Hope For Comfort

Advent Blog Post 2 - by Jamie Reynolds​

There’s something a little bit magical about Advent as a child: four weeks of candles, carols, and stories at church while colored lights, ornamented trees, and ribboned gifts pop up everywhere else.  Advent is a marathon of anticipation, of waiting, and Christmas is the finish line.  However, as an adult, I feel like I have become painfully aware that when we do finally reach Christmas Day, our waiting is actually far from over. When Jesus was born, humanity’s initial wait for the arrival of the Savior indeed came to an end.  But when Jesus died and rose, when Jesus ascended to return to God in heaven, we began waiting anew – waiting for him to come once again, to complete the work of redemption he began in the manger.

At the end of a year like this one, that thought can make Advent feel a bit like poor comfort.  We are living through a pandemic that has upended our lives, devastated families, and impoverished countless people in the midst of heartbreaking political and racial unrest.  On days when our world is so obviously broken, it can feel like Christ’s Birth just isn’t enough.  Jesus came to save us – an act of extreme grace that, without question, merits every ounce of celebration that we can pour out – but I also find myself yearning so deeply for The Rest of It.  I’m ready for that second part, the Big Finish where Jesus comes back and, as Sally Lloyd-Jones puts it in The Jesus Storybook Bible, “make[s] all the sad things come untrue.”  I am ready for the fulfillment of comfort, not just the promise that comfort is coming.

Those feelings can make God’s words to Isaiah in the midst of Israel’s own devastation into a bit of an emotional roller coaster.  While I feel such relief at God’s command that Isaiah declare bold, tender, and certain comfort to his people, to joyfully “cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned,” that “ Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low,” that “He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms,” I look around me and ask the anguished question of, “But when?  When?”

And yet.
​
Somehow, in the midst of that anguish, the comfort refuses to evaporate completely, like an echo remaining just within earshot.  Maybe at times like this, the comfort comes when we whisper fervently in the depths of our hearts, “This is not the way things are supposed to be!” and the Spirit whispers back, “Oh, my child.  I know.”  Maybe Advent is the time when we celebrate that whisper, when we cling to it, waiting for its completion, its fulfillment.  We wait to celebrate the comfort of Christmas – the comfort that the end of our divine separation began with the birth of a tiny baby, and that redemption is still in motion – even as we wait some more for the day of Reunion, when comfort will finally come in its full and complete form.