When I was a kid in the Presbyterian church, we went from “Thanksgiving Sunday” at the end of November to “Christmas Sunday” just before December 25. On the Sundays in between we sang Christmas carols. In other words, the church’s calendar was identical to that of Macy’s and the rest of the secular, commercial culture.
One of the most important things the Presbyterian church has learned over the last half-century is that there is this season called Advent that comprises the 4 Sundays prior to the Nativity. (Of course, more liturgical denominations never forgot this.) I recall my dad (also a pastor) introducing the Advent Wreath and even Christmas Eve worship services in the churches he served in the 1960’s. Many Presbyterians were not used to doing these things. It was even somewhat controversial at the time, believe it or not. These practices were considered “too Catholic,” by some.
The Presbyterian attitude towards Christmas has shifted dramatically over the years. It is easy to forget that Presbyterians were deeply influenced by the Puritans who basically banned Christmas. They did this in 17th century England and New England for three reasons: First, there is no biblical warrant for celebrating the birth of Jesus in December. Secondly, the whole liturgical calendar was considered by the Puritans to be hopelessly “Popish” and was advocated by their Anglican rivals. Thirdly, Christmas was infamous for being a time of, well, debauchery, drunkenness, lewdness, disorder, and even violence. So the Puritans ditched the whole Christmas thing, and therefore Advent too, and so did most Presbyterians.
And that ban lasted for quite a while. It did not start to change until the middle of the 19th century, when American Christmas morphed into a homey, child- and family-centered holiday, and then, in the 20th century, into a commercial festival of shopping and spending. As this developed, the church apparently sort of unconsciously went along with it. So that when the Christmas carols started getting played in the stores downtown, the church reflexively started singing them in worship as well. Even Presbyterians started celebrating secular Christmas.
But when we recovered Christmas in the culture, it is interesting that we did not at the same time embrace Advent. I suspect that this is because the culture does not like Advent. Advent has almost no commercial potential. We will never see much advertising using Advent themes. John the Baptizer’s words, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?!” will never be featured in a commercial for electric razors. Children will never put together a cute pageant based on Mark 13. Even Mary’s great hymn in Luke 1, the Magnificat, gets disregarded because the commercial culture does not under any circumstances want the rich to be sent away empty.
Advent was also traditionally a time of preparatory fasting and self-denial. That’s why it had the same liturgical color as Lent: purple. Our Orthodox neighbors still fast from November 15 to Christmas. Catholics may still remember being required to abstain from meat during Advent. The market does not want to hear about a season in which we consciously and deliberately don’t consume.
Indeed, the late autumn and early winter was historically about feasting and enjoying the produce of the recent harvest. In the days before refrigeration a lot of meat simply had to be eaten (or preserved) in December, or lost. People often gave away what they had left over. The church’s Advent fast was radically counter-cultural. When everyone else was celebrating and consuming, the Christians were preparing themselves for the Nativity by disciplines of abstinence and penitence.
Without Advent, Christmas was easily redefined, drowned-out, and buried in an avalanche of mercantile trash. It is this tawdry, loud, sentimental, chaotic, season of cha-ching! that Americans mistake for a Christian holiday. The cultural War on Advent takes the form of rushing the Christmas holiday so that store decorations go up in September, and TV commercials start before Halloween. This doesn’t happen because of any deep faith in Jesus, God knows, or any breathless anticipation of his birth. Obviously, what we now call “Christmas" has been thoroughly severed from Jesus and reconfigured to serve as a festival of greed and commercialism. Part of this is the necessary suppression of the inconvenient and contrarian season of Advent.
It almost worked. However, as Christianity began its decline in America in the second half of the 20th century, the nearly forgotten and largely repressed themes of Advent began again to resonate more with many Christians. For one thing, we started listening to long-silenced voices of marginalized peoples, for whom the end of the present oppressive order was not a bad thing. In this we began to identify with the early church, under threat from Rome.
Advent is the most apocalyptic of liturgical seasons, focusing as it does on Christ’s coming, in the past, present, and future. In Advent we are turning our attention to the arrival of God’s Reign, in which all the injustices, violence, inequalities, and ignorance of the regular world order are overturned and reversed. Jesus explicitly comes to constitute this Reign, leaving behind and inspiring a community to implement his vision and await its fulfillment.
These themes were unintelligible to a church that was largely identical with worldly power, wealth, prestige, and privilege. But when these perks get stripped away, the church can hear the Bible as it was meant to be heard: as good news for the poor and downtrodden. And Advent, a season anticipating the lifting up of the powerless and the casting down of the elites, started gradually to make sense. So, over the last 60 or so years, churches have slowly found value and meaning in recovering the season of Advent. (For example, the number and quality of Advent hymns increases dramatically in each successive Presbyterian hymn resource.)
It is only when it is preceded by an authentic celebration of Advent that followers of Jesus access the true meaning of the Lord’s Nativity, the festival of the Incarnation. The message that “the Word became flesh and dwelled among us,” and that Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” cannot be heard unless we first clear away the clutter in our lives and make room. The apocalyptic season of Advent does this by reminding us of how flawed and temporary, indeed, even unreal, is our normal existence and the economic world we have invented. In Advent we are preparing ourselves for the coming of the real and the true, which will reveal the shallowness, emptiness, transparency, and instability of everything we think we know.
That’s why the culture's War on Advent consists of a persistent blizzard of blaring words, images, and noises, often appealing to our baser instincts. The Lord comes in our silences and empty spaces… therefore the culture must fill these with entertainment and lust, avarice, and gluttony, sentimental traditions, and rituals.
But perhaps the most pregnant and effective way through Advent is found in silence.
I still occasionally get the question from people, in December, about why we’re not singing Christmas carols in church. My answer is, “Because we are in the important season of Advent and unless we prepare ourselves spiritually by observing this time as well as we can, we will not understand what the Nativity is really about.”
Then, when the great day does come, and we gather to celebrate the Lord’s birth the evening of December 24, we can sing with joyful hearts in celebration of the One for whom we have waited and prepared: the God who comes to save and transform!
+++
No comments:
Post a Comment