39 sleeps till Christmas

Late November, the Asda tannoy announced 39 sleeps till Christmas. I went home and ordered a tasteful wooden Advent calendar online to replace our tatty, lurid red felt one. Of course, there has been a clear vote from the boys to keep the old one.

What’s Advent all about? It means “Coming”. Not merely that it’s nearly time for turkey but that Jesus is returning.

So do we curl up and doze and dream the hours away while we wait?

Father Delp was a Jesuit priest, hung in 1945 for his stand against Hitler. He wrote,
“Advent is time to awake from sleep. It is time for a waking to begin …time to put things back where God the Lord put them … to go to work, with the same unshakeable sureness that the Lord will come, to set our life in God’s order wherever we can….. Advent is a time when we ought to be shaken.”

In a society where too few know Jesus – it’s time to wake up. We can echo what Delp wrote of a Germany en route to Nazism, "Our lives today have become godless to the point of complete vacuity." I get ads on my phone for remote-controlled plastic poo while politicians squabble over the future of our nation.

Shake us awake Lord. Shake off our chains of consumerism and apathy and selfishness and anxiety.

When we wake, what joy! Handel's Messiah is a pale imitation. Alleluia bursts out when we wake to the joy of Christ’s sure return because we look back to that wondrous first coming. Facing death, Delp wrote,
“I see Advent this year with greater … anticipation than ever before. Walking up and down in my cell, three paces this way and three paces that way, with my hands in irons and ahead of me an uncertain fate, I have a new understanding of God’s promise of redemption and release.”

Delp summed it all up in words inscribed on a wooden Advent angel that he had been given - “Rejoice, for the Lord is near”.

That's why I love Charlie Mackesy’s paintings which show an angel hovering over those who are bowed and beaten down. The Lord is near.

The Lord is near when we worry about our world. The Lord is near when we stress over buying the right Christmas present. The Lord is near the broken-hearted (Psalm 34:18) – that’s especially precious to me. The Lord is near to all who call on him (Psalm 145).

Shake us
Wake us in our waiting
It changes how we live when we see you are the end
The end of all our waiting
Who restores all that we have lost
Shake us, wake us
To live in the light of your glory
Rejoicing in the coming of the Lord.