Advent begins. And together we wait.
Which sounds a bit tedious and pious, and anyways, it doesn’t always feel like waiting, does it? It can feel like the mad dash through an overly-full season ending with the too-much-of-everything experience of Christmas.
But, in church, we try to slow it down a bit. Make Christmas something we can wait for. It makes sense to wait for a birthing story. Usually, that’s how these stories are lived.
So Advent begins. And together we wait.
The weekly themes we allocate to Advent are really a way of slowing ourselves down. They help us to think about the story from different angles. We read through the prophets and think about Old Testament prophecies. We wonder about promises and God. We think about being human. We take time to sit and light candles.
I like the candles tradition. For me, they help emphasize that advent is about more than our waiting and thinking. I like doing something beautiful in church. There are few things as specifically beautiful as lighting a candle.
And I like that we use the same candles each week, that we can see how the first candle is shorter because we lit it last Sunday and wasn’t it beautiful then? I like that in this simple tradition, we can see the month pass among us and slowly approach Christmas together.
I also like that by dividing this Christmas story-telling space into four, we create space inside the story where we might bring details from our daily lives. The four themes give us specific actions to live out personally. They ask us to live deliberately.
Hope. Peace. Joy. Love.
What does these look like?
That’s not a question to answer definitely. It requires life-long answers. But asking it does open up the issue of performance. What is it like to act out our faith?
Because sometimes church feels a bit like play-acting and theatre. Robey costumes for those upfront. Seating in rows, and you try to get a good view of the action. Some great music but, in some churches at least, there’s still some ambiguity about the propriety of applause.
Of course, Søren Kierkegaard got here before me. He observed the theatrical nature of worship in many churches, and reflected that the churches’ angle might not be quite right. He saw that the worship leaders –“the speakers” he calls them – behaved like actors and that the congregation took the role of the passive audience who passes judgement on the speakers. God might be described as a prompter – vital for the proceeding on stage, and reliable. But off-stage and only supportive. Not a glowing picture, is it? So Kierkegaard suggested a new way of looking at worship.
What would it be like if the members of the congregation were the actors and the worship leaders were the prompters? What would change if we saw God as the audience?
This perspective could completely do away with any elitist notions that the clergy are professional worshippers. And it might change our perception of what the pews are for.
Praise might change. Preaching might change. So might prayer.
Church would be a thing we do, rather than a place we go.
“The stage is eternity, and the listener… stands before God during the talk . The prompter whispers to the actor what he is to say, but the actor ’ s repetition of it is the main concern – is the solemn charm of the art. The speaker whispers the word to the listeners. But the main concern is earnestness : that the listeners by themselves, with themselves, and to themselves, in the silence before God, may speak…”
Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is To Will One Thing
