This is Part III of a reflecting on Christmas, consumerism, religion, politics, and Kingdom economics.
Part I: Black Friday
Part II: Who Gets the Gift?

One of the things that frustrates me most about this time of year – particularly as I’ve been getting more and more into liturgy (having grown up in mostly non-liturgical churches) – is that we call everything between the day after Thanksgiving and December 25 “the Christmas season.” The lights go up, the Santas appear at the malls, everything’s red and green, and immediately it’s Happy Time!

What’s lost, of course, is that liturgically, the Christmas season starts on December 25 (and ends with the Feast of Epiphany on January 5). The time before Christmas, as we all know from having opened the little doors on the calendars, is Advent.

What we lose, though, isn’t just a liturgical season; it’s an entire frame of mind. Christmas is a time of victory, of exuberant celebration – the Christ has come into the world! It’s no wonder the corporate interests want to advertise this, because it gives them another opportunity to say “spend spend spend!”

Advent, though, is about longing. It’s about hope. It’s about the achings of a people who’ve lived under foreign occupation and foreign oppression for half a millennium, who’ve struggled to maintain their identity and their homeland against all odds, who are just waiting for something good to happen for once.

It’s about a people disappointed in leaders like the Hasmonean Dynasty, who had led a successful revolt against the Greek occupiers in the second century BCE, only to descend into civil war and ultimately sell out to the Romans in exchange for a secure throne and a gravy train. (King Herod was one of their descendants.)

It’s about a people who are proud of who they are but unsure about how that’s supposed to work in a rapidly-changing world, a people suffering under oppression and occupation by an army that only barely tolerates their culture.

Mostly, though, it’s about a people who are waiting, hoping, praying for a Messiah to rise up and inaugurate the Kingdom, a new David to reunite Israel, right all wrongs, throw off the oppressors (both the Romans and the puppet leaders they’d set up among the Israelites) and return Israel to its rightful glory.

What we lose when we ignore Advent is the longing and waiting: the sense that the world isn’t what it’s supposed to be, that there are oppressors. When we skip to Christmas, we get caught up in the celebration, and forget exactly what it is we’re celebrating. Advent gives us an opportunity to look for the oppression in the world and stand alongside the oppressed and occupied, to feel their pain and tell them to keep holding out hope.

Perhaps more importantly, Advent gives us the opportunity to examine ourselves: Are we standing with the Israelites of the first century, oppressed, hungry, and waiting and longing for the Messiah? Or are we standing with those who are oppressing them? Who are the oppressed in the world today, and who are their oppressors? And what can we do, as citizens of the most powerful nation in the world, to stand with the former and against the latter? We ask ourselves about what we consume, about the costs of that consumption, about the arrangements our nation makes in our names in order to uphold our lifestyles.

No wonder the corporations want to skip it.

But the message of Advent is ultimately hope. The verses of the quintessential Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” are all about longing and suffering, but the chorus rings the point of Advent:

Rejoice, rejoice; Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Stay tuned for Part IV, where the rubber meets the road.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 10:22 am and is filed under Human Rights, Peace Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.