The Long Night of Advent: A Call to Honest Faith

I turned 64 this fall, and I have kept 44 Advents as a pastor. Every year the season returns like an old, unflinching friend who refuses to let me lie to myself about the state of my soul.

Advent is not a gentle ramp into Christmas. It is four weeks of deliberate darkness, a sanctuary built for telling the truth when every other voice in the culture is urging us to hurry up and feel merry. The nights grow longer, the year’s failures settle in the corners, and the church—stubborn old ark that she is—lights only one small candle at a time, as if to say, “Look slowly. Look honestly.”

The prophets refuse to flatter us. Isaiah speaks of crooked paths and rough places that must be made straight inside us before any highway appears for God. John the Baptist arrives wild-eyed from the desert, shouting that the axe is already laid to the root of whatever trees in us have borne no fruit. Even Mary’s song turns out to be less lullaby than manifesto: the mighty pulled down, the hungry filled, the proud scattered in the imagination of their hearts.

In that kind of light—or lack of it—I cannot keep up the pretense that my faith is basically healthy and just needs a little seasonal cheer. The darkness is diagnostic. It shows me the prayers I prayed more for reputation than for God to be glorified, the sermons I preached to be admired rather than to wound and heal, the people I kept at arm’s length because their brokenness might have required something of me.

Honest faith, I have learned across seven decades, starts with the confession that I do not really want the Coming One as He is. I want a milder savior who will bless my plans, quiet my fears, and leave my comforts undisturbed. But the Child who arrives in Bethlehem is the same Word who made the galaxies and who will one day unmake every evasion. He does not come to negotiate with the man I have settled for being; He comes to rescue me from him.

There is terror in that exposure, but there is mercy deeper still. The same voices that strip me bare also promise that the desert will sing, that the bruised reed will not be broken, that a teenage girl from nowhere will cradle the hope of the nations. The Light I cannot manufacture is promised to me anyway.

So I keep Advent the only way I know how: I wait in the dark, light the candles one by one, and try—often badly—to tell the truth. And year after year, somewhere between the third and fourth Sunday, when the night feels almost solid, I remember again that the dawn is not my achievement. It is a gift that walks toward me while I am still fumbling with matches.

May this long night do its honest work in all of us. May it teach us to stop decorating the tomb and start watching the horizon.

The Lord is coming—closer than we think. Open the door before He has to knock.