(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Ad - Venting, originally shared on December 21, 2020. It was the seventy-fourth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

It’s Advent. It’s not Christmas until the 25^th. It’s hard to wait even a few days. Why does Southern California’s response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic have everything to do with Advent? Today we’re going to you to see what we’re waiting for, and why it’s hard for us to wait.

The worldwide coronavirus pandemic is setting daily records for hospitalizations and death. The immunizations have started, but as Governor Newsom said, “There’s light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still in the tunnel.”

Here, in the LA metro area, we are at its epicenter, we are the most infected urban area in America. Why us? Why Southern California?

The architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”

I was looking at the history of the little store, aka The Country Store in Laurel Canyon, and I found this quote from singer Joni Mitchell: “Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they'll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they'll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they'll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they'll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they'll say Lookout Mountain. So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain.”

One of my former bishops once said, “That white stuff on the Sierra Mountains isn’t snow. It’s the transfer letters of Lutherans moving from the Midwest to Southern California.”

America has been a place people go to reinvent themselves since our founding.

California reinvented reinvention. We are the last frontier, a place where people moving west couldn’t move any further, a place where people got away from the old world.

We are not lovers of freedom. We are lovers of license. That is, of being able to be anything we want and to do anything we want.

As a result, we are creative and inventive in every way. We don’t think outside the box. We remove the box. If our behavior doesn’t match our values, we change our values.

We love our toys, our sports, our entertainment centers, our restaurants, our bars. We love to play outdoors. We can ski and surf in the same day. We love our status as rebels and iconoclasts! And, it’s coming back to bite us. All of us.

We are now in decline. Where is our creativity? It’s all in the hands of corporations now with one motivation: money. Where is our imagination? In syndication.

We used to set the standards, now we seek them.

This is not true of everybody? It’s not. But it’s the environment in which we live.

And it’s coming back to bit us. All of us.

Ok, I’ve vented. I’ve opened a space to let out some steam.

Now I’d like to move on from venting to ad-venting.

First, what season of the Church year are we in? Hint: it’s not Christmas! Christmas doesn’t even start until December 25^th, though Mary didn’t keep a baby book and Jesus never celebrated a birthday, that we know of. Theologically, it makes sense that Christmas should come around the time that the day’s darkness is giving way to the longer days of light, and there’s some evidence that Jesus was actually born around the time that we celebrate. Of course, its been in our stores since last Labor Day. It’s been on the radio since mid-November. People have started wishing me a Merry Christmas since last week!

On the church calendar, it’s Advent. Advent literally means “coming”, and its been a battle to keep it that way for years.

Why celebrate Advent if we can’t wait until Christmas? And, that’s not just in a pandemic year phenomena when everyone longs for something good. It’s been happening every year. We have the deferred gratification ability of three-year-olds. We want what we want, when we want it.

Even I, I have to confess, gave up on part of this battle.

The Christmas tree at church came in the early part of December, because it was easier on everybody’s schedule and thought to be a lot of work for something that only lasted 12 days, days during which most other people’s Christmases were over. It was in, but I didn’t turn the lights on until Christmas, until I did.

I was a Christmas purist. We didn’t sing Christmas carols at the churches I served until Christmas-eve. Until one of the members of the church I served asked me why it was that the only place they heard Christmas Carols was at the mall. I was torpedoed by consumer culture.

The Christmas Season, though, starts on Christmas Day on December 25^th and lasts until The Day of The Epiphany on January 6^th, when it ends. January 6^th. The Twelve Days of Christmas.

It seems like this year everybody’s appropriating the twelve days of something to sell a product, and they lead up to Christmas Day, because it’s the biggest celebration of consumer culture goods and warm fuzzy feelings that have nothing to do with the actual story of the Birth of Christ, my feelings of nostalgia and manufactured hope, always bound to disappoint, of the year.

It’s the human condition. We are curved in on ourselves. That’s one way Martin Luther defined sin. We want what we want when we want it, whether it’s endless fascination with ourselves or rushing Christmas to enjoy the goodies, or ignoring the simple things we can do to literally save lives and bring back our economy. It separates us from God.

How do we get that creative and redeeming spark back? Christians proclaim that it’s here and it’s coming.

It’s here now in our Baptism and faith, and it’s coming in the second advent.

Advent is an orphan season. It is a season that points to something else. It’s a season of preparation, as John the Baptist, a major player in Advent, in the very first words of the gospel of St. Mark said:

*Mark 1:1-4

OK, I’ve Ad – vented. I’ve opened up a window to let the heat escape.

Now, I’d like to admit some fresh air.

How much better, and more realistic, would it be if we flipped Christmas upside down and made it a holiday that lasted 12 days, starting on December 25^th, instead of packing it up on January 1^st. How much better would Advent be as a season of four weeks that points to God’s promise of the deliverer that people longed-for for 1,000 years, who was coming for 1,000 years, including the last 300 years of prophetic. And then the Christ, the messiah, was born!

That same Jesus, after describing the signs of the end before the Last Judgement, said,

*Matthew 24:29-31

How much better to be reminded, as we await the Second Coming, the Second Advent that has been coming for 2,000 years, that God keeps God’s promises, even when it takes a very long time? Even when it’s hard to wait?

We live between the first coming of Jesus, and the second. Between the first advent and the second.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel, and it casts it light on where we are, but we’re still in the tunnel.

We wait for a new heaven and a new earth. We seek to do what God has called and equipped and sent us to do, to make this world an expression of Jesus, the one that is to come.

To find meaning and purpose in serving others in God’s name.

To live in the reign of God that has already begun in our baptisms and our acceptance of the gift of faith, in the peace that passes human understanding, until all is brought to the perfection again that God created and that we messed up with our own selfishness.

The earliest prayer of the Christian church comes at the very end of the Bible, in the book of Revelation:

*Revelation 22:20-21

Let that be our prayer, and may that be our celebration in this Advent season.