One of my favorite elements of worship during Advent is the lighting of the Advent candles. As the pastor and preacher, I hope that the congregation will grow into the light that brightens each week, even as we extinguish the candles at the end of every service. The candles don’t just get brighter; they accumulate. The previous candles continue to burn as new ones are added. As the one who prepares the bulletin and liturgy, I have a luxury not every worshiper has: I get to sit with all four Sundays not only individually, but as a single unfolding story. This story has a particular arc which unfolds each year in a new and different way. This year, the Advent arc sits within the arc of the history of the United States of America. The United States offers but one example. Other nations have their own founding myths, independence celebrations, national tragedies, liberation narratives, and unresolved promises. How might Advent teach Christians to inhabit the story of their own nation without allowing the story of the nation to become the church’s ultimate story?
The Revised Common Lectionary does not require us to manufacture a theological response to what is happening in the nation, but it gives us the vocabulary that we need to think theologically when national narratives compete for our congregations’ imaginations. Advent 2026 falls in the closing weeks of a year the United States has spent marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence—a semiquincentennial of fireworks, festivals, and pageantry, particularly in Philadelphia. That anniversary hands the American church three familiar postures: bathe the celebration in religious triumphalism, declare the whole civic celebration beneath the church’s notice, or take a third way—one that reckons honestly with a nation forged in hope and promises, some of which have not yet come to pass. Not every preacher will stand in a pulpit in this particular national frame this Advent, but for those of us who do, this year hands us more than a headline. It hands us a counterpoint.
Advent hope is forged in that same soil—exile and unfulfilled promise. But unlike this nation’s history, it does not depend on rugged individualism or on an achievement already secured. Advent hope is not a monument; it is an arc, moving across four weeks of the liturgical calendar through lament, comfort, justice, and a great reversal. American civic hope is different because it imagines a better nation through human achievement. Advent hope gives preachers a way to practice critical solidarity. That is the work of loving one’s nation enough to tell the truth about it. We can celebrate what is worthy of celebration while refusing to call unfinished work finished. We can give thanks for genuine freedom while naming those who remain unfree.
When we commemorate the semiquincentennial, the words “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,”1 linger in the air, but Advent calls for a different song. The cry is “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens,” and these are the words of a people who still believe, still hope, that God will act as God has promised. This lament is rooted not in doubt but in the certainty that God fulfills God’s promises even when the timeline is not our own. Isaiah’s people confess, “we have become like one who is unclean”; they declare, “you have hidden your face from us.” The confession comes first—not because people have lost hope, but because naming what is broken is how hope earns the right to ask for anything at all. Scholars call this kind of prayer a communal lament. This is not one voice grieving alone but a whole people speaking as “we.” This one arises not from exile itself, but from the years after their return when the restoration they had been promised had not yet arrived the way it was promised.2
This text, when set against the pageantry celebrated in Philadelphia, asks us to look beyond City Hall to North Philadelphia, where the promises of the Declaration of Independence have not yet been fully realized. Commemorating a nation’s founding celebrates an achievement already secured. For some, that achievement reads less like a finished sentence and more like an ellipsis … a promise still trailing off, unresolved. Isaiah speaks instead to people of a covenant. A people with a hope and a trust in the God of the covenant and in that covenant’s fulfillment.
Whether our Advent preaching reaches the ears of those who have inherited founders’ promises or the ears of those still waiting to see those promises kept, this first week of Advent reminds us that lament belongs inside Advent hope. The prophet reminds us that our lament is rooted not in fear of a promise unfulfilled but in the faith of promises we have already seen kept, both in our own lives and in the lives of others. Trusting in a covenant with God is different from trusting in founding documents of a nation. The Declaration of Independence is not a covenant. The church’s identity is covenantal rather than national. The task of the preacher is not to decide whether the nation is “good” or “bad” but rather to ask, What does scripture allow us to see that our patriotic celebration cannot see by itself?
This arc takes us from a lament rooted in history and brings us face to face with God telling the prophet, “Comfort my people.” It is worth noting that this text opens what scholars call Second Isaiah. These words were spoken to a people living under Babylonian rule and captivity. As we light the second candle and are reminded of the light entering the world, the prophet—and I’d say the preacher, too—is called to comfort God’s people.
This comfort is not isolated. It comes alongside the naming of the very tragedies that necessitate God’s comfort. The celebration of the nation’s founding tends to happen without the same naming. Perhaps Advent is our opportunity to name the difficulties of human existence, both in the United States and abroad, and to name the comfort available to God’s people wherever they are. God’s comfort does not require pretending that the suffering did not happen. Providing comfort without naming the tragedy skips a step. Advent invites us to slow our pace and to pay attention to every step. There is a difference between saying that everything will be fine and declaring that God will make all things new. Trite phrases attempt to offer comfort but fail, whereas God’s comfort comes from a different source and does different work, for the one whose lament requires something more substantive than easy phrases applied hastily and without care.
In this passage, the prophet’s naming of the hard thing also acknowledges that the fulfillment of the promise has not been fully realized by God’s people. The comfort is not immediate. And now, the God who comes near to the exiled people is not announcing restoration from on high. God’s presence is part of the restoration.
Our nation’s founding ideals articulated claims about equality, freedom, and human rights whose realization remains unfinished. What Isaiah describes to a people in exile is an ongoing movement of God, and it is safe to trust in the work that God is still doing.
