Podcast: How to Wait for Christmas in an Age of Instant Gratification (Jonathan Gibson)

December 04, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Preparing for Christmas

In this episode, Johnny Gibson discusses what it looks like to truly prepare our hearts for Christmas and talks about how and why the Advent season is meant to be a season of waiting.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

Jonathan Gibson

For individuals and families, this 40-day liturgical devotional guides readers through Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany—helping Christians retain their focus on Jesus and meditate on the mystery of his incarnation.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:15 - Embracing the Christmas Season as a Waiting People

Matt Tully
Johnny, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Jonathan Gibson
It’s good to be with you, Matt.

Matt Tully
It’s good to be together. As parents and even just as individual Christians, we all know the challenge that we can feel when it comes to keeping Christ at the center of our hearts during the holiday season. Christmas can just bring with it so much busyness and a rush when it comes to our work but even our vacation plans and travel plans and parties that we might be going to, and there’s all the shopping for getting presents for people. It can lead to a lot of stress and busyness and hurriedness. And I think sometimes, at least in my experience, and I wonder if this is true for you, we can hope for the Christmas season to be this spiritually uplifting and encouraging time of year, but actually, it can have the opposite effect. I can feel a dullness and get out of the routines and the spiritual habits that I’ve been in. And that makes it really hard. So I wonder, to start us off, have you ever felt that way? Do you resonate with that sense?

Jonathan Gibson
Yeah, very much so. Life’s busy anyway, nevermind in an even busier season like Christmas. I would speak to my own experience here as a seminary professor here in America, December is marking season—

Matt Tully
Grades, for the US audience.

Jonathan Gibson
Yeah, sorry. I still haven’t got the right terminology. Grading, exams, papers, and so all I’m thinking is, I just need to get through this to get to Christmas. I can’t wait until Christmas Eve. I’ll enjoy some mulled wine and some nice food and get into the Christmas spirit. But it’s really sad because I spend most of December just trying to get through it in order to get to Christmas. And then with the kids, it’s finishing school, finishing projects. It’s getting all the presents ready. It’s getting the tree. It’s doing all these things that we want to enjoy around Christmas, but it has sort of intruded in on Advent season. And so that’s what I’ve been trying to reflect on a bit more is how can I better prepare in Advent for Christmas? Because Christmas sort of arrives without much preparation.

Matt Tully
Sometimes it sneaks up on us. We can kind of just feel like, Oh, wow! Next week is Christmas! And we kind of didn’t even notice because of all the things that we had to do, all the things we were checking off of our to-do list. And that actually connects to something that you emphasize in this new book that you’ve written, but others have emphasized this too, that Christmas is really a season of waiting. Advent is meant to be this season of waiting, and even the idea of waiting is a pretty foundational biblical concept for Christians. I wonder if you could unpack that for us. Why is the concept of waiting, expectation, and longing such an important thing for us not to miss as we think about the Christmas season?

Jonathan Gibson
Advent speaks about the coming of Christ, actually focused on the second coming of Christ, while we reflect on his first coming. And the Christian Scriptures—Old and New Testament—give us a picture of God’s people being a waiting people. We are waiting for Jesus to arrive in the Old Testament, and through the Old Testament, key people—patriarchs and matriarchs—are all waiting. They’re waiting for a son to be born, or they’re waiting for some season in their life for things to turn better, like Joseph in slavery in Egypt. God’s people throughout the Old Testament have the posture of waiting, of anticipation of something better is coming. And then when Jesus does arrive, we see this stated most clearly with Simeon and Anna when they talk about that they had been waiting for the salvation of God, and now it has dawned in this baby child, Jesus. But it continues for New Testament believers. It’s not like the waiting is over. Yes, Christ arrives in his first advent, and he inaugurates the kingdom of God. He secures redemption for us. And yet God’s people are still called to be a waiting people. Paul says we are waiting for God’s Son to be revealed from heaven. And so we’re waiting for the second advent, for the parousia. And so the orientation of God’s people, Old and New Testament, is shaped by Christ’s advent. His first advent for the Old Testament believers, and his second advent for the New Testament believers. We struggle with that in our culture today because everything’s instant—instant coffee, texts come in and they expect to reply instantly. You get annoyed even when you see the little dots flashing on your phone. You’re like, Come on, come on!

Matt Tully
Type faster!

Jonathan Gibson
Yeah, and then you see it disappear and someone starts again. You’re like, All right, come on. What are you going to say?

