The Comforter Has Come

Since this is “the most wonderful time of the year, I want to tell you about the least wonderful time of the year. For a sports guy like me, the All-Star Break over the summer is a sort of annual crisis. For a full week, there are no sports on TV. It’s summer, so there aren’t any college sports, the NFL and NBA seasons haven’t started, there’s no baseball… there’s not even any hockey. It’s a strange, uncomfortable situation – one I like about as much as being disconnected from the Internet for more than 30 minutes (which is only slightly less enjoyable than sitting in a traffic jam for 3 hours).

But that time is usually good. What I usually discover in the week-long silence from my scoreless iPhone app is that my love of sports is just my particular brand of addiction, of distraction. Dealing with myself for a week, living inside my head with nothing to distract me from my own flaws and neediness is… enlightening.

And if the stuff on TV is any indication, you (being an American) aren’t any different. You’re an addict like me.

Sure, most of our addictions are – like my sports addiction – relatively tame: on a bad day, we get some “comfort food,” or go out for some “retail therapy.” When life feels particularly out of control, we hit the gym a little harder, or spend more hours at work. But ultimately, these – just like a drug or alcohol addiction – are all ways we cope, things we stuff into our wounds, ways we self-medicate. And it seems like the stress, the busy-ness, the loneliness and even the cold, gray skies of December bring out our addictions.

This is what makes the way Luke describes Simeon so interesting to me:

“Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.”

In one verse, Luke describes what Advent is all about: Waiting. Expecting. Hoping. Simeon was waiting for the promised Messiah, who He’d been told would show up and console His people.

2000 years later, you and I are in the same place Simeon was in, aren’t we? We’re all waiting on the comforter… and we all need comforting. Each of us has a wound, a hole in our soul – self-inflicted or not – that we a desperately need to fill. We’re all damaged, broken… and we know it. But instead of waiting on the Consolation of Israel as Simeon did, we take matters into our own hands and use the tools available: drugs, alcohol, pornography, codependent relationships, shopping, sports, work. Even good things like church activities or stuff for our kids like the PTA or after-school activities can be filler when we use them to make ourselves feel better. But in the end, none of those things really does the trick, do they?

On this first full week of Advent, will you take a December equivalent of the All-Star break? Will you sit still – even for a little bit – and reject whatever it is that you use to temporarily self-medicate – to distract – and simply wait on Christ, the Comforter, the consolation of Israel? I don’t have any doubts that it will be difficult and uncomfortable. But this is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Do we really believe that God the Father has provided His own Son to meet our need? Do we truly believe that He alone can truly make us whole?

The Consolation of Israel has come. Simeon saw the baby Jesus and praised God for His faithfulness to His people, and this is the meaning of Christmas: the Comforter has come.