Sometimes, like today, the first Sunday of Advent is on Thanksgiving weekend, and when that happens, it’s like Advent arrives even more suddenly than usual. Here we are, all distracted and maybe exhausted by the holiday, and now, the colors change, the mood changes, and something new is here, and kind of like the end of the world in this gospel reading, it takes us all by surprise. What are we supposed to do in this brief season that arrives so quickly, and that gives us just four weeks, which doesn’t give us very much time to do anything at all?
Sometimes our first instinct is to think that Advent must be like our season of Lent, a time for a sort of personal renovation and internal stock-taking and conversion, a time for quiet and introspection. But you know, the readings of Advent point us in a different direction. These four weeks are about looking outwards and not inwards, looking around us into the darkness, seeing the world clearly and all the ways it is, or mostly isn’t, ready for Christ to come again. Advent is about looking at what time it really is, and what we focus on is what needs to be done when we realize time is short.
Because Advent, all the readings, the traditions, even the candles on the Advent wreath, are reminding us that Christ came to a world in darkness that had been waiting for him desperately but was not ready for him, and we are in a world that still isn’t ready. We sing “Come Lord Jesus” every week because there are so many people in this world who are desperate for him still, people living in a world of injustice and illness and inequality, they need Christ to come again as much as anyone ever has.
So when we think of Advent being about preparing for Christmas it is that kind of “preparing” that Advent means — looking at the world to see what can be done now to make it ready. That’s really the point of this gospel reading about the end time, not the destruction and the fear, but readiness, readiness for Jesus to come again, not just remembering the fact that he came once, in the past, to a people who walked in darkness, but preparing for him to come again.
How, then, do we get ready? It’s unreasonable to think that four already busy weeks of Advent are a time when we can fix anything. And yet, we all know in our hearts that there are things we could do, and would do, if we believed that we had only four weeks to make something right in this world. There’s time to reconcile with someone who needs a relationship with you, there’s time to go support people who are working for justice however you can, there’s time for some act of foolish generosity that you once thought about but put out of your mind, there’s time to make sure that if you have a business it’s doing right by people.
It all sounds a little crazy, this rush to get things done. But the other Advent tradition is that Advent, this time of darkness, is also a time for the unreasonable. Advent is the time when so many of the stories we hear and love the most are about sudden attempts to light up all this darkness, whether it is Ebenezer Scrooge making up for a lifetime of greed in a single night or all those nameless volunteers who spend their Christmas Days trying to feed as many people as they can. Why the urgency? Because Advent is the time when people get messages in the darkness telling them they have work to do and very little time left to do it.
So Advent isn’t a pressure-free season. It would be nice to tell you to slow down during Advent and stop all the usual frantic activity — but that’s not entirely the point. The point is to find the one activity that will bring light to the world around you.
There’s a story that they once asked Pope John XXIII what he would tell people in the Vatican if he found out that Jesus was arriving for the second coming. His answer was: “Look busy.” But we can do better than that. For Advent, don’t just look busy. The salvation and the love you have been waiting for is coming soon. Get busy.