Matt Tully
We’re just so oriented towards quick.

Jonathan Gibson
Yeah. Everything has to be instant. We don’t know what it is to wait. And Advent is actually known in traditional Anglican circles as “Little Lent.” Lent before Easter is the “Big Lent,” and this is known as “Little Lent.” And so some church traditions actually fast during Advent, waiting to then celebrate Christmas with a big meal. But they sort of enter a period of not enjoying certain foods or drinks for that short period of four weeks before Christmas. And again, that’s one way of trying to discipline yourself for waiting. You’re waiting for something. Fasting is one form of trying to wait better.

Matt Tully
And I think sometimes we can think of waiting as the absence of the thing we’re waiting for and that can be the focus of the waiting, whereas actually, in some ways, this intentional waiting period, the cultivation of this, is all about anticipating the thing that is to come that we’re going to receive. And something you said a few minutes ago about the first and second advents, I think oftentimes, at least for me, I think of the Advent season as really just focused on remembering the waiting that Israel did for Jesus to come as a baby. But you said that maybe it’s actually more connected to Christ’s second advent in many ways, that that’s the ultimate hope of the Advent season. Unpack that a little bit more.

Jonathan Gibson
In the tradition of the Christian church, the season of Advent has been primarily about focusing on his second coming. Now I think the reason it’s tied to the Christmas season is because his second coming is connected to his first coming. So the way I like to talk about it is it’s a season of meditating on his second coming while we muse upon his first coming. We’re waiting for his glorious appearing, and we do that by reflecting on his humble first appearing. He’s going to come in glory with the angels to judge the living and the dead, but he came quietly into the dark streets of Bethlehem. Silently was he born, without anybody recognizing him or seeing him. And so there’s this beautiful contrast between his first coming and his second coming. In the first one he’s clothed in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, and in the second he will be clothed in glory and light, sitting on a throne. So that’s been the tradition in the Christian church, and I think we’ve lost that. We’ve lost, again, the anticipation and the expectation that Jesus is coming again. And I think, again, because our culture shapes us to be very this-worldly focused—everything is just about the instant and in this moment—we don’t really lift up our eyes to think, No, we have a glorious future when Jesus returns. And it’s good to have a time in the year where you have a concentrated focus on that. And so that’s really what Advent is about. And putting this book together, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, I started to realize—because I’ve put in the place of Adoration in the liturgy, I’ve put in instead of a prayer, like it was in Be Thou My Vision, I’ve put in an Advent hymn and then a Christmas carol, and then round Epiphany hymns—but what struck me was that Advent hymns are actually really about the second coming of Christ. “Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free.” It’s actually a hymn about the second coming.

Matt Tully
Because he’s already been born.

Jonathan Gibson
And “O come, O come, Emmanuel,” If you read it carefully, yes, it’s sort of echoes the first coming, but it’s also really about the second coming. It’s asking him to come again, having already been named Emmanuel in his incarnation. “Come again and rescue captive Israel.”

Matt Tully
And isn’t “Joy to the World,” the ultimate Christmas carol, wasn’t that also about the second coming?

Jonathan Gibson
Yes, it is.

10:17 - The Role of Traditions in Observing Advent

Matt Tully
It’s such an important connection that we do so often miss in our thinking, and I think it could give us so much more significance to the season for us. It’s not just looking back. Maybe that gets to a big question here that I want to explore with you. How, as parents in particular in thinking about our families, how do we cultivate this way of thinking about Christmas season, the Advent season? Because I think so often, for all the reasons we’ve discussed, it can be especially hard for parents who have young kids where there is just even more going on, perhaps, in their lives and they’re trying to help children to not be so distracted by these other things that distract us as adults as well. And that’s where I think some of the traditions that we often have around Christmas time can come into play. As I was reflecting on this, I kind of realized that some families are really big into traditions and they have a lot of traditions. But other families maybe don’t have as many. But it seems like at Christmas time, it’s kind of a more universal experience to have certain traditions that we will do as families together. What’s behind that? Speak a little bit to the value or the role that traditions can play in how we think about injecting significance and meaning into the Christmas season.

Jonathan Gibson
I would go back to Genesis 1, actually, and the creation of the sun and the moon, which it says was given to mark days and times, years and seasons. And so God has stitched into his created order a cycle of time that would actually complement and give shape to marking seasons. You see it in the Old Testament. They have different feasts for different seasons. And I think we’ve lost that in the New Testament, or in the sense of the New Testament also doesn’t necessarily abandon that. Paul, it says, stayed longer so that he could be present in a certain place for Pentecost.

