It was a typical second grade classroom setup. The floors were linoleum. The lights were fluorescent. The hamster was missing.
The teacher, however, was exceptional, and she taught us a lesson I still remember. We were practicing the scientific method on a little piece of chocolate distributed to each one of us. “Record how it smells. Take notes on how it looks. Weigh it and write down your findings.”
By the end of these experiments our seven-year-old selves were drooling with desire. We had refrained from gobbling down our science project with admirable restraint. With a sideways smirk, the teacher finally gave the all-clear. We could eat our piece of chocolate.
What followed was the most disappointing two seconds of my short life. It wasn’t milk chocolate. It wasn’t even semi-sweet chocolate. It was bitter baker’s chocolate, and it was disgusting!
When you are expecting sweet, but you get bitter instead, the disappointment is all the greater.
Many of us are expecting sweet when it comes to Christmas. Visits with distant family. Feasts with exceptional food. Reunions with once missing hamsters.
But 2020 has rendered Christmas bitter. Family visits, feasts, and beloved pets have been replaced with broken plans, loneliness, anxiety, depression, and discontent. What was supposed to be sweet has become bitter. It’s tough to swallow.
But what if the Advent Season (the period leading up to Christmas) wasn’t supposed to be sweet or bitter, but rather bittersweet? Advent is a time when we remember the sweetness of the birth of Christ. The fulfilling of promises: for God to reign as king, for God to send a savior, for peace to break into our world. Yet Advent is also a time when we remember the bitterness of living in a world where Christ has not yet returned. Our patient waiting is still filled with sorrow and loss, sickness and death, aloneness and loneliness.
This is the bittersweet time of year when we stand between God’s first arrival and his second, and that’s the healthiest way to see Advent. Don’t be seduced by the saccharine appeal of Christmas as family and tradition. Nor should you despair at a Quarantine Christmas of unfulfilled longings. Instead, use this time to celebrate the sweetness of Christmas and to long for a taste of God’s promises finally fulfilled.
[Thank you for reading! If you are looking for a church in Boston or churches in Boston please consider giving Renewal Church a try!]