In the light cast by the third Advent candle, modern readers may feel a tug from each of the Testaments when they read or hear Isaiah 61. These are the same words that Jesus read from the scroll as he stepped into his messianic role. The third Sunday of Advent is Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday when we celebrate joy, and it is from this text that we learn of the categories for that joy: God has sent the prophet “to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.” Good news comes to those who most need to hear it, and it arrives carrying God’s liberation.
This is not a promise rooted in a document but rather a promise lived out in the covenant between God and God’s people. As the United States celebrates what it has accomplished in 250 years in the name of freedom, liberty, and justice for all, a question remains. Who is still waiting to be free, and why? Isaiah’s good news is that the covenant makes this freedom available, and those who have heard it are charged not only to speak it but also to live it.
How might preachers in this third week of Advent allow their hearers to live into the good news? Liberation disrupts the systems that have benefited from another person’s bondage or oppression. In some contexts, when the gospel liberates people, it challenges systems that depend upon their lack of freedom. In some contexts, liberty to captives means economic instability for the captors. In other communities, binding the brokenhearted damages the economic stability of those who profit from brokenheartedness. In still other communities, restoring sight to the blind threatens the economic security found by those who profit from others’ blindness. Where, then, is the good news?
Perhaps the good news is in our ability to reimagine God’s covenant community where liberation makes us more expansive and less restricted. This good news makes room for a covenant community of interdependent individuals who work for the good of one other. This is not necessarily our current reality and may require something more from the preacher’s imagination. In this week of Joy and good news, the preacher must ask who is made uncomfortable. What assumptions will be and need to be challenged? What does it mean to preach good news instead of delivering a lecture on national politics? It means beginning with scripture and exposing false claims to ultimate power. It means announcing God’s promise. It means inviting the congregation to a faithful response. The preacher who works within this arc knows that the great reversal is coming in week four and must find a way to hold onto the good news of week three with the accompaniment of weeks one and two. The arc does not proceed with each week’s work replacing that of the previous week. Instead, the candles accumulate, and none replaces the other. They are present together.
As we light the fourth candle, we notice a distinct height difference among the four candles. The first candle, lit for lament, has grown the shortest because it has burned the longest. The second, lit for comfort, has also been burning and stands a bit shorter. The third candle, lit for joy, still holds most of its wax. Finally, we light the fourth candle. In Year B, as we light this candle, we hear Mary’s Magnificat. Perhaps as we read and hear the Magnificat, we also hear the lament of the women who have come before Mary. We hear the voice of Hannah, the once-barren woman turned prophet whose praise shares the Magnificat’s bones so closely that Mary’s song almost reads as a response to her call, “my heart exults in the Lord … my strength is exalted in my God.” Perhaps we hear the songs of other women whose voices have carried both high notes and whispers throughout the witness of scripture. And perhaps, having sat with three weeks of good news for the downtrodden, we hear the Magnificat in the voice of a young woman whose body has suddenly become the site of God’s promise. Mary, in this moment, is presented by Luke as lowly, but she speaks with great theological authority. Hers is a voice that carries the community across the arc of Advent. Those with the greatest reason for lament. Those in greatest need of comfort. Those needing to hear a word of good news that will bring them joy. Yes, this Magnificat is the perfect fourth voice in a four-part harmony of the Sundays of Advent.
The nation sings, “Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,” and we sing along with pride and celebration. Mary, however, does not sing with a pride rooted in a nation. She sings, instead, “the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name,” and that “indeed, his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.” She sings that “he has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” She sings of the hungry being filled and the rich being sent away empty. She sings of a reversal that points to the promise that God made to our ancestors and to our descendants. She sings of the light that was in the beginning and is not diminished. The light has not completed its work and therefore has not gone out; there remains one candle which will be lit on Christmas Day. And we are reminded that this is not all there is. The nation’s song asks whether the emblem still waves over the land of the free and the home of the brave. Mary’s Song declares that God’s promises continue to be fulfilled in a people and not simply in a symbol waving above their heads—still unfulfilled. Mary’s song carries us through the lament of a people naming the hard things, names the comfort that God promises to provide, points to the joy available to God’s people, and reminds us that the promise extends far beyond the present moment.
These Advent texts hand the preacher—particularly the preacher within the American experiment—something more useful than a history lesson. We are handed a way to tell the truth the way Advent has always told it. A national anniversary invites nostalgia, a fond remembrance of the way things were. Advent asks us to set nostalgia down and face an unfinished future instead. It asks us to name what is difficult, then ground ourselves in God’s promises as we carry that difficulty forward.
This is what I mean by critical solidarity: a love for one’s country substantial enough to risk telling it the truth, in the same key the prophets used on Israel. It is the same key that Mary’s song uses to locate power in the God of her ancestors and not in the power structures of the land. It calls us to keep our eyes open even as we wait, and to build a good news wide enough to walk into the future together.
By the fourth Sunday, the candles in most Advent wreaths are burning unevenly—one grown short from weeks of lament, another still holding most of its wax, joy having only just been lit. The sermon emerges from that unevenness. Advent’s light does not arrive on a nation’s schedule. It does not culminate in one triumphant evening of fireworks. It has not finished its work. It has not gone out. Our task as preachers is not to extinguish love for the nation but to preach until our people can lament what is broken, participate in what is just, and live faithfully into the future God has promised.