Matt Tully
I think as Protestants, that’s maybe where I see us often getting suspicious of some of those things, these seasonal church calendar type of events. We kind of wonder, Is this helpful, or is this in some way Roman Catholic?

Jonathan Gibson
The Catholic church does mark the seasons, but the Anglican church (a Protestant denomination) does. And in my research for the book, I realized that actually most of the Reformed continental theologians did as well—Zwingli and Bullinger in Zurich, Zacharias Ursinus in Germany in the Palatinate Church. And the Dutch Reformed Church, when they met for the Synod of Dort, codified, in Article 63 and 67 in their church book of order, codified the keeping of Christmas, circumcision of Christ (which is New Year’s Day), Epiphany, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. It was actually something they had to do as a church.

Matt Tully
So there’s a robust Protestant history of valuing some of these traditional days and celebrations.

Jonathan Gibson
And Calvin, in Geneva, took a bit of a more moderate course, but he still, on one occasion, stopped his Lectio continua preaching and preached for three months on the nativity of Christ around Christmas. I think it’s part of our tradition, if we look back, and we’ve maybe lost a bit of that. But to connect it to family traditions, the point is I think it’s good to have traditions. I think God shaped it the order of time so that we would have seasons for things. So I think it’s good to observe and mark the season of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany. And what can we do practically to help with that? Well, I think it’s like the Puritans say, “If you don’t plan to pray, you won’t pray.” And I think if you don’t plan to observe Christmas, you won’t really observe it. And so you do have to plan something. And so that means getting ready soon after Thanksgiving for Christmas. So this year, probably for the first time, partly because of this book, after Thanksgiving I’m going to be saying to Jackie, We need to get the tree up. Advent’s starting on the 28th of November this year, so let’s get the tree up on that day. Putting the tree up at a certain time helps you get into the mood. Get the Christmas wreath on the door, get the lights on the house.

Matt Tully
So even something like decorations can be a way to start.

Jonathan Gibson
Exactly. Start early on that, and then that gets the children and the family in the mood for it. We, in our family, have a little thing called the Jesse tree. It’s a short little plastic Christmas tree, so it can fit in a box, and our sister-in-law, David’s wife, Angela, before we left to come to America, she made all the little ornaments for the tree that connect to all the key events in the Old Testament for the coming of Christ. So there’s a little world, it’s like plasticine balls—plasticine that’s been cooked to harden it. So we have a little world, then we have a snake eating an apple, and then you have a ram on an altar as Isaac, a throne for David, and the Ten Commandments for Moses. And so it’s there’s a reading each day and a little prayer that goes with it. And so that’s what we do. We pull out the Jesse Tree, it’s called, from the seed of Jesse comes this Son of David. We call it the Jesse Tree, and the kids love it. So they’re all like, Are we getting the Jesse tree out this year? Half the ornaments are now broken in half, but that’s fine because I think, Lord willing, they’ll just remember as they look back, You remember we used to do the Jesse Tree around Christmas time? So that’s one thing we do. And so it’s just after our evening meal, that’s when we normally do family worship, so that’s our family worship in Advent. And it’s just short. It’s five minutes. We all talk about what does this symbol on the tree mean? What does it speak of? And it’s one way to really get the kids starting to think that Christmas is all about Christ. I took my son last year to Home Depot to go and get some lights. We needed some extra lights for the house for Christmas.

Matt Tully
That’s a good dad and son project.

Jonathan Gibson
Yeah, it was great. And we’re walking past these reindeer, and we’ve got the light reindeers on our lawn we put out each year, but there were these big Santa Clauses. I turned to Ben and I said, Look at that. And he says, Yeah, dad, how pathetic. And I took a moment to be quite proud. I thought, Oh, okay, I’ve done something right. It’s not that we’ve told them Santa’s evil and don’t ever have anything to do with it. We read the stories about Father Christmas coming down the chimney to the kids as just a silly story, but that’s the point. It’s a silly story. We have never focused on that as what Christmas is about. There’s no present from Santa under our tree. It’s just presents from family. And why are they giving presents to you, kids? Because God gave his greatest gift to us, his Son. And so that’s what we’ve tried to do. We’ve just, from the get go when we had kids, said let’s just make Christmas all about Christ. And they’ll see what’s going on with Father Christmas and Santa and sort of think, That’s really sad that you don’t really enjoy Christmas as much as we do because we’ve really understood what this is about.

