What a line right before Advent. Waiting for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning.
An Advent tradition of mine is sharing a poem online on each of the four Sundays of Advent. A few years ago I collected those into a PDF booklet entitled "Glory Here in Straw and Blood." The first part of the collection is entitled "Exile" and in the Introduction I describe those poems this way:
In the poems collected under “Exile” we are often a young person sitting around the campfire listening to old timers tell stories from Israel’s past. As we listen to these stories, we experience the Advent themes of longing and waiting. There is an impatience and irritation in these poems as the stories of God seem old and worn out. Hope is wearing thin.
The poem I'm sharing this coming Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent, expresses these exilic themes. And the final lines of Sunday's poem use the image of Psalm 130, that of a watchman scanning the horizon looking for dawn. Trouble is, it's a dawn too long delayed. And because of this, hope is wearing thin.
This waiting is hard for us. Years ago, at my church, the very first song on the first Sunday of Advent was "Joy to the World." "Too soon!" I thought to myself. A proper Advent hymn places us in the experience of exilic longing, like O Come, O Come Emmanuel:
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
The plaintive plea of Advent, as we mourn in lonely exile, is "Come!" Some churches, to make the point plain, do not place the Christ child in the nativity scene before Christmas. With no child to gaze at, you're forced to use Advent for waiting.
So, my poem this Sunday isn't full of Hallmark Christmas cheer. It's an exilic lament about the pain of waiting. We begin Advent sitting in the dark, like a watchman, scanning the horizon waiting for the dawn.
