Invitation to wait
If you use an Advent calendar starting on December 1, the length of the season will be the same each year, 24 days. If you follow the liturgical calendar, the number of days of Advent will vary from year to year. For example, this year Advent lasts 28 days, the most days possible for the season. Next year, Advent will last only 22 days, the shortest it can be.
The only invariable number in Advent is four, the four Sundays of Advent. When December 25 falls on a Sunday, as it does this year, we get four full weeks. When December 24 falls on a Sunday, as it will next year, Advent is only three weeks plus one day.
This may be nothing more than an answer to a trivia question for you. Whatever the number of days of Advent, December is just as full this year as it was last year as it will be next year. But psychologically, this Advent feels long for me. During this third week of Advent, I find myself waiting for Christmas as if it’s never going to get here. With a full week between the Fourth Sunday of Advent and Christmas Day the pace of church life feels almost calm. This may have something to do with the fact that my children are adults and live far from home!
Advent may be the only season of the church year in which waiting is paramount. Even Lent, the most analogous season, is more about preparing for Easter than waiting for it. Yes, of course, there is lots of preparation going on during Advent. But at the heart of the season, we wait, and not simply for the birth of a child. We wait for the birth of eternity, for the moment when God’s time and our time intersect, when divinity breaks forth from the womb.
In The Shaking of the Foundations, theologian Paul Tillich writes, “Our time is a time of waiting; waiting is its special destiny. And every time is a time of waiting, waiting for the breaking in of eternity. All time runs forward. All time, both history and in personal life, is expectation. Time itself is waiting, waiting not for another time, but for that which is eternal.”
If we accept Tillich’s premise, waiting in Advent becomes a microcosm of waiting in life. These days in December remind us that “every time is a time of waiting.” Waiting in Advent teaches us to practice patience, to make time to breathe, to accept occasional boredom as a gift, to find joy in our hope for the promise yet to be fulfilled. Advent invites us to wait expectantly for the birth of eternity, so we will be ready to receive the Christ who comes, not only in December but every day of the year.
As the French theologian Jean Danielou writes in The Advent of Salvation, “Since the coming of Christ goes on forever — Christ is always the one who is to come in the world and in the church — there is always an Advent going on.”