I’m a sucker for a good Christmas hymn. Carols are fun, but a Christmas hymn hits the spot. There are fewer Advent hymns (“Joy to the World” and “O Come, O Come, Immanuel” come to mind), but that’s to be expected. I never heard much about Advent as a child. I was a young adult when I learned about Advent calendars. It was in my late twenties when I discovered the historic and liturgical roots of Advent. It was like an ice bath.

I burned through my overly zealous phase mercifully quick. I wanted to remind everyone that Christmastime was only twelve days and it started at midnight on Christmas Day. Up ’till then, you needed to be somber and repentant and think about God’s coming judgement all the time. No merry Christmas for you until it people started unwrapping their presents.

Nowadays, I just don’t care. Strike that – I think just don’t have the energy to care. It’s an important distinction, the difference between Advent and Christmas, but there are more important things to eat up my bandwidth than that. Maybe that’s wrong. I don’t know. But still, Advent is my favorite season of the Church calendar.

For thousands of years, the Church has read particularly angsty parts of the Bible on the four Sundays in Advent. In those readings, we hear a lot from the Psalms, from the prophets Isaiah and John the Baptist, and from the virgin Mary herself. Advent feels like a lot of waiting around. The word Advent comes from the Latin adventus, meaning “arrival”. When Jesus came as a baby, we call that his first Advent. When he comes again as the ruling King and Judge, it’s his second Advent (or Second Coming).  If you want an excellent book for the season (and they’re are a billion), I’d strongly recommend Fleming Rutledge’s classic. It’s a collection of her Advent sermons and they are directly aimed at directing our aim towards Christ.

Advent begins with us understanding Israel’s desire for the kingdom of God. Imaginatively, we’re empathizing with God’s people through the ages, waiting for Immanuel to ransom those that dwells in lonely exile here. So it’s a beautiful thing when a Christmas hymn morphs into an Advent hymn. And it helps when it’s jaunty.

Once in royal David’s city
stood a lowly cattle shed,
where a mother laid her baby
in a manger for his bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ, her little child.

He came down to earth from heaven
who is God and Lord of all,
and his shelter was a stable,
and his cradle was a stall;
with the poor, oppressed, and lowly,
lived on earth our Savior holy.

And our eyes at last shall see him,
through his own redeeming love.
For that child, so dear and gentle,
is our Lord in heav’n above,
and he leads his children on
to the place where he is gone.

That third stanza makes the turn from first Advent to second. When he comes, he comes to lead us. He has not left us as orphans. Though he is our older Brother (not Father), the hymn writer, Cecil Frances Alexander, is absolutely correct when she highlights the tangible, visible man who was that dear and gentle man – all grown up to rule and reign. And where is it he will have gone? He leads us to where he is and when he returns and makes the world new again, he will lead us into a reborn earth. The poor, oppressed, and lowly will once again live on earth with their Savior holy.

That first Advent in David’s royal city of Bethlehem promises a second Advent where he comes down again to earth from heaven. To this I desperately cling.

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.