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Can We Sing Christmas Carols During Advent?Last Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent. Since our family has long observed Advent, before church I had unpacked the Advent wreath and placed it on the table. I unwrapped a new set of Advent candles and placed them in the wreath, all ready to light the first candle at lunch after church On the way to church, I found myself singing "O Come, O Come Emmanuel!" This was the Sunday of prophecy, of Expectation, in which we begin to look forward to the Coming of the Messiah, the Incarnation of God by which he again revealed to the world that he is a "God with us." As the service of worship began, the first song that we sang was "Joy to the World," a Christmas song! I tried to sing it, and celebrate the birth of Jesus the Christ. But it wasn't quite right. It was not yet Christmas. I simply wasn't prepared to sing Christmas songs yet. It was too soon. Where was the expectation, the longing that Israel had expressed for 500 years before the birth of Jesus? And even though I had seen Christmas decorations in the stores since August, I was not yet ready to jump from ordinary worship to Christmas celebration. By the second Christmas song, I simply could not sing. The joy did not yet have any meaning and rang hollow, because it was simply too superficial without some context. It was not true joy yet. This experience highlights one of the problems faced when churches and traditions that have never observed the seasons of the church year, or are just beginning to obverse them, try to incorporate those seasons into worship. Too often, the trappings of the season are put into place without any real sense of the purpose of the cycle of seasons within a larger context of worship and theology. It is only in commercial advertising that the Christmas season begins the first of December (or the first of August!). In the Christian calendar, the Christmas Season does not begin until December 25th and lasts until January 6 (Epiphany). Advent is the season of preparation for Christmas, not the celebration of it. It is included with Christmas the same way that Lent is included with Easter. However, Advent is just as different from Christmas as is Lent from Easter. It is important, in terms of the purpose of Christian Holy Days as teaching tools of the Faith, that Advent and Christmas be different, with different emphases, especially on the first two Sundays of Advent. These need to emphasize expectation and longing, a preparation for celebration much as Lent is a preparation for Easter. Without that, the season becomes one long celebration without any context for that celebration and with little contact with the reality of life that gave birth to the season in the first place. Of course there is a progression to the services of Advent. By the third Sunday, which is usually the Sunday of Proclamation with the Magi or the Shepherds, or the Sunday of Joy, we can begin celebrating, not because it is all finished, but because the promise is moving to reality, because we have heard from God and have the promise in concrete terms. It is in that movement from distant longing and crying out on the first Sunday, to hope and immediate expectation on the Second, to Joy and proclamation on the Third Sunday, that prepares us for praise and celebration on the Fourth Sunday as the year moves into the Christmas Season. If done well, that liturgical movement takes people along in the journey of their lives, as they enact their own experiences in worship. It gives people a structure in which to take the vagueness of their own distant longings as they identify with Israel’s longings, and brings them to an expressed hope and faith that God is, indeed, "with us." It is this journey that gives people a context for celebration After such preparation, Christmas then becomes the truly wondrous event that it is. Not the warm fuzzy that is portrayed on too many Christmas cards and in the media, but the realization that, truly, there is reason to hope and faith in God, that what he has once done in real human history, in real human lives, he can do, and is doing, in the lives of people today. It brings people, not just to an existential moment where they feel good about the world, but to a deeply felt faith in the "long Advent," a faith that God will not forever leave the world the way it is but will come once again to "ransom captive Israel." What the world needs now is, not love, but hope. Without hope, without some sense that this is not all there is, that there truly is a God who will come and restore all things, there will never be much love, at least not the kind of love that is truly Christian. And it is this hope, this expectation moving toward faith, that Advent properly observed as a preparation for Christmas can express so well. On the way home from church in the car (by myself!), I once again sang "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." That is what Advent is about. |
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