Advent 1C: Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36

When Advent comes, I worry, agonize and cry. Advent is daunting. Advent is my Everest. That’s why this year I’ve decided to add humor. I’ve taped a greeting card above my computer. On it is a cat offering the card’s recipient a gesture of love—in its paws it holds a heart-shaped hairball. When I’m wrestling with an Advent sermon and losing, this cartoon will explain why. The problem is that I’m working with a hairball of Advent scriptural phrases.

Once again I read the account of “distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.” Once again I react—both personally and as a pastor thinking of my congregation—to ominous forecasts that speak of people fainting “from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world.” People are fainting, heavens are shaking, and there is fear and foreboding in abundance—how am I to shape all of this into something that the congregation will find charming (and that won’t lead to the loss of my 3 percent cost-of-living increase)?

Advent scriptures are unapologetically crude. Their prophetic barking and guttural slings make me feel spat upon. My personal context is to blame for this oversensitivity. I’m feeling fairly normal right now, fairly pulled-together. My family is healthy. My employment at church seems solid—knock on wood. My phone is ringing a modest number of times with modest news. My wardrobe is working. In ordinary times such as this, when my family is afloat on a sea of relative stability, the bellicose and crass war cries of Advent are incomprehensible to me. They come off as misplaced, misanthropic rants, to which I’m tempted to reply, “You can’t mean me. If, by chance, you can and do mean me, your anger is disproportionate to my peccadillo.”