King of kings, but not of Empire
Photograph by Wonderlane via Unsplash
Rev. Jerrod H. Hugenot
“It’s the most wonderful time of the year.”
The lyric echoed in the mall as I walked from one store to another. It was early November. The Halloween candy was on super sale, while the Christmas candy was out on the shelves.
Hearing this old song in early November usually makes me say, “Bah, humbug!” I have preached many a sermon, being grumpier than John the Baptist in the usual Advent readings, feeling a little put out that November 1 seems to be the “start date” of Christmas for our culture. Radio stations switch to constant Christmas music. Christmas lights seem to appear in my neighborhood within 24 hours of the children going home to be in a well-deserved trick-or-treat sugar coma.
I have been a grump in the pulpit on the first Sunday of Advent, saying, “It is the start of Advent today, not Christmas. We will not sing Christmas carols until later into the Advent season.”
Not a complete Scrooge, I did start adding carols on the third Sunday of Advent, as it is the Sunday we light the candle of “Joy” (Gaudete/rejoice). A little joy later is better than sooner; that is the logic of Advent liturgical worship planning and preaching.
Yet to the average churchgoer already enjoying the 24/7 Christmas music station and getting giddy from festive gatherings, the liturgically driven preacher is about as fun as the old-timer that says, “You kids get off my lawn!”
I stood there in the mall that day. “It’s the most wonderful time of the year…”
Now there is a song I have heard innumerable times in my life. And this time around, it really caught me off guard.
I felt a yearning that I am still processing a few weeks later.
Admittedly, I love the song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” My mother has an Andy Williams Christmas LP that came out from storage every holiday season, playing on the record player back in the day. And my mother decorated the house and the front yard plentifully with lights and tinsel.
And lo, unto the rural electric utilities cooperative, its year-end budget exceeded, thanks to Mother Hugenot.
This Advent season, let your heart make room for lamentation as well as wonder and reverence. Live in the tension and honor it as you have those moments of reflection even as the old favorite songs of the season croon away.
So, amid a beloved childhood memory, I found myself in the early part of November 2025, aware that I was grinding my back teeth about a lot of things. I find myself worrying, praying, mourning, and sometimes raging about the headlines. It has been a rough season for the world this year. The news cycle is a daily exercise in cycling through a lot of emotions, if one seeks a more peaceable, less conflicted world as the goal.
An old song embedded in many happy years of family Christmas just clashed with my heart and mind burdened by the news of the day, the long, relentless need for lament that troubles my soul and conscience.
In some ways, that momentary memory of Andy Williams singing alongside a sweeping orchestra jarred me. This is a year that I really do need a little sugar, a little Christmas caroling, a good dose of optimism and wonder.
Part of my rumination was also the agreement to cover a pulpit on the first Sunday of Advent. The church in question had a more diverse set of readings than given by the Revised Common Lectionary. One was Luke 2:1-5, the type of reading anyone might expect to hear read aloud at some point at a church service in December. But a reading from Lamentations, chapter 3? Why Lamentations?
Lamentations is not a typical Old Testament reading during Advent. For example, hearing a reading singing out with the lyricism of Isaiah makes sense, especially with our ears attuned to Handel’s sublime settings of these texts in his famous “Messiah.” Instead of “Comfort Ye,” we get the heaviness of lament, literally! A destroyed Jerusalem, a ruined kingdom.
The biblical scholar F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp writes, the poet of Lamentations “insists that the affirmation of God's ultimate goodness and compassion toward humanity must be interpreted considering the historical reality of the pain and suffering brought on by Jerusalem's destruction. The gap between the two realities is too great to be ignored.”[i]
So, we plunge into a reading that seems strange, if not dissonant, if we seek the major-key euphoria encouraged by culture and commerce at this time of year. Yet, for people of conscience, seeing the mess of the world at hand, Lamentations 3 allows us to feel a measure of affirmation that our faith has more to it than the brighter notes of optimism. Indeed, hope seems more earned when expressed by people who have the capacity to live in the tensions of the world at hand — by those who have not just thought about hell but have experienced it.
More familiar in biblical texts is the Book of Psalms, which also show us glimpses of this pragmatic understanding. When preaching the Psalms, I claim we enter into a kaleidoscopic collection of readings: some with praise, some with lament, and all well-schooled by a world that needs a people of God who can live within that spectrum.
This Advent season, rehearse the ancient biblical story of saying “No” to Empire and “Yes” to God’s vision of a future far better than any human could bring about.
Lamentations 3 situates us in a broken world that will take a long time to mend. Just as it would be a generation before Jerusalem’s ruins might see some rebuilding, so the world we live in requires people resilient enough to live a counter-witness to the world as it is, keeping ahold of that vision faith gives us of the world “as it ought to be.” The affirmation of God’s goodness cannot be without acknowledgement of the times when we have seen too much inhumanity at work in the world, taking stock of the injustices perpetuated too often by people in high places and learning how to put our hearts and minds together with our hands and feet, bearing a word against “the powers that be” and knowing that “empire” in any human form is quite simply insufficient and incapable.
We hear Lamentations 3 alongside the familiar beginning to Luke’s nativity narrative, two texts embedded, enmeshed in a world of empires behaving badly and people distracted by their own choices. And like that flower that somehow grows up in the cracks of long-neglected sidewalks, tall and beautiful in its incongruency and resilience, the texts told by Lamentations poet and Gospel writer punch through our despair yet do not dismiss it. Instead, the texts push us to be closer to the grit and the morass of the world, and in turn, be willing to live here and now.
Jesus was born among oppressed people and in the ironclad grasp of Pax Romana. Mary and Joseph were compelled to go to Bethlehem, no thought or concession given to Mary’s third trimester. It was as if the people who rebuilt Jerusalem generations before had worked for nothing. Jerusalem was still under the thumb of rulers at best, tyrants at worst.
We enjoy a good manger scene on the front lawn or the fireplace mantle, yet Luke’s gospel unfolds, as the rest of the New Testament, as the stories of people under Roman rule and always just a few revolutionaries or short-fused Roman centurions away from a great upheaval, most likely not to end in favor of the Galilean peasantry now slouching toward Bethlehem.
The early moments of Luke’s gospel talk of great hope made known in the coming Messiah, yet it seems a distant dream to most. The world is the world, as the subjugated prepare themselves to be counted in the effort to ensure people remember who really ran everything in the known world.
Pairing Lamentations with Luke’s Nativity makes some sense, if we are to understand the stakes of the biblical witness for the lives we know. It also takes learning (or relearning) how to feel the fullness of the moment we are in. It is easier to ignore or dismiss challenging times. One could just keep trudging to be counted by the authorities. One could grow cold or worse, let the callus form more fully on our ears and hearts to keep a semblance of “control” in our lives.
This Advent season, let the candles slowly illumine the spaces you are in. It helps adjust your eyes to what you otherwise might not be able to see around you.
This Advent season, let the Scripture readings work in your souls and cajole you to hear what you might not have heard or forgotten how to hear.
This Advent season, let your heart make room for lamentation as well as wonder and reverence. Live in the tension and honor it as you have those moments of reflection even as the old favorite songs of the season croon away.
This Advent season, rehearse the ancient biblical story of saying “No” to Empire and “Yes” to God’s vision of a future far better than any human could bring about.
AMEN.
Rev. Jerrod H. Hugenot is executive minister, American Baptist Churches of New York State.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[i] Dobbs-Allsopp, F.W. Lamentations, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2002, pp. 124-5.
Get early access to the newest stories from Christian Citizen writers, receive contextual stories which support Christian Citizen content from the world’s top publications and join a community sharing the latest in justice, mercy and faith.