the joy of Christ within us.  Others may call it Christmas cheer, and I suppose that’s a fine term. But I think it’s a piece of the joy that we anticipate. I’d like to believe that people still feel a warmth and common goodness toward their fellow human beings during this season, and maybe that’s the power of God’s love echoing back through time.
Advent teaches us an important lesson that we must master. We experience God’s presence with us now. The Holy Spirit abides with us and among us. We depend on the Spirit to be able to live and move and have our being. But the fullness of God’s presence is still to come. And for that we wait. But even waiting can create something useful in us.