Yearning

This year I am not tempted to greet everyone on the first Sunday in Advent with “Happy New Year!” It was funny the first time, perhaps. At least it’s appropriate. Advent 1 marks the beginning of a new three-year lectionary cycle, when all Episcopal churches are supposed to follow the Revised Common Lectionary. But this year I am more aware of continuity than change.

Toward the end of Pentecost, the lessons focused on the end times, the second coming of Christ. Advent begins with the same. “You know what time it is,” Paul writes to the Romans, “how it is the moment for you to wake from sleep…the night is far gone, the day is near.” Jesus says, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father…Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

One introduction to the church year that I recently read acknowledged this focus on the unpredictability of the second coming, and then said that because of it, the church should work to bring about God’s reign of peace and justice today. There’s an implication that we can create the kingdom of God on earth. That’s debatable. Even so, I don’t think it goes deep enough.

What I sense this year is a tremendous amount of yearning. Some yearn for gainful employment. Some stop by the church looking for food or gas money to get to a job interview or an Iowa City hospital. A Quad City colleague sits in an interstate rest stop and sees young women desperately trying to get out of the human trafficking web in which they are enmeshed. All of these people yearn for very real physical needs, needs that must be met before spiritual growth can occur.

I see spiritual yearning, too. “Can we have some Wednesday evening sessions on prayer?” I am asked. That request was made last year; will I finally take it to heart this time? I think of the beginning of Psalm 63: “O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.” But do those who are thirsting and fainting always know that it is God that they seek? And how will they know unless there is someone to tell them, to walk with them?

Yes, “Happy New Year” is just a bit too glib this year. Yearning doesn’t need humor; it needs Good News. The news that God has already come in human flesh, in human frailty, in human poverty. The news that God came to us through a bewildered, poor, unmarried young woman. The news that God loved us so much that God was willing to die for us. The news that Christ overcame death and will indeed come again to make all things new. Does that end yearning? No. But at least then we know what it is we’re yearning for.

Advent 1: Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44.