����

This past week, I received a text from a friend who I had not heard from in a while. A pastor, he recently offered his daughter one dollar in exchange for being used as a sermon illustration. She refused, thinking a dollar was not nearly sufficient payment for being a public example. He texted me because when I, a pastor’s kid, was about five years old I negotiated the following sermon illustration deal with my dad: (a) pre-authorization and (b) a two dollar per illustration payment—which doubled my weekly allowance amount. Over the course of time, the deal became a source of humor and joking for my family. One Christmas, I remember coming home from college and finding two single dollar bills on my breakfast plate with a smiley face next to them. I knew I was about to be talked about in the sermon. As it turned out, that Sunday, all my dad wanted to do was say how excited he was that I was home for Christmas during the service.

After laughing about my friend’s offer to his daughter, we turned to really catching up on how life was going. How are you doing? I asked. His response: “Not sure what the headline is other than: life is full of joy and grief.” From there, we shared the joys and sorrows of our past year. It was a delight to catch up with him, but what has remained with me is the way his ‘life headline’ captured the truth of life so well: it is full of joy and grief.

This kind of truthful assessment of life can feel particularly difficult as November melts into December and the festive, commercial Christmas season takes over. Abundant Christmas décor, songs that declare this to be the “most wonderful time of the year,” hallmark specials, and commercials of happy families playing in the snow all declare a consistent message of cheer and joy. From a Christian perspective, there is a deep truth to all the Christmas merriment. The manger is a moment of cosmic joy. The Saviour of the world has come, and all creation joins to sing the song of salvation as God himself comes to dwell among us in Christ.

However, when the festive decorations, joy-filled songs, and Christmas parties are the only melody being played in this season, it can erase the deep truth present in the joy-filled melody of salvation and instead seem like a veneer over the sorrow, ache, and grief that exists in all of our lives. For anyone who feels the ache of loneliness, anger over injustice, or grief over lost family members, the dissonance is palpable.

But this is exactly where Advent, the liturgical season leading up to Christmas day, has something to offer. Throughout the history of the church, Advent has been a season that focuses on waiting, longing, and crying for Christ to come, not just at Christmas but once again at the end of the age when He will make all things right. It is a season oriented not just to Christ’s coming in Bethlehem but also to His second coming. And thus, it is a season oriented to the future, not just the past. It is also a season that invites us to be honest and name the darkness, grief, longing, and ache that still exists in the world. It is a season that does not ignore the joy of Christmas, but it refuses to use Christmas as a veneer to cover over the pain that persists in our lives and the world around us. It refuses to cover over the darkness because we, like those waiting for Christ’s first coming, are still waiting for him to come again when death, sorrow, pain, and hardship will finally be no more (Rev. 21).

Advent joyfully refuses to allow us to pretend that everything is alright. This is because in the season of Advent we remember that the light of Christ shines into the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it (John 1). To see how bright the light of Christ shines, we need to be honest about the darkness. It is then that the joy of Christmas truly shines forth. Christ meets us in our grief, longing, pain, and sorrow. And if He has already come into this real darkness, we can be assured that He will come again and darkness will have its end.

Until all is made new, here’s the headline: life is full of joy and grief. Advent invites us to be honest about both, but it also orients us to hope for the day when the headline will change. One day, when Christ comes again, there will be a new headline: life is full of joy. To learn how to live in hope for all things to be made right can be extraordinarily hard. For to hope means learning to wait. We do not hope for things we already have. Rather, hope is inherently future oriented. It is practiced in the present, but it is always oriented to the future. Advent not only invites honesty; it also says that the Christian story is one in which we wait in hope.

As we wait in hope, Scripture gives us a resource: lament, especially the Psalms of lament. Lament is not typically tied to hope. As the theologian Kelly Kapic points out in his work Embodied Hope, Christians often think that lament is what one does in the absence of hope (Kapic, Embodied Hope, 33). However, in the Psalms, lament depends on hope in the God of the covenant, who makes and keeps his promises. As Kapic puts it: “Laments rise to the heavens as a strange combination of complaint, grief, questions, confusion, desire for rescue, and expectation of divine faithfulness” (Kapic, Embodied Hope, 29). Far from being opposed to hope, lament is part of the language that hope has learned to speak. The Psalms of lament give voice to confusion, pain, injustice, and anger, but they are addressed to God with hope-filled-assurance that He will be faithful.

As many scholars have noted, the lament Psalms have a characteristic structure: an address to God, a complaint, a petition for help, an expression of trust, and a vow to praise. Typically the complaint, petition and expression of trust are written in the present tense while the vow to praise is written in the future tense. In these prayers, the confusion and pain is real and present, but so is the expectation of restoration in the future. They are prayers filled with abundant hope, not blind optimism.

So too, Advent is a season of abundant hope. Thus, it can also be a season where we enter into or learn the language of lament. How? There are many ways. One is to pray through the Psalms of lament in the leadup to December 25. Read them as a way to express the very confusion, questions, injustice, and sorrow of the world that Christ comes into. Another way is to use the Advent season as a time to train your heart in the pattern of lament. As Advent starts in the darkness of sin and sorrow (and the literal darkness of short days and long nights), start by naming the actual experiences of grief, longing, and sorrow in your life, your community, and the world. Then, as we move closer and closer to Christmas, start to declare the promises of God made and kept in the first coming of Christ. This is where reading the prophets can be a gift during the season of Advent. Finally, tune your attention to how the first coming of Christ grounds our hope for the second. See in the manger, ‘the weary world rejoicing,’ ‘the hopes and fears of all the years’ met in Christ that night, and God coming to make His blessings flow ‘as far as the curse is found.’

Here's the headline until Christ comes again: life is full of joy and grief. But, we are given gifts that can help our hearts become fluent in the language of hope. And so, as we continue to journey through this advent season, may you find yourself growing ever hopeful as you see that Christ is truly the light that shines into the darkness.