17:36 - Meditating on Theology through Christmas Hymns

Matt Tully
It’s not about taking something away. It’s about focusing on something far more meaningful and significant for them. I’m just struck by how it does require intentionality. It does require some planning, but it’s also not rocket science. And there are even tools and resources out there, like the Jesse Tree, that make it relatively easy to just keep drawing their attention back to Christ during the season. That leads to another question. You’ve already mentioned hymns and the wonderful tradition of Christmas hymns that we have that we often sing around the Advent season. The first and most important question that I want you to weigh in on is when is it appropriate to start listening to Christmas music?

Jonathan Gibson
When is it legit? I think after Thanksgiving. Here, we’ve really enjoyed Thanksgiving as an exile.

Matt Tully
Because this is not a British holiday.

Jonathan Gibson
It’s not a British thing, but as exiles living here, we’ve really embraced it and we think it’s a lovely tradition, because there’s also not a lot of fuss about it. It’s really about the meal and family. But soon after, that’s when we start getting the Christmas music on. And this year in particular, as I said, because I’ve got this liturgy that begins on the 28th of November, or November 28th, as you would say. We’re going to be wanting to get the music going early this year. So I think around that time is a good time to start playing those songs in the house, singing them with the kids. And Christmas hymns, carols, and the Advent hymns that you’ll see in this liturgy—Christmas is my favorite time of the year. But it’s also my favorite time of the year to be worshiping in church because I actually think some of the richest theological reflection is conveyed in Christmas carols. “Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more shall die. Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate deity.”

Matt Tully
We sing the words so quickly, but there’s such richness in the truths expressed there.

Jonathan Gibson
Paul, in 1st Timothy 3, calls it “the mystery of godliness.” And the first line, as he outlines the key points of the gospel, is God manifested in the flesh. It’s a mystery. And I think singing the hymns and the carols really helps us meditate and muse on that mystery, that God became flesh. There are some great quotes in this liturgy that I’ve got from church history. Let me just read this one by Augustine because it’s so good.

Man’s maker was made man, that he, ruler of the stars, might nurse at his mother’s breast, that the bread might hunger, the fountain thirst, the light sleep, the way be tired on its journey, that the truth might be accused of false witness, the teacher be beaten with whips, the foundation be suspended on wood, that strength might grow weak, that the healer might be wounded, that life might die.

And I think our hymns capture some of that great profound mystery, that the eternal God, in the person of a Son, became one of us and was lying in a feeding trough crying. It’s amazing.

21:09 - A Flexible Liturgy for Observing Advent Individually or as a Family

Matt Tully
It’s hard not to, as you reflect on those things through hymns like that and through quotes from history, it’s hard not to then just feel your affections drawn towards Christ. It’s hard not to see him as this is what it’s all about. This is what is so exciting about this season, and help our kids do that as well. In this resource you’ve created, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, it’s such a wonderful tool incorporating hymns from history, quotes from history, liturgical elements; and it’s one more of those examples of something that parents can use on their own, but also could adapt and take parts of to use with their families as we walk through the season together.

Jonathan Gibson
And as you’ll see from the liturgy, it would be a long evening worship to expect a three- or four-year-old to endure through. But this year, well, we already as part of our evening worship, we sing the Gloria Patria or the Doxology each night, and we say the Lord’s Prayer every other night, and we recite a creed every few days. So we’ll probably do that in a bit more of a concentrated way this Christmas. But we don’t use all the elements in this for our children.

Matt Tully
That’s what I like about both this and Be Thou My Vision, the first book you did, is it’s not prescriptive in the sense of you need to use everything here. It’s probably more robust than what most people would do on a regular basis, but it’s giving you elements to pick from very easily. And it’s less about exactly what you choose and more about just getting us into these habits, these routines, establishing these traditions, connecting us to the Christian tradition as we worship God.

Jonathan Gibson
I think what I’ll be doing is I’ll be using it, and Jackie as well, in the mornings, and then in the evenings we’ll be picking elements out of it for the children and thinking, Let’s do these three parts of the liturgy with them.

Matt Tully
That’s wonderful. Johnny, thanks for spending some time giving us all some ideas of how to make Christmas a little bit more meaningful and intentional this year with our families.

Jonathan Gibson
Thanks for having me on the podcast, and a very Merry Christmas to you.

Matt Tully
Merry Christmas.

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