You’ve probably heard it happen: we all woke up to snow a few weekends ago, and someone inevitably started playing Christmas music. Some celebrate this as tidings of great joy, while others protest, “Christmas music already? It’s not even Thanksgiving!!” Regardless of your position on this timeless debate lived out in dorm rooms and craft stores, I want to introduce a valuable and often overlooked element of celebrating Christmas: Advent music.
Advent is the liturgical church season before Christmas, in which churches remember the waiting for the Messiah and celebrate the themes of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love (one for each week of the season). It mirrors both how God’s people waited in silence for hundreds of years before Jesus was born and how Christians now anticipate Jesus’ second coming and final renewal of all things. Though my childhood churches followed traditional Advent liturgy and traditions, I didn’t fully appreciate Advent’s beauty and importance — and its unique music — until recently. It was just “the season before Christmas,” and I didn’t realize the depths of spiritual insight it offered for our Christian life all year long.
C. S. Lewis, in his book Surprised by Joy, said that joy is “an unsatisfied desire which itself is more desirable than any other satisfaction.” This unconventional definition captures the spirit of Advent: for the Christian, lament and joy are deeply intertwined. Only once we allow ourselves to wait and grieve over the depths of the world’s need can we truly experience the joy of Jesus breaking into our world with light and full salvation. Living joyfully means being stretched between our inherent, God-given desire for peace and wholeness and the ache of knowing this world will never fulfill it.
But what does this joy look like practically? In one of my classes we’ve recently discussed how the historical idea of the church in exile, reflected both in the prophets and in medieval Christian philosophers like St. Augustine, could apply to the modern church, once again waiting for the coming of a Savior. An oft-quoted passage on this topic is Jeremiah 29:5-7: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”
Living in exile is the message of Advent, and of the Christian life: we aren’t home. But we’re not called to escape; instead, we’re drawn into a story that promises joy in the here and now as a reflection of joy to come, and a determined practice of seeking the good of all around us in anticipation of the flourishing that will come in the new creation. We’re called to set aside the arrogance that believes our own efforts can bring God’s kingdom on earth, but also to faithfully live out our hope in everything we do.
In her book The Liturgy of the Ordinary, Tish Warren explains how ordinary habits, even as small as waiting in traffic, shape us as citizens of God’s kingdom or people whose habits reveal other idols that cannot truly satisfy like entertainment or busyness — especially relevant in the holiday season. She encourages readers to realize that we live out the grand vision of God’s kingdom in our everyday habits. She dives into the theology of Advent waiting, arguing that the life of a Christian is to build our lives around God’s timing, not ours.
It’s hard to slow down and resist rushing on to the next celebration. As college students, we’re often pushing ourselves, or being pushed, to always do more and be more. It’s easy to make being busy and well-connected an idol or believe that achievements and involvement will truly satisfy our desire for connection and fulfillment. Yet as I’ve heard in multiple convicting teachings recently, sometimes the idol of busyness is actually a symptom of the vice of sloth — defined as not being willing to do what love requires of us. Sometimes love for God and his beloved yet broken world requires slowing down, refusing to let the idol of busyness mask the pain and lament or delude us into believing we can save ourselves. Are we willing to sit in the uncomfortable beauty of Advent a little longer, and make the joy of Christmas all the more full?
Music so often gives words to thoughts I can’t express, and nowhere is this more true than in Advent’s paradoxical partnership of waiting and action, of lament and joyful hope. One Advent-themed song I’ve found especially meaningful is Wendell Kimbrough’s “The Day of the Lord,” which includes the line: “Though your heart burns with anger/for all that is wrong/do not let the dark steal your song/It’s not long ‘til the day of the Lord.” This encapsulates what I love about Advent: it lets us cry. It lets us feel the full brokenness of the world, the sinful habits entrenched in us, and the powerlessness we feel when faced with systemic injustice. We know that the world is not how it is supposed to be, and we long for the day when it will all be made right. Advent is radically honest, down-to-earth, and practical, and I love it because it so accurately captures the hope and lament I so often feel living as a Christian in this world all year long, not just in the four weeks before Christmas. We live in a world longing for hope and renewal, and some days that ache is especially strong.
Yet Advent doesn’t let us stay in the darkness. Sandra McCracken’s “Song For Rachel” has inspired me with these words: “Until the trumpet sounds/until our home comes down/children of Zion, raise up the sound.” There is One who has come, and who is coming, to turn over the systems of oppression in the world and to bring beauty and justice to all things.
Until that day, we work alongside Him to shine our little light in the ways that we can, in the unique places we have been called to serve.
Until that day, we sing.