Advent: Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and Flat Tires
It is the season of Advent. In many ways Advent is like the opening acts for Beyonce’ or Taylor Swift. It’s tradition to have an opening act…someone to warm up the crowd, but everybody is really just waiting for the main event to begin. I say Beyonce’ or Tay Tay (yes, I’m on a nickname basis with Taylor…no, not really) because I am trying to remain culturally relevant in my middle-agedness…that, and I have two daughters. I would have preferred to say Led Zeppelin or the Stones or Pearl Jam, etc. Still, there are some positives: my girls get more excited about watching football now that Taylor is dating the Kansas City Chiefs star tight end, Travis Kelce. She’s been showing up at his games this season. And I’m still committed to properly educating my daughters musically. One is big into the Killers and The Head and The Heart, and I just spent a good portion of the weekend building Legos to AC/DC, Audioslave, Foo Fighters, and Led Zeppelin with the other. She’s my hard-rocker. God bless these girls! While a great song-writer in her own right, I need to keep Taylor’s music in the context of truly great music. But I digress…woefully so.
I was talking about Advent. It’s like a warm-up. Important (especially when your turning 45…is that the second time I’ve mentioned my age in less than two paragraphs?...obviously I’m settling into my mid-life crisis well), but also not really the point. Advent is like the other 4 members of the Jackson 5. Sure, they were talented and it was impressive they were all from the same family, but no one really cared who backed up Michael. All we really wanted to hear was that little phenom belt it out.
Implicitly, the opener or the warm-up equate waiting. Waiting is not our strong suit. We live in a world where we can’t even take the time to form our own thoughts any more. We’ve got AI to help us write emails, cards, papers, reports, etc. We’re in such a hurry we’d rather farm out our brains to computer programs. How can a season focused on waiting resonate with the contemporary mindset? For the record, AI had nothing to do with this post, as I’m sure you can tell from its less than concise beginning.
I am grateful to author Chad Bird. I just finished his excellent little book, Your God is Too Glorious, and in it he calls Advent “The Season of the Flat Tire” (77). The metaphor goes: we’re all rushing about from one important meeting or errand to the next and boom! We hit a massive pothole on the Long Island Expressway (otherwise known as the world largest parking lot) or catch a nail in our tire, and everything stops. The flat tire forces us out of what we thought was important onto a completely different timetable. It’s annoying and frustrating and unpredictable. Now don’t get too caught up in the metaphor and argue with me about your run-flat tires or your full-sized spare…let’s assume you forgot you had a spare tire under the trunk and haven’t put air in it since the Obama administration (back when Biden was less old, but still quite old!), so it’s also flat as a pancake. And if you’ve got run-flats then this doesn’t apply to you, so just move on with your problem-free existence.
Advent is the season of the flat tire because it slows us down. It rips us out of our run-flat-tire-controlled existence and reminds us that we are waiting. As Bird says,
During this season we are Abraham and Sarah, waiting one hundred years and ninety years, respectively, for the advent of baby Isaac. We are Israel, dragging our feet for forty years through the desert sands of Sinai until our arrival at the land flowing with milk and honey. We are David on the run, forced to wait, year after year, until Saul’s death, when we finally mount the throne God has prepared for us. There’s no speeding up Advent. All we can do is twiddle our thumbs. The air’s out of the tire. God is making us wait (77).
We are in the in-between. We are in the season of what theologians paradoxically call the-already-and-the-not-yet. The Bible tells us that Jesus has already come. He has already dealt with sin once and for all on the cross. He has already ushered in the Kingdom of God. We already know how all of this is going to end. And, at the same time, we do not yet fully see it or experience it. We do not yet fully know the peace promised by the great company of heaven singing to the shepherds that Christmas night over two thousand years ago. We are still here in a world where potholes and random nails exist everywhere. We are here in a world where during this Advent season there are, according to Geneva Academy (https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-s-armed-conflicts), 110 armed conflicts going on around the world. You’ve heard of the two big ones in Gaza and Ukraine, but there are dozens more in almost every corner of the world. This is still very much the-not-yet. We’re waiting to see and feel in real time all that we know to be true now by faith.
That’s how Dr. Steven Paulson explains the second coming. He says it’s not that we’re waiting for Jesus to come back as if he is not already here…he promised never to leave us, and he has not…he is most certainly present with us by the power of His Holy Spirit (John 14:15-29, Hebrews 13:5-6). He is already here and we cannot yet touch him and see him. His second coming will be a pulling back of the veil. We will be able to see and feel all that we believe by faith now. The reality that Paul tells us of that all of God’s promises find their ‘yes’ in Jesus…we will finally fully experience the ‘yes’ (2 Cor. 1:20-22).
Even though we hate waiting, as usual God is doing something beautiful to us in it. First, Advent gives you permission to actually be right where you really are. You can be honest about the flat tires in your life. God’s waiting forces the issue for us. Like all those examples Bird gives in his book, God highlights the impossibility of the situation for us. He reminds us that we are on his timetable. In this way he disabuses us of any illusion that we are in control or have power to change where we are. This seems awful at first because it’s taking away the candy coating and exposing a seemingly bitter pill underneath. I don’t want to be reminded of my own powerlessness. I want to flex my consumeristic muscles and use my spending power (make that debt building power…thanks a lot credit cards!) to buy unnecessary things that help reinforce the illusion of control over my existence. It’s Christmas! And I’m an American, gosh darnit! It’s my duty, nay, my right to keep the illusion alive! But the bills will still be there in January. The illusion is a permanently ravenous beast that will never be satiated. It may take some of us longer than others to surrender to that fact. “That’s okay,” God says, “I can wait.”
God makes us wait to give us permission to call a thing what it is. Like the little girl declaring to her mother on our rough transatlantic flight a few years ago, “This is not a fun place.” We are in need, and we can’t meet that need.
The second reason God makes us wait for his second coming, for the consummation of all his promises, is to save us. Peter explains,
But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance….And count the patience of our Lord as salvation (2 Peter 3:8-9, 15).
He waits to make us uncomfortable with the fact that things actually are uncomfortable in the-not-yet in between time in which we live. AND he waits so that he can save more of us in this time. Peter tells us God is not done bringing people into his family. He’s not done making new people as the UN estimate proves: roughly 385,000 people are born around the world each day. That’s 140 million new people every year! (https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/how-many-babies-are-born-each-day) He’s making more of us because he’s not yet done filling his house.
The master…said to his servant, “Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’ And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled’” (Luke 14:21-23).
Did you know that every generation of Christians has thought the Lord would return during their lifetime? Paul and Peter initially did. Some of their followers thought that they had missed it because it was taking so long (2 Thess. 2), and others thought since he was coming back so soon what they did didn’t really matter, which is why Peter wrote what he did in his second letter. The Lord showed Peter that he wasn’t late, he was patient because he is busy saving people. Good thing he did wait because you and I would have never existed if he came back when the early Christians thought he would. But God waited and continues to so that we can hear that he forgives us, and he loves us. And so we can share that good news with others.
So, in this Advent season, this flat tire season, this opening act, this warm-up, enjoy the waiting and count his patience as salvation. It means there will be a whole lot more people to enjoy the main event with when our faith proves real.
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