Readings of the day: Job 19:23-27a | 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17 | Luke 20:27-38
The thing about Daylight Savings Time ending is... it’s not just that it gets dark at 5 p.m.
It’s that it gets dark at 5 p.m. and you still have to make dinner, walk the dog, answer emails, and pretend you’re not slowly losing your mind.
The sun goes down and your body thinks it’s bedtime, but you’ve got at least three more hours of responsibilities ahead.
And then you walk into church and it’s... purple.
Three weeks before Advent is even supposed to start.
And your pastor is standing up here telling you we’re experimenting with a longer season of darkness and waiting.
As if we needed more of that.
(Sigh) I know... November is hard.
The days are getting shorter. Your body is tired. Your heart is tired.
And meanwhile, Costco has had Christmas decorations up since Halloween,
I can hear Mariah Carey warming up her vocal cords (because all she wants for Christmas is you!) as the culture screams,
“IT’S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR!”
—while you’re sitting here in purple, being asked to wait.
I mean, let’s be honest... Advent is almost impossible to faithfully observe in December in the U.S.
You think you’re going to resist decking your halls, watching Home Alone on repeat, and the onslaught of Christmas songs? — you think you’re going to resist all those forces until Christmas Day?
Your neighbors have their lights up. The office party is on December 10th.
Your grandkids want to bake cookies now.
Good luck going against those strong yule-tide cultural currents in December.
But Advent matters.
Not as a buzzkill, but as a practice we desperately need — the practice of waiting, of sitting in the dusk, of noticing our deep yearning for Christ’s inbreaking instead of medicating our stress and sadness with tinsel and eggnog.
(Which, for the record, I fully intend to enjoy — all in due time.)
So this longer Advent?
I hope you see it as a gift.
If we actually want to practice Advent — to let it do its work in the soul — we gotta start earlier than December.
November still has breathing room.
As hard as it is with Christmas cheer plastered everywhere, we can sit in the purple now, feel the yearning now.
Then, when December hits, if we want to, we can let ourselves lean in.
Because we’ve fully participated in the rhythm.
We haven’t fast-forwarded to the light.
We’ve let ourselves be carried through the dark first.
The thing about darkness and waiting is... we’re terrible at it.
We hate it.
We want resolution.
Answers.
And when God doesn’t show up that way — when the darkness lingers — we start to panic.
Or worse, we start making up explanations.
This is exactly what happens to our old friend Job, the man who lost everything.
His children, his wealth, his health, his dignity.
He’s sitting in ashes, scraping his sores with broken pottery (so emo, I know), and his friends show up.
And you’d think, Oh good, friends. Job needs friends right now.
Except these friends are pretty awful.
They’re not there to sit with him. They’re there to explain to him.
To try to fix him.
“Job, clearly you’ve sinned. God is teaching you a lesson. If you just confess right, pray right, straighten up and fly right... God will restore you.”
This is works-righteousness dressed up as pastoral care.
The toxic positivity of ancient Israel.
Job’s friends are trying to turn God into a cosmic accountant.
If suffering equals sin, then avoiding suffering equals righteousness — and suddenly they can gamify their anxiety through moral performance.
It gives them a sense of control.
But Job won’t have it.
He’d rather have God in the mystery than theological certainty without God.
Job wants his Redeemer.
Job doesn’t say, “I hope my Redeemer will show up someday.”
He says, “I know that my Redeemer lives.”
Not will live.
Not might live.
Lives.
Present tense. Right now. In the middle of the ashes.
Job continues...
“And after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God.”
In. My. Flesh.
Not despite my flesh. Not after escaping it. In it.
Job is somehow seeing what won’t be revealed for another couple thousand years on a cross outside the city:
God doesn’t redeem by removing us from the darkness —
God redeems by joining us in it.
And that’s what Advent is about.
Not just preparing for a baby in a manger... Or a Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time. (to quote Ralphie from A Christmas Story)
Advent is learning to see what Job saw 2,000 years before Jesus came to show it in bloody detail — that the Redeemer isn’t coming someday.
Our Redeemer... Is already here.
We’re not waiting for His arrival so much as we’re learning to recognize His presence in the waiting.
So... As we enter these longer nights...
When you’re sitting there at 3 a.m. and the anxiety won’t let up...
When you’re thinking about someone you love who’s suffering... or the sorry state of the world... and the prayers feel like they’re bouncing off the ceiling...
When you’re so tired of trying and it seems like God couldn’t care less...
You are not alone.
But that abandonment you feel?
It’s a lie.
The deepest lie there is.
The truth is this:
God is closer to you right then and there... than your next breath.
In Jesus Christ — God in flesh — God reveals what was always true:
He’s been with you the whole time.
In the hospital room.
In the sleepless nights.
In the grief that won’t let go.
On the cross, God enters the one place that feels like total abandonment — death itself — and redeems it from the inside out, proving that nothing, not even death, can separate you from God’s love.
And now — right now — the Redeemer Job longed for is here.
Not up in the sky. Not far off. Not waiting for you to get your act together first.
Here.
In the bread and wine we’re about to share.
In the flesh of your actual life.
In the ordinary moments you thought were too mundane, too dark, too broken for God to bother with.
You don’t have to orchestrate your own rescue.
You don’t have to white-knuckle your way through these longer nights.
These are the nights where we learn to see what Job saw. Where faith becomes recognition, not achievement.
And in a few minutes, when we gather around this table, you’re going to eat and drink and become what you receive:
the Body of Christ.
God in your flesh. God in your actual life.
Not as a nice idea, but as bread and wine going down your throat.
This isn’t a mere symbol.
This is God saying, “I’m here. I’ve always been here. And I’m never leaving.”
So yes, we wait.
We sit in the purple twilight.
We let the darkness do its work.
But we’re not waiting for an absent God to arrive ‘someday.’
We’re waiting with a God who’s already here, learning to see Him in the dark.
And so it is. Amen.
I preached on Job too, but I like your sermon more!