Advent Lament

a broken prayer for a hungry season

We’re neck deep in Advent now.

I love this season.

Out of all the seasons in the Church year, this is the one with which my soul most naturally resonates.

Longing. Waiting. Dissatisfaction with the status quo.

My Advent hymn is often, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, by U2.

I have climbed highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you
I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her fingertips
It burned like fire
This burning desire

I have spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of a devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

I believe in the kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
But yes I’m still running

You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Oh my shame
You know I believe it

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for - U2

Honestly, as prayers go, it’s not a bad one. It’s honest. It’s hopeful. It embodies the tension of the already and not yet. And as they used to say on American Bandstand, “it’s got a good beat and I can dance to it.”

There’s a triumphalism in the American church that I think would cause the early church to blush. We were making America great again long before President Trump came down the gold escalator. We’ve been convincing people for decades that following Jesus makes them better than other people and comes with some outstanding perks and privileges. We tell the curious seeker how amazing it is to be part of a church family but leave off the bit about the dysfunction and abuse they will inevitably encounter within that family.

Bonhoeffer warns us about the wish dream for our church.

“Every human wish and dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”

Even a quick reading of Life Together, the book from which the above quote comes, makes clear that Bonhoeffer can’t be telling us to accept the Church as it is – otherwise the rest of his book on how to do life together is hypocrisy. Perhaps the important thing that Dietrich was aiming for was that we need to be honest about how the Church is rather than pretend the Church is something it is not. In fact, this is how he started this paragraph…

“Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it…A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse.” (p27)

We’re not doing harm when we lament that the Church is not as it should be, we’re being faithful to our story.

Ivanka Trump, who I’ll concede is an expert in these matters, once wrote, “Perception is more important than reality. If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true. This doesn’t mean you should be duplicitous or deceitful, but don’t go out of your way to correct a false assumption if it plays to your advantage.” This is precisely what Bonhoeffer warns against and what I would argue the church growth movement in the U.S. has embraced. A quick reading of the story of Israel and their prophets shows us that this isn’t a new issue for the people of God. We prefer to have someone telling us how we want things to be – to lie to us – rather than tells us things that will make us feel bad or doubt that we’re winning.

I’ve been in church meetings where leaders encouraged us to only allow people to give positive testimonies and only share good things that are happening in the church and in their lives. I’ve been in church meetings where national leaders have suggested that those with legitimate questions and criticisms of the Church have “a spirit of cynicism” that they needed to be delivered of. I’ve seen really hurtful and harmful church leaders promoted and elevated because they “could grow a church” or “get things done!” In my 40 years of experience in the Church, I can tell you perception has often been more valued than reality.

And that bill always comes due.

Years ago, when that U2 song was still new, a colleague in ministry challenged me for calling “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” a Christian song. He could not understand how anyone could be following Jesus and say that they still hadn’t found what they were looking for. Even back then I felt the song captured the dissonance between the already and the not yet kingdom of God. If we were getting this Church thing right – I thought – the Spirit didn’t do us any favors on the day of Pentecost. If *this* is what Jesus meant when he announced that he was building his church on a rock, someone certainly slipped him the wrong blueprints.

Advent invites us into a prophetic honesty that can hold the tension between how things are and how we dream things can be – ought to be. There’s a big difference between dreaming and pretending. Dreaming imagines how beautiful something can be, how amazing it will be, it makes space for hope and peace and joy and love. Pretending though is hollow and thin because we are not all easily fooled at once into thinking that this is as good as it can get. We aren’t all going to be willing at the same time to pretend the cupboard is full when our bellies growl with hunger. Dreaming imagines a day when people are no longer abused by the institution, pretending confidently insists that we have no wolves in the sheep pen until only wolves remain.

So, let the disillusionment come. Let the facade crumble. It feels terrifying, like we are losing our faith, but we are actually just losing our illusions. God doesn’t live in the PR strategy or the carefully curated testimony; God lives in the truth. When we finally stop pretending that we are finished products living in a perfect community, we create the only environment where grace can actually breathe. We clear the rubble of our “wish dreams” to make space for the manger—a place that was messy, smelly, and politically inconvenient, yet exactly where God chose to show up.

To sing “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” is not an admission of defeat; it is an act of holy defiance. It is a rejection of the cheap substitutes the world—and sometimes the church—tries to sell us. It is the soul’s refusal to settle for a plastic Jesus, a sanitized community, or a gospel that promises comfort without the cross. It is the persistence of the believer who knows that the “already” is good, but the “not yet” is glorious, and we won’t stop running until we see it.

We are neck deep in Advent, and the water is rising. But this is good water. It washes away the pretense. So, keep looking. Keep crawling. Keep scaling these city walls. To say “I haven’t found it yet” is to say “I know there is more.” And that “more” is coming in every small, defiant act of hope, every peace made, every rebellious act of joy, every small action of love. God is the one who meets us not in our perfection, but in our longing. He is the one who joins us in the crawl. And He is the one who guarantees that one day, the colors will bleed into one. Until then, our longing is our liturgy, and our hope is the song that keeps us moving toward the dawn.