Advent is for Singing Not-Christmas Songs

Advent is for singing not-Christmas songs, not Christmas songs.

This is, of course, easier said than done. Hymnals fail to supply a decent list of options and congregants often clamor for the “traditional” carols, the songs of triumphant appearance and glorious coming.

Yet this insistence fights against the dominant concern of the gospels. Luke especially spends the bulk of his story anticipating Christ’s birth rather than narrating his arrival. The dramatic tension lies in what’s to come—not in what’s happened already.

The fulfillment of prophecies, the promises of angels, the poetic utterances of unlikely protagonists who imagine the unimaginable? All of these elements feature prominently in the nativity tales.

And singing such things together is arguably one of the important tasks of the church.

Singing is the way that we remember who God really is. He is the God who takes his time.

Singing is the way that we become more fully ourselves through waiting, not despite waiting. Waiting is not an interruption of our lives or a problem to be efficiently solved; waiting is how God forms our truest humanity.

Singing, finally, is how we learn to see the world as it really is: not fully healed but not abandoned by God either; being put to rights but not perhaps in ways that we can perceive; where God’s promises are being fulfilled but not always in our own lifetime.

How does singing together form us?

Singing forms us by activating our imaginations so that we can imagine what may seem impossible to fathom about the story of our lives as we empirically know it.

Singing forms us by rewiring our emotions so that we can bear the pain of unanswered prayer with real hope, not in despair.

Singing forms us by releasing fear-filled stress from our bodies and by re-sensitizing us to the subtle presence of God in our lives, so that we can sense God’s With-Us-ness more nearly.

We skip Advent to our spiritual peril, then, and we fail to understand the coming of Christ when we only sing Christmas songs.

We need waiting songs, not arriving songs.

We need them because it’s how we become more fully like Christ himself and thus more truly ourselves.

(My prayer for the second week of Advent is from my book, Prayers for the Pilgrimage (IVP, 2024).