Advent: the watching season

Read this at the start of Advent, if your household keeps the year. It belongs to the Year view only.

Of all the seasons of the church, this one is ours in a special way, because Advent is the watching season, and watching is the heart of what we do.

For four weeks before Christmas, the church has always done a strange and beautiful thing. It waits. It does not rush to the manger. It sits in the dark and the cold of the year's end and keeps a vigil, remembering how long the world waited for God to come the first time, and turning that same watchfulness toward his coming again. That is the whole spirit of Advent: not yet, but soon; keep awake; watch the road.

So for these four weeks the readings are the watching texts, the ones about staying ready, about the master who returns at an hour no one expects, about lamps kept burning through a long night. They are the passages that sit closest to why this community exists at all. If you read nothing else of the year together, read these, and let them do their slow work.

A few simple things a household might do to keep the season:

Light a candle each week, one more than the week before, so the light grows as Christmas nears. Say, as you light it, the old prayer: maranatha, come, Lord Jesus.

Keep the season a little plainer than the rest of the year. Advent was traditionally a quiet, waiting time, not yet the feast. Let the waiting be real. The feast comes soon enough.

And talk, at the table, about what it means to wait for God, then and now. The first followers waited for a Messiah and did not know the day. We wait too, keeping an eye on the road, and on the world and the new things rising in it, testing everything by the way of Jesus. Advent is where that watching is at its most awake.

Then, on Christmas, the waiting breaks into joy. But first, keep the watch. That is what these weeks are for.