The Audacious Hope of Advent

Content warning: Miscarriage.

The defining feature of my life right now is that I am pregnant. Almost every casual conversation starts with either a “Congratulations!” or a “How are you feeling?” But now that it is Advent, I have noticed another theme appearing, especially with other women who have given birth. “It’s wonderful to be pregnant during Advent. It will be so meaningful to proclaim the gospel of Jesus’ birth to your congregation!”

There is something special about feeling that connection with the Virgin Mary, as she was about to give birth to her child. While her whole experience was clearly different from mine, the anticipation of childbirth is nearly universal. She gave birth to a baby boy who would be the Savior of the world. I will give birth to a baby boy who will be saved by hers. This is hopeful and beautiful.

However, there is another layer here for me, because in both 2021 and 2022, Advent was marked by the grief of miscarriages. Now in 2023, the doctors tell us everything is normal, and we hope and pray that continues. But I have been here before, and the pain and the fear of those past experiences do not fade easily. As I ponder this, I realize that I have learned just as much about the meaning of Advent from miscarriage as I have from pregnancy.

On the surface during Advent, we are waiting for Christmas, the day we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, who saved the world from sin and death. We read about John the Baptist preparing the way of the Lord, proclaiming a baptism of repentance from sin. A penitential theme weaves through sermons and hymns as we prepare our hearts for this baby boy, to whom Mary will give birth in a manger. All this connects to the beauty and hope of pregnancy — the Savior of the world coming to us in such an intimate and personal way, born from a maternal womb, naked, helpless, and dependent, until he grew into the understanding of his identity and his mission, and began his journey to the cross.

That waiting is ritualistic, almost more of a remembering than a waiting, because Jesus’ first coming already happened. We know that our celebration of Christmas will not actually involve baby Jesus in a manger. But there is another waiting, one that is not ritualistic because the event is still to come. Under the surface during Advent, we look for Jesus’ return, which he promised us at his ascension 2,000 years ago. The church has been waiting for so long that sometimes it feels ritualistic, because so many lifetimes have passed without seeing it. When we are hopeful that it will actually happen in our lifetime, we tend to count all the false prophets who convinced people about a specific day and time, and then were wrong. But Jesus promised us that he would come back and we trust his word. This means our waiting and our hope are real.

Through our waiting for Jesus’ second coming, we remember that he still has work to do in our world. In one sense, his work is complete in his incarnation. Through his death and resurrection, he accomplished our salvation for us and sat down at the right hand of God. Our future with him is secure, and we can trust that nothing will come between us and his goodness, grace, and mercy. And yet the brokenness of our world leaves us longing for something more. There is something deeply wrong when the life-giving, expectant state of pregnancy is marred by death, when little children are gone before they see the light of day. It is in this pain that I know that God is not done with our world, that there is something more to come. Why would he send his Son to suffer and die, if suffering and death were to continue for us indefinitely? Jesus’ resurrection must be stronger than this; there must be a moment when he returns to finish what he started and to defeat death forever. This grief can either lead to despair or to trust that God will one day heal all of this, too.

The grief of miscarriage is particularly nebulous. The loss of a child before birth is the loss of hope, a hope for something to be. You put up the Christmas tree and you wish you had to worry about little hands grasping at the ornaments on the bottom branches, but those little hands are not there, and you do not have any memories to help make sense of that pain. You do not know what those hands would have looked like, or what other mischief they might have gotten into. Loss like this is hard to describe, and this makes it isolating, especially during a season like Advent, when everyone else seems to be excited, happy, and hopeful.

But the future that we wait for during Advent can seem just as amorphous. The apocalyptic passages of Scripture that refer to the end times are full of fantastic images and are hard to interpret. We know that Jesus Christ will return, defeat death, and remake the world, but we do not know when it will happen, or what that new heaven and new earth will look like. It is an open waiting, a trusting in the reality of a good God who promises us life and joy and hope, without having anything concrete to put with that trust. To trust in something this nebulous is audacious. And yet, in a way, the nebulous grief of miscarriage prepares us for the audacious hope of Advent. Knowing in our deepest being that we have lost something real, even if we struggle to put it into words, can give us the courage to trust that this vague and cryptic future is just as real.

A world with suffering and death is not what our God has planned for us forever. He promises to wipe every tear from our eye. He has accomplished this through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who will return one day to defeat death. Through him, life, and not death, will have the final word. This is the audacious hope to which we cling in the midst of a nebulous grief. And so we cry out with the psalmist, “How long, O Lord?” and keep waiting.